On the fly firmware updates don't always allow for proper testing. I don't know anyone who would trust an on the fly update on any large system.

I would agree, though I have had a number of long running plants I have sat in front of that were offline for weeks because they were "broken", and investigation showed that the operator had simply forgotten how to look for and clear a startup error....

It is ridiculous in any case, and I don't think it is a good idea. The trouble is, in a long running plant, they will never apply any "security fix" because that means shutting down the system anyway. Possibly even re-commissioning and testing the damn thing anyway, depending on policy. This is why most of the time people go with air gaps and such. Not always possible, but it is a bit of a tricky problem.

A lot. You can't do that with a PLC as that would be clinically insane and might have serious safety/economic ramifications. No engineer worth his salt would touch such a device. You might configure it to simply fail to startup after a powerdown on a certain date, but not have it stop while the system is running.

Your method is textbook and certainly will work(even if you use SCRs but triggering them becomes... interesting...) , but I have a very puzzling question... What do you need a 120kV medical X-Ray machine for?

No, but they can be made to change direction frequently, as the core in any transformer may demonstrate... Not sure entirely what tempoaralbeing was driving at though...

Beyond that, the internet exists out of the jurisdiction of the US.

It is possible to boil water using nothing but mirrors and sunlight... It isn't as efficient unless you can control where you point the mirrors effectively, but still...

While I agree nuclear is the only viable way forward, I think we could bootstrap nuclear without coal/oil. You would just need a lot of political will. And maybe some biofuels to help it along.

No, I got the joke, I just didn't consider it very good.

You would think, but I actually lurked as an AC for ages before joining. Slashdot does occasionally produce interesting discussions. Over the many years I have been here, I have seen a few.

So, I came here for an intelligent discussion on the technical challenges involved. I found just trolls and jokes. Clearly I am in the wrong place.

Almost everyone in South Africa I know* uses it. It is a no-brainer in terms of the cost of sms/mms here.

*I know some people without capable phones, who would if they had a phone that could.

If there is one format I always hated it was cassette. Vinyl wasn't too bad, but the hiss was annoying (never got around to building myself a filter, which may have broken the fidelity of the sound anyway. I never did the math either...), and I haven't played one in years. Cassettes were just pure evil, even on high quality players, stretching, distorting. getting chewed up and snapping, then you have to splice it. No thanks.

I'm surprised there wasn't a vinyl release... Or is that too old tech...?

But I revel in sharing! :P

I do exactly the same thing, but I use problems from Project Euler. I think I may be a bit evil, but really, if you claim to know a language and can't at least brute force a numerical problem...

Weirdly though we just took on two paid interns to develop some internal tools under supervision. One failed my sadistic little test, and the other passed it. Turns out the one who failed writes better code and grasps the problems better. Anecdotal, but surprising. Disclosure: I am definitely not a software engineer.