Lots of flux is important. We found that using just gobs and gobs of it, made for really pretty easy soldering that avoided solder bridges and reliably gave us beautiful connections. And by gobs and gobs, I mean enough that the leads are submersed. Naturally, that much of it needs to be cleaned up afterwards, but some alcohol and a toothbrush works well. I worry a little about the flux that gets trapped under each IC, though.

However, when we, on occasion, needed to remove some components, especially ICs, we discovered that there was absolutely no molten solder incursion under the leads. We're using gold-plated boards from OSH Park, so it's easy to see where the solder has flowed and where it hasn't. I suppose if we were even more serious about prototype manufacturing, we'd get some solder paste to lay down first, but we haven't made it to that level of sophistication, yet.

We've been doing some prototyping in my lab. I've been trained on old-school point-to-point prototypes. They work very well, are usually pretty good models for actual performance, and when its all said and done, take just about as much time as anything else.

My employee, a younger fellow, built a prototype with a breadboard. Egad, I remember those from undergraduate years, and how much I hated them. I spent more time debugging that mess of wires than it would have taken to build it point-to-point from the start.

Except that now everything is surface mount. We were getting ready to buy a rework station. And build one of those hotplate / toaster oven processing things. Then, I found a couple of videos showing people soldering SMT devices with a hand-held iron just fine thankyouverymuch. And, you know, it works great. The key is a steady hand (which I have, even though my assistant does not) and -- critically -- a stereo microscope. Assembling boards can be done pretty fast. In ways, it's faster than through-hole, and heaps less frustrating 'cause you don't need to keep flipping the board back and forth all the time.

The best part is that it's become ridiculously inexpensive to get PCBs made of medium size, with free (as in beer), or nearly free, tools that are really pretty good (and I've used the $25K/seat stuff, too). I've got three full-custom PCBs in front of me that, other than the ECOs from being prototypes, are professional grade. While they weren't free, they were affordable, and much more so than, say, 10 years ago.

So who needs one of these print-you-own circuits? Not me. Or a setup to etch boards myself? No thank you, I'll stay clear of those chemicals. I'm much happier spending a little more to have my boards come back perfect, with real vias, and even four layers if I want! But a garage full of specialized equipment? Nope. Just the old bench, iron, solder, wick, flux, with the addition of a microscope.

I'd more expect it to be an instance of espionage, not terrorism. Why do you expect every attempt to breach a government facility to be called terrorism?

I bet your work doesn't involve being responsible for the lives of hundreds of people.

Gravity is non-linear, or maybe you didn't notice that distance is in the denominator? It's linear in mass but really very non-linear in distance. m1*m2/r^2. Not even remotely linear.

To review: double m1, you get double the force: linear in m1. Double m2, you get double the force: linear in m2. Double r and, WHOA NELLIE you get 1/4 the force: massively (pun intended) non-linear!

Heck, he could, you know, rent an OFFICE to conduct his business from that has connectivity. There are tons and tons of incubator spaces that would be happy to have his business.

I've conducted business from home. It sucks. There are many good reasons to separate work and home.

It's actually far better than that. With Prime and a few dollars, I can avoid going to the mall entirely and wasting the two hours that horrendous experience entails. All-in-all, it's a profitable proposal for me, as time is precious.

When the need for having something immediately rises above my personal cost threshold for a trip to the mall, well, that's still an option. But in the name of all that is holy, why would you ever step foot in one of those things otherwise?

When malls first opened (yes, I'm that old), they tried to attract customers by making the experience a rich, enticing, special one. You had good restaurants. Calm, quiet environments. High-end department stores as well as fashion boutiques. Sales staff that dressed well and spoke proper English. Now it's noise, bling, distraction, horrid food, snotty sales staff with slacker attitudes that match their poor verbal skills, and self-checkout tellers. Thank you, I'll stick with an on-line retailer for commodity items. And when the malls die, it will not be a great loss as the positive shopping experience of yesteryear is gone already. To paraphrase the parent poster, good riddance to the modern malls.

Because they have certain tools at their disposal. They have the private pilot's license. They have the medical certification. They know how do to handle those things. No additional bureaucracy is necessary -- and that's a mightily good thing. If they had different requirements ("sedentary medical certification" for example), then that would represent a heapload of additional work for them, cost for the taxpayer, and, as this is an EXPERIMENTAL PROGRAM, potentially wasted effort.

Far, far, far better to use the tools they have available. Yes, the regulations might not appear a good fit, but they are as close as possible given the requirements surrounding piloting a remote flying vehicle.

Being piggish about the mismatch of regulation versus actual requirement is not seeing the larger picture.

Really? I used to get 30 mpg when everything was in perfect tune. The trick, though, was it was very easy to fall off of that global optimum, so you had to keep continually tuning and tweaking if efficiency was the goal. If you didn't care so much, then it was a wonderfully reliable car. And, sure 18 mpg was easy to obtain.

The best theory I've heard is the follows (don your aluminum-foil hats!) --

Suppose you were a terrorism-for-hire organization, or a straight-up terrorist organization that was planning another big strike against a major superpower. Either one works for this theory. And suppose you had some new, amazing high-tech way of taking over a 777 by remote control. What would you do to either (a) test your system, or (b) impress a potential client? Such an ability would be HUGELY valuable, but only if it remained secret. You'd probably select a flight operated by a developing country that would not nominally have been under the same level of scrutiny as one from the first world, and one that could quickly be taken out of normal radar coverage. You'd take the plane over, disable its communication, move it about against the pilot's will (but still within radar range so that the demonstration could be recorded), and then send it off to crash well outside of radar range in a very deep part of the ocean where it might never be found, so evidence of your nefarious actions would not come to public scrutiny.

You'd be able to demand a pretty high price in the elite international terrorism market with such a demonstration. So while the act of diverting MH 370 might not in itself have been an act of terrorism, it still might have been executed by terrorists.

It's far fetched, yes, but it fits the facts better than any other theory I've heard. (Suicide by two non-suicidal pilots? Fire that magically disables communication without affecting navigation? Hijack with modern hardened cockpit access? Etc.)

The solution is actually pretty simple: use Google. To understand what time it is in a different city, use

To schedule a multi-timezone meeting, have the leader declare, e.g., "the meeting will be at 7AM London time", and allow each participant to figure out when that will be for themselves using queries such as

Our company has been using this method to organize our international meetings with participants from five distinct timezones for some years now. Works like a charm.

Did you verify that the two clicking drives were working BEFORE you removed them?

(I've never, ever had removal or re-installation of an old drive change its status, and I've surely done it more than a dozen times.)

As (another) analog designer who happens to be in the middle of designing a mixed-signal board, I can assure you that the right answer depends on how sensitive your analog circuitry is, and it could very well be that the answer is, "enough to drive you crazy trying to eliminate the interference."

Proper shielding of analog circuitry from digital interference, when the two are in close proximity, is really very, very hard. That's why you see all of the high-end audio cards have either (a) full faraday cages (plus careful PCB layout technique), or (b) are external to the computer case, or (c) both.

Five unshielded single-ended lines switching 1.8V at 208MHz that might not be properly terminated? Sounds like a powerful AM transmitter to me if my uV to mV level analog traces are anywhere near them.

The biggest contribution from the massive levels of research on AIDS is not curing the disease. That will be wonderful when, and if, it happens. The biggest contribution will be that, as a result of trying to cure AIDS, we have learned immense, really truly immense, amounts about the immune system and it's incredible intricacies.

And, guess what? Ultimately, it is the immune system that keeps your body free of cancer. Cancers happen frequently in your body, and the immune system beats them down. When it fails at that for some reason, only then does clinical disease happen. I've heard it said that most people have 6 or so small cancers in their bodies at any given time, all being properly managed by the immune system.

Understanding the immune system, because we have been trying to cure a disease of the immune system, will eventually do more good for human health than any other single effort since the invention of antibiotics, with the possible exception of magnetic resonance imaging.

But let's look at the GP's assertion about money. The National Cancer Institute's budget appropriation for FY15 was $4.9B. They're the part of the NIH that sponsors cancer research. The National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases, the NIH that is charged with fighting AIDS, had $4.3B appropriated for FY15. Even if we assumed that the entire NIAID budget went to AIDS (and it does not), the NCI has a bigger budget. So the GP is just flat out wrong with his initial assertion: much less research effort in the form of NIH extramural support is spent on AIDS than on cancer.

You could do the following, and with a little non-standard indenting, it's rather more elegant, I think.

void func() {
      if (AcquireResource1()) {
      if (AcquireResource2()) {
      if (AcquireResource3()) {
            DoStuffWithResources();
            Cleanup3;
      }
            Cleanup2;
      }
            Cleanup1;
      }
}