I figured they'd tackle something more ambitious than that with their drone offerings - a drone that (barring instructions to do otherwise) follows you around whatever you're doing and keeps the camera on you, trying to get the most epic shots. E.g., you bungee jump off a bridge, it races you to the bottom, keeping whatever distance and filming style you told it to.

But maybe it's just another remote control drone.

If you compose music on a computer, you almost certainly still do it with MIDI. All the new highly advanced synths and samplers still use MIDI as their input for data. Everything from big dollar stuff like Native Instruments Komplete down to freeware. MIDI goes in, sound comes out.

In some ways it surprises me since you'd think they would get around to improving it (there are some things MIDI leaves to be desired) but on the other hand it does work well for nearly everything and there's something to be said about keeping things standard. You can literally take one of those old General MIDI songs and feed the data in to a modern sampler. I do just that all the time to remake old game soundtracks because I enjoy it.

So you mean get rid of wide-character encodings and only use UTF-8 where unicode characters are needed? I agree. :)

But that's the point. If it slams into an immobile object of course. But we're not talking about anything slamming into an immobile object. From the perspective of a molecule in the gas stream, it's going about the same speed as its neighbors. It's quite cool.

As for the boundary region, even at the "pinched" funnel outlet one could be talking dozens of kilometers here. A dozen kilometers between going from zero velocity and 25 kilometers per second is roughly the same as a dozen meters between going from zero velocity and 25 meters per second. Aka, a virtually insignificant gradient.

UTF-8 is an encoding of unicode, so I'm totally not getting your "Actually I think "Unicode strings" should be avoided completely."

I like that idea. You're right, it should be pretty efficient to implement, regardless of the string's backend encoding. And the value represented by the iterator will, by nature of being implemented as a pointer to a certain part in the string, be able to point to a glyph of arbitrary length (unlike a getter function with a fixed-length return type). Being an iterator it'll fit into all standard c++ libraries that take iterators.

It would be nice to have it be a random-access iterator so that you can jump to an arbitrary offset. There's a lot of optimizations they could do internally to help facilitate that. But obviously you still want to let programmers choose - by some means or another - whether they want such unicode optimizations (or unicode iteration, or so forth). Because while the overhead they'd impose wouldn't be huge, there still would be overhead.

We have to have something, though. Not everybody writes in English.

Except wait - we've got a phase change from gas to plasma in there, which almost certainly breaks their calculations badly.

Again, no, you don't. All of the particles are moving in the same direction. They're not hot. They're not slamming into each other and kicking electrons off.

Do you think if you had a spacecraft moving at 25.4 kilometers per second it would be plasma too?

... and I'd like to add ...

Wake up SHEEPLE!!! Italian dressing ISN'T REAL! .... stupid rubes.

Yup ... or "French Dressing" for that matter. It's a vinaigrette.

You should apply some kinetic energy to a mixture of oil and water sometime, and see how it looks.

Better still use a mixture of vinegar and oil, (with a little added pepper, salt and dried herb), and then apply some kinetic energy. That way you can have your demonstration and eat it too.

There was of course a lot of cgi in the movie but ...

the cgi was there to tell a story- not to render action scenes.

An action movie with rendered action doesn't connect emotionally.

When those guys swinging around on poles showed up- i had a gut reaction.

Making an action film and then using cgi for the action scenes usually lacks just enough realism that I don't have an emotional reaction to the action. That emotion is why I'm willing to put down good money to see a movie.

MM:FR was decent. As everyone else says- so little acting and so few words- but combined with incredible action scenes and a lot of genuine stunts. I probably won't ever see it again but I don't feel like I wasted my money.

First off, you're misusing temperature. You don't call it heat if all of the particles are moving in the same direction and unionized, you just call it "wind". It only becomes heat if that windstream suddenly slams into a non-moving solid surface and becomes instantly thermalized (but of course even then that would be a very short-lived event as it would correspond with a pressure rise and the deflection of the stream behind the high-pressure zone). Additionally, nor would that be the windspeed touching the surface as, obviously, wind forms boundary layers.

Secondly, hundreds of km/s from Venus escape to Mars intercept? That doesn't at all correspond to any delta-V chart I've ever seen.

And it's important for new programmers to learn them - more important than learning syntax.

  For C++ for example I'd warn about classes containing pointer member variables with implicitly-defined assignment operators / copy constructors. You have Foo a and Foo b, where Foobar has a member variable "int* bar". So the newbie does "a.bar = new int[100];" then later "b = a;" then later b goes out of scope, then they try to use a.bar and the program crashes. Seems to be a very common C++ newbie mistake. Eventually they learn to see pointers in class definitions as having big "DANGER" signs over them calling their attention, and/or rely on smart pointers.

Any others that people can think of that are common?

Oh, here's one more: iterator invalidation. A newbie who's not warned about this in advance will likely get bitten by it several times before the point gets driven into their head: "if you're using a class to manage memory for you, it's going to manage memory for you, including moving things around as needed."