It was my original instinct to say the same (since nearly all basic languages are), but I looked it up on wikipedia before posting and found that there was indeed a compiler for it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

There's not a whole lot of info about it on wikipedia, and it doesn't even say when it was written (and there are no citations), so I have no idea if it was something recent or very old.

Actually, it is written for resource efficiency...specifically program size, which uses memory. The goal was to write a 1 line program, and in BBC Basic, that meant they were limited to 256 characters. Yes, maybe they could have wrote things with more verbose naming and had it compile to the same size, but the particular goal there was to write something big with little code. I think they accomplished it fairly well, and probably 95% (at least) of programmers would be hard pressed to replicate their results. I suspect the people capable of accomplishing that would be capable of similar accomplishments on an embedded platform, given the necessary experience with the particular hardware.

Unless, of course, you were developing for embedded hardware, where you are trying to do way too many things with way too few resources***. Then you'd give that programmer a promotion.

***Although those days are gradually coming to an end, as even the tiniest systems are getting more and more resources, and eventually they'll all join the rest of us, where readability, verifiability, and maintainability take top priority. But for now, they're not all quite there yet.

That's not apple. That's the entire CPU industry in general. Clock speed, we are right around where we were a decade ago. And that has nothing to do with clinging, but rather what's realistically possible. CPU speed used to increase rapidly because it was the easy way to increase performance year after year. Then we started getting into diminishing returns....smaller improvements in performance even while power consumption and cooling requirements grew rapidly. So now they've learned they need to focus their improvements on both multi-core design as well as per-clock execution efficiency.

Apparently your reading comprehension isn't quite there. Did I say we've arrived at the panacea? No, I didn't even say anything remotely like that. What I was saying is that it's a lot better than it was before.

And I don't think your math is quite there either. 170 miles * 21 stops = 3570 miles. Over 2 days, that's 1785 miles per day. Even on the summer solstice, you have only 16 hours of daylight (unless you are up in northern canada). So even if we don't count time to eat, use the bathroom, and get gas, you must have been driving 111 MPH continuously. Even if I grant you the hour before sunrise and after sunset, that's still 99 MPH with no stops.

It'll get to that point eventually. Tesla's currently installing superchargers across the country. You can get a half charge in 170 mile charge in 30 minutes (and it's free)

http://www.teslamotors.com/sup...

That's not too bad. Having to stop for 30 minutes every couple hours is a bit less than desirable, but that's a significant improvement. If you plan your bathroom breaks and dinner around charging time, then several of those stops won't be so bad.

Neither. Read that sentence again, and I think it's pretty clear they are comparing all 4 to a baseline level (not sure what that is or how they get it). Think of it like:
basline = x
carbonated SSBs = x-1
fruit juice = x + 1
non-carbonated SSBs = x
diet carbonated SSBs = x

And just to be certain I am interpreting it right, I took the 15 seconds (literally, that's how long it took me) that you couldn't to click the link, skim the 1 page summary, and find: "No significant associations were observed between consumption of diet sodas or noncarbonated SSBs and telomere length."

It's as if, after all these years, the n-gage lives on.

WTF? Did I stumble onto the set of "The Bachelor" or something?

You are right, they are not the same thing. However, some pieces of hardware have no firmware instanlled and require the driver to upload it on boot. I have no idea if that's how nvidia cards work, but I know that years ago when I was using hauppauge analog tv capture cards, this was exactly the case. Instead of flashing the firmware to the card, it just gets loaded every time you reboot. In these cases, people passionate about open source are probably going to want to use open source firmware to go with their open source driver. Or perhaps using the closed source firmware with the open source driver isn't even an option. I really don't know.

Do your new hires routinely circumvent 2 layers of security mechanisms just to alter the values of Integer objects? Sounds like you have some shitty new hires. What you really should be teaching them is that, if they have an Integer object with a value of 2 and they want it to be 3, then rather than use the reflection API to bypass private and final modifiers and turning off the accessibility restructions, they could just do "new Integer(3)" or "Integer.valueOf(3)" and be done with it.

I'm sure as hell glad I don't have your shitty new hires working with me. Nor your stupid ass teaching/hiring my coworkers.

OK, if autoboxing is crap, then you should just consider it invalid to assign a primitive type to an object type. Thus I guess you made a coding error when you wrote the code that did autoboxing. Shame on you.

Now, back here in the real world, you went OUT OF YOUR WAY, even going so far as to explicitly circumvent 2 levels of security measure, just to FORCE the problem to occur. That's like claiming the scissors you bought are unsafe because they made you go blind when you jammed them into your eyes.

Sorry, but the autoboxing is completely safe unless you take explicit measure to attempt to make it unsafe. Don't go whining just because the language didn't protect you from yourself. It actually tried, but you told it not to. If you can't trust yourself not to be an idiot, then just run all of your code with an appropriate security profile in place and you'll be all set.

I'm not sure Id say this is "due to the nonsensical autoboxing syntactic sugar". This only works because you "hacked" the system.

1) You aren't allowed to modify the value of an Integer object, as the value is both private and final. You worked around that by using reflection to get at the object's variables in the roundabout way.
2) Even then, you wouldn't be allowed to modify it because of security restrictions. However, you also explicitly turned off the security restrictions.
3) The only reason you were even able to turn off the security restrictions is because you were running in an unmanaged environment. In that situation, it is assumed you have full access to do pretty much anything you'd like. However, if you were running in any sort of managed environment with a security manager installed, you wouldn't have been able to do that.

This is really not much different than C++, where it's assumed you have full access to everything. You can take a const, get a const pointer to it, cast that to a non-const pointer, and then modify it. Even if that constant value were stored in a non-writable code page, you could make the code page writable if you were running in an environment that allowed you to alter those permissions. I haven't done such a thing in a VERY long time, so I'm not sure if Admin access under windows these days gives you that level of access, but I'm almost certain linux root level would allow it.

I think all 3 of those were the same degree of closeness, just difference camera angles and zoom.

If you look at the shot at 0:52, you can really see there are only 2 ledges in the volcano. There is the really close one at the very edge of the lava, which you later see getting splashed with lava continuously, and at one point even see a piece breaking off. These guys clearly did not go to that one. Then there is another rim which is probably 80-90% of the way down. That's the one I'm pretty certain they filmed themselves standing on. According to their blog (http://www.stormchaser.ca/News.html) they repelled 1200 feet down to get there. So if my estimate of 80-90% is correct, then they are 100-300 feet above the lava surface at that point.

What sort of troll modded this insightful? Oh yeah, Obama golfs a lot. Well, maybe instead of the 3 or 4 iron, maybe Obama should go with the Crawford, Texas Ranch