And having 8 pumps off-line at a time will probably lead to less-than-cheery looks from the station owner and his customers.

Are you thinking of the food-grade plastic wrap that a Walmart might have sitting in the warehouse? That stuff is wimpy compared to the stretch wrap that is used on pallets. It would be like saying if they're all out of cardboard cartons, why not open up some Christmas wrapping paper or tissues and build a box, it's all paper, after all...

NPR's Planet Money had an interesting episode about pallets and CHEP pallets this summer: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

Resistive touchscreens also don't care if the user is wearing gloves, which would be a plus for automotive use. But, they are not as durable as capacitive, which I would argue is a reason to not use them in a car.

But IR systems are also not a good choice because the sensors can be swamped by sunlight.

IR systems still find uses in industrial settings because they can be completely sealed, respond to gloved fingers, and have no flexible/moving parts like a resistive screen, but IR is hardly the new, groundbreaking technology that the sponsor of this article claim.

I had the exact same reaction to the 2009 Prius that I test drove a couple of years ago. If I have to look down to find a button to change the fan speed on the A/C, Toyota has failed on it's UX.

No, but The Cause* would benefit from the publicity around yet another valuable, copyrighted movie stolen by evil hackers.

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*The Cause being the movie studios' upward battle to convince the populous that torrented movie rips are starving children in Hollywood.

I propose a much simpler reason aside from potential liability that they are pulling it. Looking strictly at the bottom-line (and setting aside the idea that Sony might actually have a corporate conscience, somewhere..). The rule-of-thumb is that the opening weekend box office numbers are the best indicator of which movies are hot and which are stinkers. Ticket sales usually taper off week by week, and never surpass the numbers at the opening. If a movie has a weak opening weekend, everyone assumes that the movie is crap and even fewer people go to see it the next week. By not having an opening weekend in the top 5 chains, Sony would pretty much guarantee they have a flop on their hands, never mind the fact that all signs point to a crappy movie to start with.

Load, operate, store is the correct way to access a hardware register, except when it's not. Some hardware has side effects when reading from or writing to a hardware port. On some devices, using bit-manipulation instructions is the correct way to do things.

No, the C standard does not guarantee that bit fields are implemented in a portable way, but if a compiler is not optimizing correctly, that's the fault of a broken compiler, not C.

If you are accessing hardware registers using bit-mapped structures, then yes, you need to understand the machine code being spit out by the compiler.

Really? Are you saying it's not possible to have a Null Pointer Exception in Java? Hmm...

That's not C. What is this "foreach()" you speak of?

Well then kudos to the evolution devs for sticking up to their principles, and a reminder to myself to have no sympathy for the lack of adoption of their product.

Very apropos; this is a perfect example of the type of self-righteousness that drives people away from a FLOSS project.

Amen to this. If your goal is to get your ideas implemented, you need to be able to accept them being known as your boss's ideas.

This is my exact experience as well. I couldn't convince the customer service rep that their "system" also showed that I was an Internet customer for 2 years before they started trying to charge me a modem rental fee. How was I receiving service before that time? Did their system show me ordering a modem? Did their system show them shipping me a modem? All of these questions fell on deaf ears.

After cancelling service with them, their automated phone service would no longer recognize my account number as an active account, but then 4 months later the attempted billings for not returning this mystery modem began again.

The very helpful person I chatted with on their website last month assures me the problem is fixed. We'll see about that.

I wouldn't consider your journey done just yet.

If your experience pans out like mine has, in about 4 months you will start getting e-mails and letters from Comcast attempting to bill you for the equipment you haven't returned yet.

Attempting to explain that you don't have any more equipment to return, will get you empty promises that they will fix the error in their computers, along with another e-mail and bill next month.

In my case, they continue to attempt to bill me $70 for a cable modem that I have never rented from them. Their system still shows a credit of $42 they owe me, but no one seems to know when that money will be returned to me, 6 months after cancelling.

If I never hear from them again, I'll consider it $42 well spent.