Ha ha lol. Yeah, sure. First of all, Microsoft generally doesn't even want to deal with you as a device vendor. They direct you to a distributor, who has zero leeway in pricing. You get a list price, except that the price is not publicly listed, and you have to deal with a bunch of legal agreements, and you can't bypass the distributor. The entire process is engineered so that the fifth wheel distributors are artificially indispensable. They are useless, but MS decided they have to stay. It makes no sense, really. I'm so glad I don't have to directly license anything from MS.

You never tried to license Windows Embedded products, right? Because it's a quagmire of a process that requires signing your soul away and whatnot. In an ideal world, you could just go to a webpage, enter your CC number, and get back a number of licenses/entitlements. But no, Microsoft had to make it hard for everyone.

The fucked-up-ness of Windows Embedded licensing is why at work we spend extra money to run our stuff on off-the-shelf Windows Embedded controllers - we simply don't want to deal with the licensing. It's also why we'll be dropping Windows Embedded in the next two months, as we near the end of testing for the Linux port of our solution. It's utterly infeasible for small vendors (say 100 devices) to deal with Microsoft licensing mess unless they have got way more patience than I do. It's as if the 90s called and wanted their "talk to your distributor" shit back.

Of course you can then run a dehumidifier in the same room - because having one noisy machine in your room isn't enough. Of course, it's best to have two sets of circulating fans and a compressor. /s

Of course this needs to run on deionized water, and I certainly do hope that they have a robust, validated mold and fungus control solution for this thing.

They also really dropped the ball on USB 2 throughput on some combinations of modern OS X (like Mavericks) with old hardware (say a 2007 MacBook Pro). There are serious throughput problems with some peripheral devices. A workaround is to run Snow Leopard or Windows 7 on the same hardware. This was the last straw that forced me to upgrade my trusty '07 MBP.

Probably if they allowed themselves to use the full 512 bytes, it could enforce all the rules. Alas, I wonder what would come out with APL :)

As crazy as it might sound, the GP-B mission has validated means of following a zero acceleration orbit with sub-micron precision. The precision achieved was that the residual acceleration was on the order of 1E-11 g. So yeah, we can definitely follow a zero-acceleration orbit with crazy precision!

Everyone here seems to forget that a variant of Pascal is, for better or worse, also standardized as an IEC 61131-3 language. It's called Structured Text (ST). It is in rather widespread use in industrial automation. ST is also one of the languages you can use to write the actions of the Sequential Function Charts (SFCs), also known as Grafcet. SFCs provide most of UML State Diagram functionality. Standardized support for state machines is still not in C++, after so many years!

So Pascal isn't dead in the mainstream, it's just that it's not the mainstream you might think of. A lot of products in your fridge have been packed in machines controlled in part by Pascal code.

I wrote a lot of I/O code/drivers in Pascal, and also what would pass for a rudimentary run-to-completion realtime OS kernel. There was nothing fundamentally worse about it, compared to C, except for the lack of finesse in the code generator. It worked just fine, and I'd rewrite in assembly the few functions/procedures that had to be faster than compiled code.

If you are not a professional full-time driver then no, you have not. And if you are a professional driver, then still you have not been scored on your driving.

This government regulation isn't about protecting you from idiot drivers. It's about protecting you from the long tail of accidents that happen in spite of everyone following the rules. People aren't infallible. Occasionally, we make mistakes even with the best of training. Unless you're a race driver, your driver "training" is nowhere near the amount of training the olympic athletes receive. Yet, invariably enough, in every olympics there's a bunch of snafus committed by the best trained people. That should be the only thing you need to see to realize that, once again, no matter how well prepared you are, you will make mistakes even if your weally, weally wish not to. I mean fuck, these people are fucking competing for olympic medals. They are the best of the best worldwide. And they do mess up. So yes, no matter how good you think you are, you will commit random errors on the road that may prove deadly. The regulations and the technical means here are to make those random things less deadly. That's all.

I think that the part of the issue is that there's really not all that much standardization that has force of law when it comes to ECUs. It's sad to see that they use an ECM that has such silly issues.

The printed part is a concrete skeleton that acts as a form that needs to cure and then be filled with concrete. None of the finishing work is printed. It is basically a cast-concrete structure, where the typical metal forms were replaced with a 3D-printed skeleton. Of course the printed skeleton is a couple orders of magnitude rougher than what you'd get with metal forms, so the walls need heavy finishing before they can be presentable.

What they've done is perhaps a step in the right direction, but they are very, very far from truly 3D-printing an entire building. First of all, they'll need to have an inline concrete mixer that can continuously mix a fast-curing mix, so that they could print shapes that are filled-in. They also need to change the shape of the nozzle so that the deformed (compressed) shape will be rectangular, and not oval as it is now. They really did everything without much thought or understanding of what it takes to do it right. It is, at best, cargo cult 3D printing. They did all the right moves without understanding what it really takes to do it.

Nope. They simply don't take all cases to trial, and some crimes go unpunished. As happens now anyway, since with a plea bargain you're punishing some other crime, not the one that really happened. You really need to look outside of the U.S. legal system. In many a European country, a crime won't be prosecuted for the reason that it had low social consequences. It's IMHO a rather valid reason not to prosecute, it's in fact what the U.S. prosecutors have yet to learn. Yeah, the law says that you shouldn't smoke marijuana. Yeah, you did break the law. No, it didn't really cause much suffering for anyone. Thus, no prosecution. That's how it's supposed to be in the civilized world. Of course, ideally we shouldn't have stupid laws to begin with.

You're just making a bunch of stuff up. Plea bargains and prosecutorial discretion are entirely separate issues. What, you think that in jurisdictions without the plea bargain, the prosecutors take all cases? You're nuts.