I guess I was thinking about "device" in terms of electronics rather than pet rocks. The biggest manufacturer of the magnetic/copper bracelets actually got in trouble for making them out of potentially hazardous industrial waste.
It's not the buttons themselves, it's using them to execute more than one command at once. If you seem to manage to press some key combination with perfect timing all the time.
EVE players get banned for programmable buttons. You really can pick your poison.
Selling people homeopathy wasn't enough, now there are medical devices. That Thync thing looks like pure snake oil. Unless you walk around with it strapped to just the right spot on your head.
I'm pointing out that there is certainly quite a bit of mass hysteria going around. Sometimes that manifests as whackos killing innocent people, as per your definition. Other times it manifests as whackos engaging in multi-year legislative and regulatory exercises.
The OP was talking about cockpit door regulations. I tend to think that's a good idea, but it obviously has a downside; his point isn't unreasonable. Lots of other "legislative and regulatory exercises" are harder to defend: the random stuff airport security comes up with seems to be borne completely of overreaction. Also things like special border zones hundreds of miles from a border, domestic spying to make Orwell blush, decades long wars, that kind of thing.
Idiots killing innocent people and overbearing regulators: different sides, same mass hysteria coin.
I also found this interesting:
Yup, no witch hunts at all. http://rt.com/usa/231839-musli...
It's tough for an untrained person to kill another in a confined space without a weapon. It makes noise and takes a while. The rest of the crew would notice.
The Python code
s = ''
for i in range(0,1000000):
s += str(i)
will be painfully slow too, for multiple reasons. Both Java and Python have ways to do this that aren't dumb.
One of them looks like a chemical engineering PhD student and the other is a tech, so maybe not. The third is an electrical engineering professor who's supposed to be doing software performance research though. He should definitely know better.
Although, when I was at the U of C the people doing software stuff in the EE department had some very interesting ways of doing things.
They're not doing something weird, the article is crazy.
Basically, they wrote some shitty code to do highly inefficient string concatenation and, wow, it turns out that it's less efficient than the caching code in the operating system. They're not comparing in-memory versus disk operations at all.
Uranium nukes are even worse. They require strip mines to get the uranium, and then a bunch of very special purpose equipment to enrich it. If you think it's hard to hide a nuclear reactor from a spy satellite, try hiding a strip mine!
"The Sum of All Fears" was released in 1991. Clancy's comment about using computer weapon design is even more applicable today. CnC machines are also now something geeks build in their basements out of a few hundred dollars worth of parts.
Generally it's not an accepted defence to say "you should have seen what I would have done if I hadn't nuked them!"
So is American culture. It doesn't mean all Americans are killers.
So you burn over 800 calories an hour running? Why is it you think I don't? I bet we're using the same calculators and you weigh a bit less than I do.
I think I struck a Slashdot nerve. You're the third person so far to reply with a weirdly aggressive and poorly researched message.
It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.
