I view Tesla as the best bet for a completely new American car company in a long time.

The U.S. Big Three have been around for eons. After World War 2 Hudson and Nash were hurting, merged to form American Motors, and went bust. Packard and Studebaker were hurting, merged, and went bust. Kaiser/Frazer tried, and went bust. De Lorean tried and got in to all sorts of trouble. Nobody seemed to be able to launch a new car company and make it work.

Tesla, on the other hand, seem to have cracked it. They're selling all the cars they can make. I see lots of them around here (Vancouver).

...laura

Actually there's at least two potential plot lines in the books already to make that... ambiguous. Heck, half the plot is taking seemingly irreplaceable characters and kill them, the world keeps on twisting and turning. But yes, I don't see it happening until after they've sailed for Westeros.

Actually it's a bit more complicated than that, it started as one book that outgrew itself and was divided geographically but the timelines eventually merge again in Dance of Dragons with characters from the south appearing after the events of the fourth book. So it will be highly biased towards characters based in the north/east since they're in the entire book, followed by characters travelling north while those staying in the south aren't in the fifth book at all, but who will certainly return to finish up their arcs.

Pretty much nobody argues with the kind of science you can conduct in a lab like physics, chemistry, optics, mechanics, electronics and such, if you can put it in a lab and reproduce it then it's generally not controversial at all. Even when CERN finds some exotic new particle. All the controversy usually revolves around systems that are either so complex we can't meaningfully reproduce it all in a lab so basically parallel world theories or where the results come from a thought process, not compelled by any law of nature.

In the first case we do some partial models that are only approximately right, like for example weather forecasts. And lots of people claiming that flapping your wings this way or that will set off a butterfly effect. In the second case you'll never settle the discussion on applicability because these people might react different than those people based on culture, age, sex, education, experience, history or simply understanding the purpose or confines of the experiment and how applicable it really is to any real world situation.

For example, I suspect you can take pretty much all literature and studies done on airplane hijackings done before 9/11 and throw them in the trash bin, or at the very least put them in a museum. Not because they were in any way scientifically invalid, but because nobody will react in the same way anymore. Granted, that's probably a rather extreme example but there's lots of example to prove those kinds of scientific truths are fluid and change over time. It's a process, not a set of answers and it'll always be noisy.

The problem with any system is content.

Bingo.

Use static HTML, CSS, the F4Player and see the lectures catch on. Once you've got content, choose/buid you system based on that. That might even be Wordpress or Joomla or something.

Well, the company itself is only one piece of the puzzle. They're also connected to vendors, customers, competitors, their particular market and the general economy. All of those give a lot of impulses into the system, if your competitor launches a great new product that's bad for you. If your vendor's got supply problems, that's bad for you. If your customers for some reason get mad at you that's bad for you. If they suddenly want something else like tablets instead of your laptops that's bad for you. Growth and recession drags the entire economy up and down. The effects ripple through like waves in a pond and it's never still. Just because there's waves on the surface doesn't mean the tide stops coming in, but if you measure from the bottom of one wave to the top of the next then it might go against the fundamentals. They exist if you're investing in a far longer horizon where today's waves are of no real significance, in the long term the companies that make money go up and the ones who lose money go down.

That said, belief is often more powerful than the fundamentals until the illusion cracks. For example take the dotcom boom, as long as everyone thinks it's a boom they hold on to their stocks. If it dips, they think now they're getting value and buy more. That happens until the bad news overwhelm the value buyers and the stock really start tanking, which again leads to a stampede out. At every step of the way there's people trying to be ahead of the market, but the day traders don't really influence the long term stock price. They're just there trying to make a margin on the market over-reacting/under-reacting or not grasping all the interrelations at play.

And the space station would do what exactly, pull materials out of a magician's hat? If all the raw materials are eventually going to come from earth anyway, you're just adding intermediary steps to increase costs. Here's a number of reasons why you might want to have a space station, but practically doesn't apply today:

1) We can gather and refine materials and produce parts/fuel with the required tolerances/quality from a lower/zero-g gravity well like the moon or asteroids at a lower cost than shipping it from earth. For example say you discover an asteroid full of bauxite ore. You still have to create a mining ship, send it to the asteroid belt, extract the bauxite through mining, ship it to the space station, capture it, smelt it, roll it to sheet metal and cut it with extreme precision. While launching it from earth is expensive both the setup costs and production costs of doing it in space dwarfs the savings.

2) You can likewise gather energy by for example setting up gigantic solar panels that can charge a space craft. However, none of our current rockets run on electricity and the energy costs of orbiting/deorbiting a space ship probably dwarf the energy gains.

3) You can refuel/repair/retrofit/repurpose incoming spaceships without going down into the gravity well, however we generally don't do return missions because of the costs involved in sending them back to earth. It may be useful if we have big reusable "ferry" ships between say Earth orbit and Mars orbit, though even then it's questionable if we shouldn't just launch resupply rockets directly rather than going through a space station.

4) We could build ships that aren't hampered by the launch forces and are designed for zero-g only, but practically we're pretty good at various forms of fold-out designs that'll survive launch and transform into a more fragile shape in space. Same with the rovers, they hit the ground curled up like a ball then deploy.

5) We could build bigger ships than could be launched through a single launch, however the total launch costs would be the same. Practically we'd probably build it like the ISS though through interlocking modules, with large interlocking sections it should be almost as structurally sound as building it in one single piece in space.

6) If we have a lot of cargo going between many different systems then a hub-and-spoke system is more efficient than direct peering. In the foreseeable future though, everything will either come from Earth or go to Earth so this isn't relevant until we've got major off-world colonies.

The TL;DR version: Nothing a space station could do would lower space exploration costs today, only increase them.

Well, you can make a similar graph for "Death by nuclear weapon by year" but I doubt anyone think that despite the peak in 1945 we've lost our capability or technology to do it again. It seems that many people - for no apparent good reason - think that a moon or Mars colony will lead to the warp drive. All it would do is inch the bar higher to "The universe is probably littered with the one-solar system graves of cultures..." while not bringing us significantly closer to interstellar travel. And I think it's also undervaluing the progress we're actually making:

1) We're making great strides in discovering exo-planets that may be possible targets for colonization
2) SpaceX and others are making huge progress in getting the $/kg to orbit price down.
3) For reasons entirely unrelated to space, we're making huge strides in semi-autonomous and autonomous robots.
4) What used to be a two way race now includes space programs from Europe, Japan, China and India in addition to US and Russia.
5) From 3) and 4) there are several plans for "dry-run" base deployment missions to create the necessary human environment.

I think the last one really indicates where the future of manned missions is going though, the base doesn't need you to function because we're not going to send you there until it's already functioning without you. At least under normal circumstances, obviously if there's a malfunction you'll be the impromptu on-site repairman. Granted it won't be quite like checking into a hotel but you expect it to have air pressure, right oxygen/CO2 levels (scrubbing easily tested with oxygen-eating bacteria), habitable temperature, electricity (lights, power through solar cells) and communications (satellite dish). Perhaps even stores of food, water and other supplies if it's cheaper to send them some other way rather than with the astronauts.

What you say is absolutely true yet grossly misleading and I suspect you know it. Yes, if you boot a machine with no HDD, no OS, no drivers the computer will display something to say "Hey, I have no boot disk" which is obviously built in. To get 2D/3D/video acceleration though you typically need to load a firmware module first, then you can start programming it through the API. As I understand it based on reading about AMD's open drivers which still depend on closed source hardware their opinion it the firmware makes the hardware comply with their "assembler language" GPU API. It won't function without it and explaining the actual bits would mean explaining the hardware implementation which is a tightly guarded company secret. It should also be noted that the firmware doesn't run on the CPU, it runs internally on the GPU so it's a bit like demanding how a RAID card's chip is programmed, not the driver that runs on the CPU but the programming of auxiliary chips. The funny part is that nobody cares if you use an EEPROM to write the firmware blob to that the card will read from. But if you binary dump it directly, then RMS won't be happy. I don't see the big practical difference though.

The truth is somewhere in between. For example the nVidia GTX 980 now sells with 16/16(?) SMMs enabled for 16*128 = 2048 cores. The GTX 970 sells with 13/16 SMMs for 13*128 = 1664 cores. It is extremely unlikely that no actual cards have 14 or 15 working SMMs. Card makers probably do some more binning to see which chips they can up their OC editions and which they put in their reference editions too. The question is how good is your validation versus their validation, if it runs through 3DMark okay does it mean it's good? Or is it going to start misrendering or locking up the card or bluescreen the machine? There's a real cost to answering "Is this caused by my overclock?" even when the overclock turns out to not be the problem. If I had more time to swap for my money perhaps the answer would be different, but I run at stock speeds and I expect the manufacturer to make sure it runs flawlessly at that speed. I agree that sometimes it might be the manufacturer shaping the bins to fit the market, but what's it worth to you to take that chance? I mean, I seriously doubt a manufacturer bin down all their chips. I expect some of the GTX 970 chips to actually have just 13/16 working SMMs.

With all this hassle nowadays - I remember the times when nVidia was the only company supporting Linux and was something like the darly child of the FOSS community - which company actually *is* the most FOSS friendly today? Intel? AMD/ATI? Some other company?

Educated opinions on this needed.

You're an experiecned C developer? Well, sorry, but that's a no-brainer then. Go for Objective-C. Anything else would be really really stupid. You'll have to change some C habits to actually 'get' Obj-C, but you'll live. Obj-C works on every plattform, so you wouldn't be tied to iOS/OS X either. Only upsides to that route for you.

I OTOH also am an experienced developer, but pampered by 15 years of modern scripting language usage. I would want to learn C++ or Objective-C (I've been trying to pick up C++ for the last 2 years but haven't put enough effort into it yet), especially because im a FOSS Linux Geek, but I hate having to deal with anachronistic shit - so for me actually using an easy-to-use lock-in language would actually make sense - especially if I know what I want to build on iOS exclusively, since I would only do something very product and project specific on iOS. And only if I'm paid for it.

The ballast in a CFL can't handle the dimmer.

Its not that you replace the dimmer,but that you need to use "cold cathode" florescent bulbs with them--andin the smaller sizes (candelabra mount), you can't get these (or LED) that are very strong.

My house has been almost completely devoid of incandescent for about ten years--more initially for heat (broken AC in the Vegas desert!) than power.

The only place they're left are in the refrigerator (don't want mercury there if it breaks . . .) and oven (heat). But the socket is bad in the refrigerator, and the oven is dead an needs replacing, leaving only the halogens in the stove hood. Inadequate LEDs in the ceiling fans family & dining room (3 25 watt equiv, all I can find), and just about everythign ese is CFL (and will slowly swap out to LED as they fail)

hawk

Serious gaming graphics card makers supporting G-sync: 1
Serious gaming graphics card makers supporting Adaptive Sync: 1

As for the monitor manufacturers, I'm pretty sure they are on the passive end of this - customers choose graphics card first, then a screen that works with that card. So while it is a standard, I doubt consumers will care. nVidia is the top dog, with GTX 970/980 they gave AMD another kick to the balls and they're in a position where they can choose to be the MS Office of the market. How far as OpenOffice's standards compliance gotten them in dethroning MS Office? Not far, around here at least.

... how the indignation at a major vulnerability like this (2nd in a few months) is so muted when the OS in question doesn't come from Microsoft.

Bugs happen. The bullshit and coverup that comes with many of them needn't happen.

When did shellshock come out? A week ago?
We already have testing routines, fixes, live reports on ongoing exploits, ad-hoc sidetracking fixes for commercial non-FOSS versions (Mac OS X), countless how-tos on how to close up holes, a lively worldwide debate among experts on how to prevent this class of exploit, the bash crew merging the fixes, existing updates for debian, etc.

Seriously, this is a *very* *bad* hole, and yet the cool with which I was able to approach it simply knowing that all my outward facing boxes run a type-a prime FOSS distribution like debian was something you will not see with a windows admin. apt-get upgrade, apt-get update ... bladibla blubdiblub packageA bash someOtherPackage ... bladibla continue? Fuck yeah. Hit Enter. Yawn. Go get some coffee, come back, paste the onliner test. Fixed.

Sorry pal, but even with a bug of this magnitude, the way the FOSS community deals with it is a whole different league than any other camp. Openness beats everything else in this line of work, every time.

My 2 cents.