I know the "proton-sized black hole with a positive charge" with an electron orbiting it has been studied - but I don't know what was concluded. But you won't get "orbits" out to maybe 3x the radius of a black hole, so no danger of that for the Everest hole.

The LHC uses two beams colliding from opposite directions, so the total momentum of a collision is low. If most of the energy of collision goes into making the black hole, then the mass of the black hole would be much higher than whatever collided, and thus it's velocity would be much lower than the difference in momentum of those two particles.

DTS is CD-quality. AAC isn't - you can hear the difference between AAC and DTS. Beyond DTS is a gimmick.

TrueHD needs to die in a fire. DTS is CD-quality audio, while TrueHD and DTS HD-MA are just a waste of space. The latter is always mastered such that you can trivially rip the DTS track when you're ripping the DVD, but TrueHD leaves you with just the AAC track if you don't want to double the size of your rip. TrueHD is a copy-protection measure, nothing more.

No, no, /.ers can totally be "married for several years", or have no girlfriend at all - either way you're not getting laid. It's that in-between zone that we don't see here. (There's an old joke: put a pebble in a jar every time you have sex until your first anniversary. Remove a pebble from the jar every time you have sex after that. The jar will never be empty.)

I remember when it was spelled auto_ptr (OK, OK, they're not quite the same). But unique_ptr's just part of using RAII - you need to know shared_ptr as well, was my point.

Yeah, I've done that trick before: it's not quite the same. It's been a while since I tried, but I remember it not working for some operators and implicit conversion the way it would with a simple public data member - complexities of type inference.

There was actually a provision for this originally, sort of: by overloading the -> operator you can change what foo->bar returns, but you can't change what foo.bar returns, and since I almost never pass pointers around I rarely use the -> operator

The moon is just over 7x10^22 kg.

The hard part is determining the rate at which a small black hole would consume matter. Very small black holes simply don't have the cross-section to consume matter fast enough to live. The hole would have to live long enough (and still have a cross-section large enough) for the few seconds needed to fall through the ground and get deep enough to pass the water table and into denser crust. From that point it's a matter of its cross-section, speed, and the density of the rock its passing through.

My best estimate for the Mt Everest mass is 4*10^15 kg, which gives a radius of 6 pm - seems big enough to eat silicon and iron atoms.

Is it really C++, or "C with classes", though?

Not any more than owning a chisel makes you a sculptor. If I had a dime for every init() method I've seen ...

I propose we adopt "mass of Mt Everest" as a new Slashdot standard of measument - measuring mass in Libraries of Congress was always awkward.

I believe the mass of Mt Everest estimate is correct for the Earth-destroying black hole - it's the point at which matter infall at the density of the Earth's interior exceeds Hawking radiation. In a vacuum, the magic mass is about the mass of the moon - the point at which the Hawking radiation is cooler than the CMBR, and so you won't have a net loss for 10^lots years.

(You can't "compile with RAII turned off", as RAII is a coding style: you're probably thinking of RTTI. But the RAII style might not be good for a realtime system, as it can hide expensive work to release resources.)

The abomination that is Google's C++ coding conventions is why I hang up on their recruiters. (Though I hear an internal war has been raging for a couple years within Google over their 80s-night coding conventions). Actually, I'm not sure what's you'd use from C++ beyond "C with classes" if you're writing C-style code. If you're not comfortable with exceptions, and are following an "allocate at the top, clean up at the bottom, never return from the middle" mindset, C++ is damned awkward - you won't be using the standard libraries much, you won't have non-trivial constructors, and so on.

Oh fuck yes. But that's easy to explain to a new-hire - it's just a tedious convention, not really a mindset thing. IMO, the single most annoying flaw in C++ was not making all members and parameters "const&" by default. (Passing an int by value instead of by const reference is just the optimizers business, not a semantic change). I'd much rather declare the non-const exceptions!

And while I'm wishing, C++ really needs C#-style properties - a way to optionally intercept "foo.bar = 4" to add a non-trivial setter, without cluttering code with getBar() and setBar() functions "just in case".

That's just, like, your opinion man!

Seriously, though, C++ was never intended to be "C with a little extra", but instead a Java-like (but native code) language with backwards compatibility with existing C code. You can see that throughout Stroustrup's writings, including how he says C++ should be taught (start with std::vector and std::string - don't even teach arrays and char* until people have the basics internalized).

IMO, C++ properly written is a better Java - no worries about resource cleanup (Well, now Java has try-with-resources, so it's not so bad), vastly less boilerplate, a great standard algorithms library, and so on. Java's advantage is in its easy learning curve, and standard cross-platform libraries, which led to a vast selection of open-source tools. If the C++ standard had included more cross-platform system libraries earlier, Java might not have the library advantage. While C++ finally has threading in the STL, it's missing so much other systems-level stuff. But at least I can have a freaking unsigned int in C++ if I want to!

As others have pointed out: the "pedestrian detection" feature is completely unrelated to self parking. That feature would not have engaged here. Self-parking already checks for obstacles, but if the driver asserts control, self-parking lets the driver drive. And that's what happened here - the idiot drove into people.

Vastly more: almost every "unintended acceleration" in history had in fact been "pedal misapplication". Why admit fault when you can just sue someone for a pretend-faulty product/.