I just wish we had continued to develop it like the Japanese have. I can't understand why in the west we don't import that technology. Heated seats, built-in bidet, sound effects to cover up embarrassing noises, in-bowl lighting for when you need to pee at night without waking yourself up too much...

What exactly does this job entail? I mean, do you actually design and build computers, i.e. engineer them? Or is it more of a technician job?

I ask because I see this job title advertised occasionally and the salaries are well below what I would consider engineer level, which is a shame because it could be interesting.

Three years ago would make it about the right age to qualify for Apple's recall to fix fault SSDs. It's also about the lifetime of the battery pack; even if you had it plugged in the whole time the Air comes with an underpowered PSU and uses the battery to meet peak loads, and heat slowly kills them off anyway.

I thought you were supposed to piss in the tank and use that to wash away what's the bowl... no?

It is hard to do, and in this case might not even have helped. The problem was a custom implementation of a common memory management library function that behaved differently from more secure variants. The original reason for making the custom version was performance of the some of the standard ones that were more secure.

To even begin to diagnose that kind of problem the compiler would have to know about the target OS, the C library implementation and possibly even the behaviour of other pre-compiled modules linked at run-time. That wouldn't protect you from issues stemming from run-time libraries either, and it's hard to see how a compiler could deal with those.

Years ago someone would have paid him and published this article in print. Now we have videos of cats doing funny things on the internet so they all went out of business.

If you force them to finance clean up you make nuclear even less profitable. All they will do is spend the 50 years until decommissioning lobbying to be let off the hook. 20 years down the line they will be telling you that if you don't subsidize it they will shut the plant down anyway and the lights will go out.

Emergency cooling was available at Fukushima. The lack of pumps early on was widely publicised but actually they had emergency vehicles with pumps on-site that were working just fine. They would have been enough to avert the meltdowns and explosions, but due to damage to the plant and a critical valve being in the wrong position most of the water the pumped in was diverted to storage tanks.

Onagawa was the closest to the earthquake and was badly damaged. It lost three of four external power lines and temporarily lost cooling for spent fuel pools. The sea wall was not high enough to prevent the plant flooding. Some radioactive water also spilled.

Onagawa-3, where this all happened, was built in 2002.

What a joke. A 28kWh battery for a minivan. The smallest one you can buy a Model S with is more than twice that size. Just shows how far, far away Mercedes is from delivering an EV to rival Tesla's.

Most people don't need that. Gas tanks are sized the way they are because you have to go to a special filling station to put more fuel in, not because most people need to drive 300 miles without stopping. With an EV you can just top it up at home or at work, rarely ever doing a full charge. On a long trip a 30-50 minute break every 4 or 5 hours is necessary for your own health and safety, so charging doesn't really add anything to your journey time.

(cue responses from people who claim to drive for 8 hours solid with a only 5 minute gas/bathroom stop perfectly safely five days a week, as if that somehow matters for a mass market consumer product)

That seems to be the case already.

(cue responses from some people who found a route that an EV can't do, as if it matters for most drivers who live places where the Tesla can get them pretty much anywhere)

The Model S is cheaper than similar sedans, when you consider fuel and maintenance costs. At worst it is similarly priced. The main issue is the up-front layout, and you do have a point there.

Common mistake when thinking about EV charging. Most people very rarely fast charge their vehicles. Most top-up over night at home, or while at work, or in the car park when out shopping. Most people make short journeys anyway. It's not like petrol where you can only fill up at a special filling station and only go there when you are on empty, instead you can top up almost anywhere and rarely need to add tens of kilowatts in a short space of time.

In other words we will never see millions of cars fast charging at the same time. As the infrastructure gets better the need for fast charging will decrease even further. If you need to drive 200 miles to your destination but then plan to spend several hours shopping or stay overnight, in the future you will be able to use that time for charging so no supercharger required. Right now you can't be sure if charging will be on offer, but in a decade or two it will be pretty much universal wherever you park cars.

Does the Mercedes have:

* A 17" touch screen for controlling most functions
* Configurable screen in front of the drive
* Configurable steering wheel controls
* Google maps / satellite imagery with Garmin navigation
* Lifetime mobile data connection
* Remove monitoring/control from your phone
* Flush door handles that extend when you approch
* Flat floor and three real seats in the back
* Near zero engine noise
* Free fuel at Mercedes gas stations
* Frunk (front boot/trunk)
* Zero emissions, granting it zero tax, free parking, high occupancy lane use and a variety of other benefits depending on local offers

Actually the Model S does have some of the things on your list. It has a motorized boot door at the back, which can also remember the maximum height to open to in case you are not quite tall enough to reach it in the highest position. It has adjustable suspension and ride height.

This is like one of those stupid Galaxy vs. iPhone charts where you pick your top trumps features to produce whatever result you like. You pays your money, you takes your choice.

You have to understand Japanese society. It's complicated but basically people in service industries ate expected to have a "service attitude" all the time. It's hard for them to maintain that, so assuming this could be developed to the point where it were not uncanny there might be uses for it. Look at it this way, everyone knows that the "service attitude" isn't the person's real feeling anyway, so this isn't any more fake.

People who buy Mercedes are now buying Tesla. Mercedes threatened to quit F1 if the new hybrid engines were not introduced, because they were really hoping that performance hybrids would be the next big thing. Now Tesla has leapfrogged over performance hybrids completely and made a performance EV, leaving hybrid looking like the old stop-gap technology.

Mercedes have produced a few concept EVs over the years, like their all-electric AMG, but nothing serious. They clearly viewed it as a far off technology, much like many of the people on Slashdot who still can't quite accept that it works and actually makes pretty much the best luxury performance sedan you can buy.