What is Swift written in?

So... C. Ok, we're done here.

No wait. One more thing. It's the Objective-C runtime. Which means Objective-C programs will just keep running, as they ever have.

The new language can't supplant the old one while the old one exists in the same environment. More to the point, compatibility with Objective-C, C, and C++ was an explicit design goal. So you can just pack up all the bullshit about taking over the world.

Even MIT is teaching courses that are nothing but rehashes of history? Seriously? I mean in theory, there's something to be learned from how it was done before, but from the description, this is just an excuse to rub elbows with an astronaut for bragging rights.

Here, here's a technically feasible Mars idea.

But wait, that's not a city. Not quite. How about this. There. That was about $5000 worth of work. Pay the man.

For my compiler, you insensitive clod. Now that we have SSDs that can feed the beast fast enough to keep it busy, I would be delighted to have one of these on my desk.

Uhm, what?

Since when was Elon Musk not a capitalist? I'm pretty sure he's charging real money for Tesla Model Ss and Powerwalls. I'm pretty sure SolarCity isn't giving away solar panels for free. I'm pretty sure the Model X will go on sale this year, and people will give him money and he will give them a car in return.

Capitalism is not incompatible with environmentalism. It's just that there are entrenched interests in our current capitalism that make money in ways that are incompatible with environmentalism. Elon Musk is a disruptive capitalist who is going to make several more entrenched interests very unhappy by the end of the decade. He's already making some entrenched interests (notably United Launch Alliance) very unhappy in non-environmentally related fields. (They're having to spend money on those horrible horrible professional middle class people to get them to design a better rocket for the first time in two decades, instead of just selling the same old piece of shit for sweet cost-plus contracts.)

As of today, if you have the capital, you can give Elon Musk money and he will give you equipment that can cut your personal carbon footprint by 36%, permanently, by wiping out your emissions for housing and travel. That 36% is fully half of the footprint that you personally control. This is a transaction in a capitalist system, where the means of production are privately owned, rather than government owned, where the organization doing the producing expands its production capacity and research and development efforts using private profits, and where the purchaser has a choice of viable alternatives in some sort of market.

The US economy has been capitalist for over 200 years, and it has been getting more environmentally friendly for that entire period. Admittedly it started out rather thoroughly unfriendly, so there was a lot of room for improvement, but it has happened. Nor were the changes voluntary, but they still happened, while still being fundamentally capitalist.

Why would you do that? Every single one of those things has an off switch. In all but extraordinarily rare cases, use of every one of those things is discretionary. You don't need to rewire your panel in order to keep the house running during quite a long power outage. Just don't use heavy draw appliances. If you are affluent enough to buy one or more of these battery packs in the first place, you can certainly afford to buy a few paper plates and an extra pair of underwear, if it comes to that.

Yeah, you're probably not going to be an early adopter, if you don't have solar panels already, if you don't have an electric car already, if you're not subject to substantially high differential energy pricing, and if you live in a region with a better-than-average grid maintenance organization. But the price will only come down once the gigafactory comes online. It's very likely that these packs will get cheap enough to fit in a discretionary budget just for rare convenience. My existing UPSes certainly fall into that category. You may already have a few for the same reason. It's just a somewhat bigger UPS, when all those other conditions apply.

Regardless of your individual situation, it's a gamechanging device for the vast majority of the world.

Walmart has decided to try it. To $9, not $20, but that's their minimum for 2015. 500,000 employees will make more money, costing Walmart $1 billion more than it would otherwise have spent on salaries this year. All of it going to the people in the very lowest income bracket, who are practically required to spend every dime they earn, because they're at or below the poverty line.

We'll see how it works, both for the economy and for Walmart. (Personally I think Walmart damn well knows that some large fraction of that billion dollars will be returned right back to them in increased spending at Walmart by poverty-stricken people.)

Damnit. Posting to undo moderation. Mouse aim is poor, and this is insightful.

The Coward is a ULA partisan who comes in here to spout lies pretty regularly. They're not losing money. They're profitable on every launch, by a healthy margin. The Coward can't understand how it happens, since the ULA can barely turn a profit when they charge $480 million for the same thing, so he assumes they're taking a loss.

Elon Musk hasn't been so rich that he can run a rocket company for 13 years out of his own pocket. (Probably he is now, because of Tesla stock, but he wasn't for most of that period.)

Does that mean you can't represent yourself in UK court without renting a wig?

Not just pandering, but rather arrogantly optimistic, aren't they. Considering their competition is 1/10th the price and will shortly have identical certifications to bid on government contracts...

And considering the Senate Launch System, we should just rewrite it for them: "...the new rocket that will be responsible for not a single one of the nation's future space launches."

Write his name down on your short list to hire as a system administrator. The police won't release his name because he's a juvenile, but it's probably on Facebook.

Intel is actually substantially bizarre in their practices. The chips themselves are made in the US billion dollar fabs. Then very carefully packed into shipping containers and shipped to Malaysia, where they are removed from the shipping containers and inserted into the production packages. And then shipped to China and Taiwan to be put on boards (and small amounts back to the US to be sold retail by NewEgg).

Why the chip packaging step isn't so completely automated that it can be done for peanuts on site at the fab, I'm sure I don't know.

Monitor 4K is also 4096x2160, so far as I'm concerned. The other resolution has a different name that we need to push HARD: UltraHD. It's already in a lot of marketing materials. That's what we need to use to refer to 4X HD.

Nope. Ubuntu copy protection is so fantastically unbreakable that there are no piratebay links! It's incredible!