What's worse, I promise you that a larger company that has made enormous campaign donations to certain politicians does not have to jump through all of those hoops.

Few battery powered devices don't already have a boost converter built in. Most wireless mice, for example, have two AA batteries in parallel and boost the voltage to whatever it needs, be it 3.3 or 1.8 or whatever.

Well I just updated to 2.6 and now cinnamon continuously crashes into fallback mode

This is Slashdot. Did you really expect anything other than rampant, hard-core bias in favor of Tesla? It matters not that Daimler and dozens of other companies have been doing battery storage power facilities for decades before Tesla existed.

It has been a great many years since I was fresh out of school. I now own my own company and employ nearly 50 people.

The way I got to live the dream is by being honest and having integrity from the get go. That means saying what is on your mind, professionally and personally, and above all, being NICE about it. Also, being flexible and eager to go outside my comfort zone was a huge help in learning everything I had to learn to go out on my own. The biggest mistakes I see "green" engineers make are:

1) Getting defensive. You're going to be wrong. A lot. You have a lot to learn, and a winning attitude is to accept this and seek out learning opportunities. There are certain school I just won't hire from anymore because they program their students with ultra large egos, probably to compensate for the ultra large price of tuition. There isn't much room for ego in an Associate Engineer position.

2) Getting lazy. We all realize you've been busting your ass to get your degree, and that being a good student is more than a full time job. But, you don't get to stop working hard just because you graduate.

3) Closely related to being lazy is: doing the bare minimum. You'll likely not be assigned enough work to keep you busy for 40 hours, but it will generally be expected that you spend the remaining time seeking out learning opportunities, reaching out to people for new work, and generally being eager and inquisitive.

4) Pigeon-holing: I see this one a lot too. Having your first real job is scary, and often I've seen new grads learn their first new skill, get comfortable with it, and then not want to do anything else. I would say the first 10 years of your career are not the time to specialize in something. The first 10 years are for exploring different skills and use cases and finding out what you're really good at.

I think the top three things you can do during the first year in your new job are:

1) Get to know everyone you can and what they do, and learn something about it, and how it ties in to the overall goals of the company

2) Be helpful. Offer to assist more senior engineers with testing, documentation, or whatever. You need to learn how to do the mundane and seniors will definitely appreciate your help in doing some of those tasks.

3) SAY SOMETHING when you get into trouble. If you're getting behind, don't know how to do something, or need help, SAY IT. You will not get in trouble for not knowing what to do, and the only way to learn is to ask. "I don't know" is not an obscene phrase.

Mars' gravity is well less than half of Earth's gravity. It's not a lot larger than the Moon. To put the same stress on your skeleton on Mars that an obese person does to their own in Earth gravity, you'd need to add about 250 to 350 pounds of radiation shielding.

Seriously? You move my poll and don't give me a Cowboy Neal option? Slashdot, you are dead to me...

"being a socialist and afraid of persecution during the McCarthy period."

My, how things have changed...

Argentina was a special case where an investor rolled the dice on buying up all their debt and then somehow taking them to court in the US and winning a judgement that crippled them financially. Previous to that, Argentina has had a long track record of failing to pay back their debt going back decades without repercussion. So do most other countries outside of western europe. Spain and Greece are two of the biggest examples of what happens when you join a currency union and your economy is not in sync with the strongest players.

Yeah I was going to say, I wrote a crude flight simulator, including the display drivers for my Arduino and SSD1306 OLED display, that weighs in at 31KB. A piece of code to focus a laser should be less than that.

I think the thing about Teddy Ruxpin was that he had always moved. If you have an inanimate object for a lifetime, and then suddenly it springs to life but without facial features or moving eyes, yes that is creepy. But if it's advertised as a moving device from the start, it's not creepy as that's expected behavior. It's when things suddenly spring to life that it triggers stalking predator alarm bells in your brain. If your houseplant started talking to you that would be freaky, but if it said hello and goodbye to you every day when you go to work, and helped you keep track of where you put your car keys or to remember to pick up milk on the way home, that's just another family member. Digital assistants will head in that direction eventually. The British series "Black Mirror" had an episode like this, where the AI was held in an "egg".

At least 7 of those boards have SATA ports, and one has mSATA support. Just do a ctrl+F for 'SATA'...

If they really want to make road taxes usage based, then they need to charge by the ton-mile or something like that. Wear and tear on roads goes by the weight of the vehicle, and if I remember correctly it is a non-linear relationship (square or cube, I can't remember).

It's pretty trivial for a vehicle to compute its own weight, so it is similarly trivial for a vehicle to compute its own road tax as well. Many cars are now coming equipped with GSM modems as well, so your car could simply upload your road impact once/month and you can be billed for your use tax.

Piece of cake.

For an individual business, you're right: you always set your prices to maximize revenues, regardless of costs. For the market as a whole, however, costs obviously do play a part in determining prices. It's an indirect effect; increasing costs drive the marginal producers out of business, which decreases the supply. A decreased supply and no change in effective demand results in higher prices (or shortages). The change in price does not necessarily match the change in cost, however; the extra cost is split between higher prices and decreased profitability for the remaining suppliers, with the ratio depending on price elasticity.

I'm curious to see whether we will see a flood of immigration to cities with the high minimum wage, and a corresponding increase in cost of living that effectively negates the effects of the higher wage through reduced purchasing power.