As it turns out, even a vehicle like the Prius has triple-redundant brakes and redundant sensors in the gas pedal.

The way this ought to work is that there should be two different sensors in the pedal, and they should be of different types, like one resistive pot and one Hall-effect transducer.

They won't do this; it'll cost too much. Remember, when dealing with quantities in the 100,000s, a $1 savings on a part adds up to a lot. This isn't aviation; they don't care about redundancy in cars.

I knew the people who designed the Ford EEC IV in the 1980s, and they thought like that. They were terrified of a software problem that affected safety. In the EEC IV, the program was masked directly into the CPU chip's ROM, and cannot be changed. (There's a bolted-on ROM unit that has the data tables for each engine model, and you can replace that, but there's no code in it.) It never needed to be; cars with the EEC IV are still running, and there was never a recall for a "firmware update".

Yes, and that was back in the days when embedded systems were programmed in assembly. Now, they have tons of C++ or Java libraries, multi-GHz CPUs, buggy OSes, etc.

The previous version of the "post-48" series was the hp49g+.

Absolutely godawful keys. Really horrible and also not great.

The hp50 is _much_ better, and I agree with other posters (on other forums) that it is the first calculator to be "better" than the hp48gx.

But it's not much better, and some things are less intuitive.

If you get one the bible (aka advanced user/programmers guide) from hpcalc.org is mandatory.

And help them install X code and the SDK. Then they can hack on their iPad all they want.

Correct me if I'm wrong (I very well may be; I'm not overly familiar with the Drake equation), but doesn't that broadcasting time apply mainly to before a civilization has the technology to broadcast? What about when they still broadcast, but in such a way that their signals don't pollute deep space? Is that taken into account?

Don't read news articles -- read the paper. Here's a basic summary of how it works; they get into the numbers later:

"In this paper, we investitage energy storage in arrays of reverse-biased nano vacuum tubes, which are similar in design to nano plasma tubes, but contain little or no gas. The key design parameter is the gap size, the distance between the electrodes. Electrical breakdown in vacuum gaps has been studied or more that 80 years [8-10] for gap sizes above 200nm. However little is known about vacuum gaps in the nanometer range. We show that in reverse bias, the electric eld near nano-tip anodes can be orders of magnitudes larger than breakdown eld in conventional capacitors, varactor diodes, and nano plasma tubes. Since there are only residual gases between the electrodes in vacuum junctions, there is no Zener breakdown, no avalanche breakdown, and no material that could be ionized. Electrical breakdown is triggered by quantum mechanical tunneling of electrode material: electron eld emission on the cathode and ion eld emission on the anode. Because the energy barrier for electron eld emission is large and the barrier for ion eld emission even larger, the average energy density in reversed-biased nano vacuum tubes can exceed the energy density
in solid state tunnel junctions and electrolytic capacitors. Since the inductance of the tubes is very small, the charge-discharge rates exceed batteries and conventional capacitors by orders of magnitude. Charging and discharging involves no faradaic reactions so the lifetime of nano vacuum tubes is virtually unlimited. The volumetric energy density is independent from the materials used as long as they can sustain the mechanical load, the electrodes are good conductors, and the mechanical supports are good insulators. Therefore, nano vacuum tubes can be built from environmentally friendly, non-noxious materials. Materials with a low density are preferable, since the gravimetric density is the ratio between the volumetric energy density and the average density of the electrodes and supports. Leakage currents are small, since the residual gases contain very few charged particles. Nano vacuum tubes can be fabricated with standard photo lithographic techniques [11] and could be easily integrated in integrated circuits as a rechargeable battery."

Let's pick another car. The Jetta TDI isn't as efficient as the Prius, and hence it doesn't score as well, but it still beats most cars.

It's all about operating costs.

I guess the main reason for this will be so you can play pirated games. Homebrew is already possible on PS3 and lets not kid ourselves, piracy is always what these things are mostly used for.

You're forgetting one thing - homebrew is possible, but access to the 3d hardware is disabled so that unofficial software can't compete with official games. That, combined with the removal of the ability to even use a 3rd party operating system in the new hardware revisions, is a rather compelling reason to hack the PS3.

Humorously enough, a friend and I stated rolling our own minimal blog software after realizing that a base install of Wordpress is over 6 MB.

It supports comments, multiple posting users, categories, has RSS, will let you theme it (although there is still a bunch of hardcoded HTML generation that we're working to remove for the next major revision) and is less than 300 KB installed.

Sourceforge project at http://sourceforge.net/projects/blobblogsystem/

Well, I guess we're in for a thread about how Firefox is still the (greatest|worst) browser in existence because of its (extensions|javascript performance|standards compliance|support for HTML 5). Looks like I need to go and get some snacks and pull up a recliner.

Yep, you'll only have to wait for -12 years to get one.