The cool thing about the Seattle program is that it doesn't cost $7000 to install, it costs $150 on your electric bill (once) and it moves with you inside the city, even if you rent.

Since you have different DC voltages you either need DC wall warts (not achieving anything), per outlet transformers (sounds expensive and turn the socket into a wall wart) or one circuit per outlet (sounds expensive and needs big conduits). And because of fire risk, property damage and whatnot you'll never get to use the same plug, tripling each outlet. Then you need something fancy to flip each socket at the source and what part of the socket is powered at the sink in a safe way, for every outlet. And I doubt 9VDC/500mW-2A matters much economically, if you want the aesthetics embed the wall wart in the wall, it'll probably be less hassle than the alternatives.

I've been buying solar panel units here in Seattle that are placed on public buildings through our Seattle City Light program, since my townhouse faces north, and it works even if I sell the house and buy another one somewhere in Seattle (costs about $150 per unit, due to large scale installations that drop the costs).

As to poor people using solar panels, some cities way up here give homeless veterans Tiny Houses (250 sq ft) with solar panels on their roofs so they don't have to camp outside.

Adapt. Cause emissions don't care about your excuses, and change is now.

I don't know who told you C++ was an object-oriented language. It's not -- ask Bjarne. It supports many different styles of programming, object-oriented being just one of many, but it is in no way object-oriented. You can write large code bases without using a single object.

unique_ptr<T> is normally preferred over shared_ptr<T> -- the former is zero-overhead compared to a pointer, while the latter has a reference count associated with it which has to be incremented and decremented. If you know two or more things will be using the pointer and you don't want to have to worry about ownership semantics, shared_ptr<T> makes a lot of sense. If you know only one will be using it, unique_ptr<T> makes more sense.

Duh.

Nerd fail, invalid use of significant digits ;). Though I was thinking the same thing, one in a million doesn't seem very significant. It's like 5 people dying in my country of 5 million, that's one bad car crash not exactly dropping like flies.

Fair enough, many climb Mount Everest for no better reason.

Well mostly you'll be living in a bunker living off a long supply chain from Earth. It'll be a lot like living on a submarine that you mostly endure rather than pioneer. Many will envy you going, not so many the actual living conditions.

Name the third guy to set foot on the moon. I'm not saying there's no fame, but there's many easier ways to celebrity status. Except if you're the next Neil Armstrong.

True. But I imagine it'll be a rather unglamorous and unthankful task. Remember that you're a million miles away from any fans or fame, no vacations or time off and it's unlikely any amount of money will get you fresh bacon and eggs.

And as for changing the world, they won't send you up there just to be a warm body. If you can change the world up there, you can probably change the world down here too. There's thousands of people who can say they contributed to the Apollo program, even though they never went to the moon.

Look, we actually have documents (go look at wikileaks, no I won't do your work for you) that prove that Germany has been instrumental in making sure that Greek milliionaires avoiding taxes aren't followed to their Swiss deposits and other tax frauds.

The only problem is that the German Banks might have to suffer a loss for Liar's Loans they made under the Goldman Sachs "promises" that Greece could be in the EEC (EU monetary combine), which even internal German audits show was known to be a lie.

The banks losing their money is what is supposed to happen when they make bad loans.

That and the lack of repayment by Germany for the war looting of Greece during WW II, which has never been repaid.

Does Greece have a strong economy? No, but it never has.

Is there massive tax fraud in Greece? Yes, but there always has been.

Is this a major risk for the EU? No, because .... wait for it ... Greece is less than 0.1 percent of total EU GDP. Total.

All the rest is sturm und drang by Reichsmarshalls in Den Stadt.

Abandon London, nothing of consequence remains there.

Scotland, a free independent and green country, is where your future lies.

Unlike the desktop, most people use the browser supplied with their smartphone/tablet. Apple doesn't allow any application competing with their own as far as I know and on Android Chrome is a central part of Google's all-or-nothing package of apps and services. Maybe they think that for once they'll be the default browser on something. Then again, they're not a first party browser on the desktop either so why they need to have delusions of grandeur I don't know. What I do know is that they have zero chance of pulling off a whole mobile ecosystem with apps and everything. Even Microsoft struggle like hell and they have poured billions into Windows Phone, the Nokia buyout and whatnot.

My first OCZ Vertex - the original one - I did nothing to optimize it and spent as temp drive for everything, including torrent downloads that I later archived. It does 1.5 years later after eating through a 10k writes/sector endurance, if I read the SMART data right it had 9.6k write average and 14k writes worst case. My replacement drive from WD I did all the basic stuff to optimize and kept my torrents to a HDD, it lasted about 3.5 years and the lifespan indicator said it should have another 1.5 years left but one day it just wouldn't boot.

Now I have a Vertex 450 (before you say anything it's for boot and gaming, I keep my documents on another drive...) and it has 9589 power-on hours, that's 400 days and 96% life left. At this rate, it should last 25 years or more. It seems to me they've done a lot to fix write amplification and other issues, that easily killed some of the early drives if you actually used them.