That's hysterical. Along those same lines, a co-worker met Bryan Cranston this past weekend.

Or is Slashdot just in love with Ethan?

Well, they had to fill the site with something once they got over their Bennett Haselton love-fest.

I've seen boards where all the decoupling caps are bunched together in a corner of the board, far away from the action.

Yeah, kinda defeats the purpose. I've seen something dumber though - many years back, a friend of a friend tried to get rid of the ignition noise coming over the radio in his car by installing a filter cap across the battery terminals and then wondered why it didn't make any difference. Guy was an electronics tech in the Navy, for crying out loud.

Not every power supply is the same, add a capacitor and/or line regulator to the input.

And don't be stingy with decoupling caps.

I've never experienced that, ever, in my 35 years of computing on various platforms and various text/document editors.

It happens to me occasionally on my Win7 box at work, and sometimes requires firing up Process Explorer to find out who still has a lock on the file if the file had been closed a while back. Getting out of the editor is the only thing that releases the lock in those cases. It's happened in Word, Notepad++, and UltraEdit.

Yes, I see those every day, and often have to wait for the same train twice on my way to work. FEC has five terminals over about 650 miles, which means there's still a lot of the coast that has to be served by truck.

What if we solve two problems at the same time by legislating that for some number of years self driving rigs have to have human co-pilots aboard (bear with me)... We'd still get most of the benefits of improved safety and 24 hour schedules and the humans could even do other work while on-board but they'd ostensibly be there to monitor the rig and take over in crazy situations (e.g. flat tire, fire, unexpected weather).

The flip side is that the public gets a (somewhat irrational but real) feeling of safety knowing that humans are on board... in the same way that I feel better about flying in a mostly auto-piloted aircraft because I know two people fully trained in the systems are trusting their lives to it.

So truck drivers turn into truck co-pilots for a few years, get an easier / safer job, and some of them retire during that time while we all get used to self-driving trucks on the road.
 

I think more of the problem is so much stuff gets sent by truck when rail would be cheaper and faster. Unfortunately the U.S. doesn't have anywhere near the rail infrastructure that Europe does. I live about a mile from the Florida East Coast railway tracks. The next closest set of tracks belongs to CSX, and is about 100 miles away.

And they will get robot guards, what could possibly go wrong?

"Okay, turn left at the light and pull into the staging yard's second driveway on the left. Don't worry about the "deadly force authorized" signs - the ED-209 shouldn't bother you."

In the U.S. at least, it's very unusual to see a 60-ton truck on the highway - most are limited to 40 tons, with special permitting needed for heavier loads. Australia's a whole different story, but their road trains have many more brakes to distribute the energy across.

And that means it's going to take a while as that heat dissipates - the brakes will literally melt if you try to brute-force a shorter braking distance, for example by increasing braking system pressure.

Increasing the pressure will lock the wheels up (not taking ABS into account), at which point the rotors/drums aren't absorbing any more heat and stopping distance is determined by the friction of the sliding tires. That said, truck brakes are *big*, and are quite capable of handling a 50 mph panic stop without damage to the brakes.

So, write your OS in 90% C and optimize the remaining 10% in ASM

"A profiler? What's that?"

Plus the bootloader firmware (although I guess you could call that part of the environment) - you can't just drop a stock AVR into the socket and have it work without it unless you use an external programmer to burn the sketch into the chip beforehand.

Which is ironic, because even in the mid-90s (i.e. almost as soon as the web had become popular), people were already slapping crappy, pixelated pre-rendered GIF animations of all manner of spinning crap onto their "home pages"!

Don't forget the flashing text, too!

I read somewhere (Can't remember where :/) that the fastest assembly code produced to date was written by a human, not a computer; again, google returns nothing.

Michael Abrash's ancient-but-awesome book, "The Zen of Graphics Programming", contains a chapter called "Heinlein's Crystal Ball, Spock's Brain, and the 9 Cycle Dare" that 's about Abrash's adventures in coming up with the fastest CPU-driven texture mapper he could write in hand-written assembly for his X-Sharp graphics library (he eventually ended up with 16 million texture-mapped pixels per second on a 90 MHz Pentium). Might that be what you're thinking of?

They should just pick a number, convert it all to nickels and make the CEO shove them all up his ass.

Nickels are too small and smooth - Eisenhower dollar coins would be better,in uncirculated condition so that the reeding is nice and sharp.