I think that is a rather limited view. It may not be a religious system of thought, but it is based on various philosophies and systems of thought. Empiricism, naturalism, and so forth are subjects of belief, like it or not. If you dig deep enough, belief is at the bottom of everything.

A Project Euler kernel module would be an interesting way to solve some of those...

Take a look at GuitarBots (guitarbots.com). They seem to have no label deals though so the selection of music might not be so good..

That is the big issue with this sort of thing. If you want to play music made in the last 100 years or so, the guys need a deal with the labels which is probably stupidly expensive.

I bought Rocksmith without proper research. The Uplay crap sort of works, but my word is it annoying. And they make you use their "special cable" (glorified USB sound card with a 1/4" jack for a guitar, and a non standard connector). So basically I now have two shitty antipiracy measures to contend with. The game itself isn't too bad, but if you don't have some experience, it might push you into some bad habits.

I am not buying another ubisoft game. Ever.

A harmonic gearbox will reduce the backlash on a servo to zero, but then it all depends how much money you have to spend.

To be honest, I am quite surprised they weren't already using encoders and feedback control. That and a small PID loop and you can even minimize overshoot. Or just have acceleration/deceleration profiles...

I was actually responding to the comment, 'Anything "gas" is inherently unsafe.' If you read my comment in that light, you will see what I'm getting a - by comparison, safety is more closely negatively related to energy density and the ability to quickly extract that energy. It isn't so critical exactly what form you store the energy in, though lithium batteries are fairly scary. As is petrol. Diesel is pretty good though.

As far as I can tell, drafting trucks is pretty idiotic all by itself. You can't see where you're going, and in order for it to help (if you're too far back the turbulence may make things worse) you're so close that if he slams on breaks or hits something, you die.

The real problem is energy density. Almost anything with a reasonably high energy density is inherently unsafe, as most substances like that can (often by design) release that energy rapidly enough to be dangerous. Life is inherently unsafe. That new battery technology? That's going to be dangerous too.

There are no spitfires in that list, because the spitfire (and hurricane, and FW-190, Zero, etc) were all highly successful aircraft. However, they were not adaptable for general purpose aviation, hence they no longer fly outside of airshows/rich enthusiasts.

I just think it is a pity that eventually we may run out of merlins to power these things. I would love to see that restored mosquito fly. That was an amazing aircraft.

That is actually quite interesting thanks. I'll look into some of those, though I am often limited by what the client specifies.

Out of curiosity, what PLC system allows this? I haven't run into any that do so far, though I tend to avoid certain manufacturers when I can....

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?