That's crazy talk, if you do that you won't be able to charge your clients enormous change fees when they realize they didn't really want a wall, they wanted a 5 bedroom house.

Most software engineers I know have a fixed salary with no over time pay. There's no possibility of working overtime to make up for the price a plumber would cost me to change a faucet. I can either take the financial loss or do it myself to save money.

I've worked with a lot of embedded system where memory was under 64MB and that was recent stuff. You have custom allocators for everything so that you can track with tools where every single MB went. For us the STL usually gets wrapped or replaced to prevent non system engineers from doing really stupid crap with it ( the things I've seen...) we need to account for all that memory. Mostly changes were things like fixed size vectors.

Anyways, look at iOS dev for an ARM SoC. Still today, developping an app that uses over a 100MB of RAM is pretty iffy. You'll get low memory warnings on plenty of iOS devices. I usually had to develop with managed languages and I really, really missed the ability of having custom allocators to track every single byte. It just makes memory profiling incredibly time consuming and imprecise IMHO with most of those languages. Some of those did have really good memory tracking tools but it wasn't ported to the iOS version, others just plain don't have detailed memory allocation tracking.

That's funny, I was reflecting on my days working with EASTL too. But yeah, it's all about memory allocation. People don't realize how incredibly tight memory was on a Wii/PS3/Xbox 360.

Like another poster mentioned, normal radiation levels are an "acceptable risk". So most of the designs Nasa or others came up with simply include a storm shelter design. Many such designs put the shelter in the middle of the water tank for the crew. To quote a website: "The only way to protect against radiation (besides magnetic shielding and other things that don't exist yet on the scale of a spaceship) is by putting as many atoms as you possibly can in between you and wherever that radiation is coming from."

Even the %1 are not "rich" by most people standard, just well off like you. In Quebec, Canada, last year if you made over a 100k annually you were in the top %1 earner. Here, a 100k is very much possible for good SE after a few years of work in the right industries. Welcome to the 1%!

Well, steam engines were *mostly* immobile and powering crap like pumps or press so yes it would not be less efficient. However in the case of a steam carriage, sorry I mean a car, the additional weight might actually make it *less* efficient.

I feel like a broken record but its an US thing. In Canada they just fix you up no matter what you have, they never cheap on the treatment because there's no bullshit like a max number of hearth surgeries of type X a year per hospital. If the hospital has to run a deficit to treat everyone they just will. Seriously, even for medicines we have free gov coverage and if you're employed, the employer has to provide a plan with no limit. The best part? Our economy STILL hasn't collapsed or is not in danger because of that. I never IN MY LIFE had to worry about being sick and not being able to get treatment. The only worry you have when you have to see a doc is: "Damn I'm going to have to wait 3-4 hours in a waiting room to see a doc, am I sick enough to want to wait that long.".

Ok, consider that the province of Quebec market in Canada is tiny compared to the US but I had a friend developping software for ultra-sound devices. They were a small tech startup and they were working on real-time 3d viz of ultra sound when it was still an idea. The thing is they managed to sell their software to 15 hospital that's a LOT of hospital for most province in canada so they had good market coverage. Now it's not rocket science to calculate that the cost of 15 employees with a lot of math guy for signal processing, software engineer, etc means that 100 000 is actually CHEAP if they want to turn in any kind of profit. The amount of customer is so tiny and the dev costs are huge in comparison.

Could we at least do that with an illness where vaccines are actually reliable? Yearly flu vaccine preparation is an educated guess each time as I understand it and some years are better than others because they guessed more correctly what the seasonal flu would look like.

Considering the population of the USA the percentage of the population killed each year by this is 0.00022300095%. On the other hand deaths for the flu have been as low as 3000 yearly so that's 23.3% of deaths. Still, the number of deaths compared to the population makes it comparable to winning the lottery in any case.

I prefer Canada long term plan :) Sorry, being Canadian I find all the hand wringing about government run health care in the states hilarious. Just do the switch like we did back then, no half measure, no bullshit, you just pull the plug on the whole private insurance thing and send them a thank you note for all their effort.

Well, in minority report, you had an hologram in mid air. It's pretty neat because now a 3d projection would have tactile feedback, which I suppose is really the point of such a system.

Err crap all my formatting disapeared and I have to go, sorry :P

Well it's almost worth it. Note that I NEVER rented but here's how it works if you buy: If you fly in, there's a few problem with bringing your own bike, which I faced. I was in Reno, mind you: -Bikes disapear crazy fast in Reno, even walmart for those sub-130$. -You're renting a car, you need to buy a frigging bike rack now. You then have the added stress of scratching the rental car with the bikes hanging from a super cheap bike rack. Note that the bikes won't fit inside with 2.5 gallons per person per day with 3 people in the car plus food, tent etc. Note that we flew in with all our equipment except the food, if you're efficient you can pack everything in a your luggage and still be withing you weight allowance. -The bike is destroyed at the end of the week and it's probably full of spray paint anyway and you can't bring it on a plane. The big money saver here is to buy a Burning Man bike from the Reno Bike Project. They take trashed BM each year and make them playa worthy again and sell them back to you for very cheap. They will even take them back afterward. PS: Walmart bikes have a reputation for dying on day 2 on the playa, I witnessed that myself several times. I must say the guy who wrote his experience is much more wealthy than me, I usually DO NOT HAVE A bike because I can't afford to bring one. I actually walk, which is pretty crazy if you've been there. I just scrape together the money for 1) Plane tickets 700$, 2) BM tickets 300$ 3) Car rental split with others 500$-1000$ depending on rental outlet 4)Food: whatever is left :). I mean fuck, two years ago between us we had 50$ left for 2 days in Reno for food and everything after the burn. We agreed to bet everything on the red in roulette, yes we won :).