Or worse--they could sell advertising on the road to help fund it.

One economic test would be to compare the price of installing the solar roadway with the cost of building a cover over the roadway with solar panels on it.

The should do the simple tests first.

They claim that the glass cover panels can hold up to traffic and provide sufficient traction. Why not mount just the glass covers over a stretch of road and see how it behaves? Until they get the covers right, the rest is irrelevant.

Once they have the ability to make a glass roadway, then they can deal with the question of what to put under it. How about just LEDs for traffic marking? Will they work in the day time? Will they put out too much light pollution?

Once they have the traffic markings working, they can get the heating elements needed for installing where it might snow. I'm under the impression that they have to melt the snow because the panels won't stand up to snow plows. Maybe it will make more sense to run pipes with heated antifreeze solution instead of direct electric heat. Maybe it will make more sense to redesign the glass covers to stand up to snow plows.

Once those are solved, putting in solar panels is a no-brainer that helps the economics of the project work.

In the end, once all the technical issues are solved, it's a matter of economics. What is the cost of a road made with the panels over 50 years as opposed to a traditional asphalt or concrete road when all the maintenance is factored in for each road type?

Considering all the above, I'm convinced that it makes much more sense to put solar on rooftops.

It's simple. You use signed source code instead of signed binaries.

Then you use a compiler and linker that does some simple things like randomly ordering variables and functions in the executable and on the stack. That makes it impossible for an attacker to know where some key variable is and exploit it though an overflow (whether on the stack or elsewhere). The attacker is far more likely to crash your program than to exploit a bug, which is much easier to recover from.

Also, as pointed out elsewhere, while this may make debugging more complicated in some cases, it also makes it more likely that bugs where the compiler's choices matter will be found earlier in development, so you may not encounter them in the first place.

And in the case of a corporate IT department, you use the randomizing compiler to build the binary that you push out to your clients. It may be the same throughout your company, but it will be different from anything anyone outside would have access to, which is probably good enough.

Gentoo isn't about speed. It's about control and configurability.

All those packages with optional Gnome support? Turned on in every other distribution, but turned off for me.

Want to add patches to a package? Just put the patch file under /etc/portage/patches// and it gets included. I currently have 9 patches applied. I can upgrade the packages, and keep my patches as long as they continue to merge cleanly.

The whole concept assumes that there is no soul. An individual is simply what you get from a functioning brain. If you can create a duplicate of a functioning brain inside a functioning body with the nerves wired up correctly, then you have a person. You duplicated the individual (personality, emotions, memories, etc.) with a duplicate brain structure. If the body doesn't match the original body, you've essentially done a full-body transplant.

Yes, it's all science fiction for now, but there's no reason to assume that it always will be.

We're probably a lot closer to replacing our bodies with mechanical equivalents than we are to printing a complete person. The biggest challenge is the brain. If you replace everything surrounding the brain with prosthetics, then it may be much more practical to suspend the function of the brain for a long voyage than it would be for a whole body.

Or combine the ideas. Freeze a brain in a cyborg body. When you get a colony set up, print a uterus, implant frozen embryos, and then let the cyborg parent the first off-world generation.

You don't need to describe a human on the molecular level. For the most part, go with the organ level, and you're all set. Once we can print replacement organs, it's just a small step to putting it all together for a complete person. You'll need compatible DNA to match the cells that you're printing.

The only big deal is the brain, as you probably want to print a person with memory and skills, so you have to be able to scan a live person and then print a duplicate.

You don't really need to match the DNA to the brain structure. You also don't need to match the DNA to the body shape, though that's probably a good idea.

Yes, it is what the poll asked.

In a narrow definition, twm is not a desktop environment. But if you look at my system running it, it's hard to argue that it's not what defines the environment under which my desktop operates. Sure, it doesn't provide the features that have recently come to define the term "desktop environment." I don't want those features, which was the point of my post.

It's reasonable to expect any discourse to expand beyond the original question. This is especially true in a format such as Slashdot poll questions. To expect to not see answers that are related but marginally off-topic is just wrong. Such answers add value to the discussion, providing alternative viewpoints and answering the questions of people who are dealing with similar but slightly different issues.

And in this case, even with the strictest definition of "desktop environment," my answer was absolutely completely on-topic. The last options is "Other (list in comments)" which is what I chose. Whether you interpret my "other" as twm or as none is up to you, but either way it's exactly what the poll question asked.

I can accept that twm is ugly, but I really like how it works.

I can configure any mouse button to do whatever I want. The only icons I see are from windows that I have minimized. There's no always-present status bar or extra junk. (If I want a status bar, I'll find an application that provides one.)

A tiling window manager is too restrictive. I use overlapping windows all the time.

The source code for twm is very simple. I'm currently running with four different patches that I've written: dynamic config files, reprocessing the screen dimensions on xrandr events, avoid placing new windows partially off-screen, and allowing resize from hot keys.

My remaining complaints that I haven't patched yet are:
*) Proper handling of multiple screens with different dimensions
*) Using color icon images
*) Managing icons for applications that generate their own

I haven't seen twm consuming excessive CPU power. My current session has been running for over two months with less than a minute of CPU time consumed by the window manager.

I don't want a "desktop environment." I just want a window manager. I still use twm because it does everything that I need and then gets out of the way.

I have found a few minor things I don't like about it, but I've written patches to correct them. (And I submitted them, but I doubt that much of anything will be accepted at this point.)

Yes. I made a point of writing my original post without including a value judgement on that point.

There's a big difference between a cop deciding that someone looks suspicious because he's driving in a neighborhood where the residents don't match his skin color and a police officer deciding someone is suspicious because it looked like they were doing a drug deal in a parking lot but he didn't see exactly what was exchanged. I expect if you were doing a civilian ride-along at the time, there's a wide range of possibilities, some of which you would agree with, and some of which you wouldn't.

My point is that a traffic stop is a tool that is widely used in law enforcement. Tools can be used for good or bad, but aren't necessarily good or bad themselves. Driverless cars remove that tool. In some cases this is good. In others, police will need to find new ways of dealing with old problems.

It's not just about the money. Traffic stops are a major tool that police use in law enforcement. If they think someone is suspicious, they look for a traffic violation as an excuse to pull them over and investigate. Likewise, normal traffic stops give officers a chance to notice suspicious activity.

Someone should dig up the numbers for the percentage of arrests that begin with a traffic stop.

I'll Google that for me:

http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHT...

While there may not be solid data nationally, at least in this one area, traffic stops account for about a third of all arrests.

I think the big surprise here is that this doesn't happen more often.

Consider how many corporations, universities, and such have huge PC deployments with automated updates. I've seen updates that drop all the PCs off the network, but I've never seen one where everything is wiped.

I'm also surprised that I haven't heard of malware that accidentally wiped a network of 100K or more machines when someone sent the wrong command.

Or maybe the news here is that it was in a more open environment where people hear about it. If a publicly traded company wiped a thousand PCs at its headquarters, you bet they would try to keep it quiet.

That doesn't quite do it. FLAC is great for the individual tracks, but there is also information about inter-track gaps. If you lose that, playing the album won't sound right if any of the tracks are supposed to flow into the next one. This isn't an issue for probably 90% of the CDs out there, but for the remaining ones, it's important to get them to play correctly.

I've noticed the same problem when ripping old vinyl albums and playing them on an MP3 player. When the tracks used to flow, there's now a gap, and it can be really annoying.