Also, no offense to Harvard, but Harvard is NOT generally known for its engineering programs. Just in the past couple of years, Harvard has started to try to make a shift there, but generally Harvard was a place to go for liberal arts, econ, and hard sciences. There's a much better engineering school "down the road" in Cambridge that's much better known for engineering. (And that school -- MIT -- is known to make fun of Harvard all of the time for its lack of engineering skills.)

I'm not saying these Harvard kids aren't smart -- I'm sure they are. But you're looking at a heat transfer kind of class intended for engineering students who actually wouldn't take a better heat transfer class... at a school that traditionally has downplayed engineering. (Harvard historically disliked "practical" training in college -- that was professional schools, not an undergrad liberal arts degree.)

I'm writing firmware today that stores the date as a 16 bit unsigned integer giving the number of days since 1/1/2000. When printed it is converted to an 8 bit unsigned year and formatted with %02u (2 digits). I'm well aware that this will fail on 1/1/2100, but... I'll almost certainly be dead and no-one will be running this code in 85 years time, surely...

I'm starting to feel bad about it now.

I knew a guy who did support for a multi million pound company. They had many problems, mostly due to the fact that he was too scared to reboot their servers because he did all the support remotely and it would be a 100 mile trip up to their office if the machine didn't come back up. They insisted that he do maintenance in the evenings or at weekends to avoid disrupting their work.

So their terminal server was still running IE 7, because he was too afraid to update to IE 9 as it required a reboot. Someone actually got fired because they infected the server with a drive-by. Their mail server had a dodgy network card, but it took nearly a year to diagnose because he was terrified of updating the driver in case it didn't come back up, so that was just intermittently not responding or dropping incoming connections for over a year. The driver update fixed it in the end.

Wow. Just wow. Brisket is one of the most flavorful and delicious cuts of meat. It's cheap because it requires a lot of prep, not because it's not "good." That's pretty typical for meat -- the stuff you can just throw on a grill and cook in 5 minutes: that's expensive. The stuff that's also ridiculously flavorful and beefy but which takes at least 12 hours of careful cooking (usually because it's tough and has lots of connective tissue, not because it doesn't have great flavor)... well, that's cheap, because rich people are lazy, I guess.

I love a high-quality ribeye. But if you give me a good-quality smoker and sufficient time, I'd choose brisket over any steak any day. If you haven't had slow-smoked brisket that made you cry because it was so awesome, you have no business commenting on this article.

There certainly needs to be a lot more on-street charging in residential areas. Ideally the system would allow anyone to use any charger and have the cost billed to their home electricity bill. There would be posts with simple 230v/13A charging at regular intervals.

The eGolf is actually rather slow to charge by EV standards, because it uses a combined fast charger that isn't actually all that fast. A Leaf will charge to 80% in half an hour, and when doing long distances you typically end up stopping for about 20 minutes (since you never run right down to zero) every hour and half or so. It's actually fine if, like me, you prefer to have a little break at that kind of interval for water and bathroom facilities.

Half hour for 80% seems to be the sweet spot, and is what Tesla have gone for as well. Beyond 80% the speed of charging rapidly drops off due to the way the batteries work, so EV route planners take that into account and make sure your charging is in the optimum 20-80% range.

The real issue is what happens if the rapid charger isn't work for some reason. It's getting more and more rare, but until there is more infrastructure it won't go away as a concern. Something needs to be done about plug-in hybrids and crap EVs that take too long to charge as well (I'm looking at you Tesla) because hogging a rapid charger for more than 30 minutes is bad form. Other people need them, and if you can carry on without using one (PHEV) or your car takes forever to charge (Teslas are slow with adapters for anything other than dedicated Tesla chargers) you need to be considerate.

One of my first engineering jobs out of uni involved modifying a UPS. This UPS had a massive battery bank that was quite dangerous to load test and didn't have an automatic load testing function. I came up with a small design involving a contractor and some minor wiring changes and we were part way through implementing it on every UPS at this site.

This UPS was part of a redundant pair that fed an emergency shutdown system at an oil refinery. In between the UPSs and the ESD system were about 120 circuit breakers, two for each circuit, and one of them was off. We modified the first UPS without issue then started the process for the second one. After calling the control room to let them know they will receive an alarm I switched off the UPS and was suddenly meet with a steam of profanities over the radio.

We lost power to 80 field instruments which triggered a fail safe action on the shutdown system tripping 4 units at the refinery, one of them was the FCCU which is core to a lot of refinery processes. To add insult to injury the unit was unable to be hot restarted because of a stuck valve and then thermally contracted breaking of large chunks of coke from the overhead line which blocked the internal cyclones. The FCCU was down for repair for roughly 10 days, I had made a name for my self and was asked to display the cock-up award (a giant dildo mounted on a plaque) on my desk.

Total cost of the outage was about $8million. Fortunately only partially my fault.

I don't have anything nearly that bad - my worst only cost me data. A friend taught me (while I was still learning Linux) a trick, how you could play music with dd by outputting the sound to /dev/dsp. But as I said, I was still learning Linux and hadn't quite gotten all of the device names into my head, and I mixed /dev/dsp up with /dev/sda...

Out of interest, how much time have you wasted posting long replies that I don't read? Notice how I respond to the first line and ignore the rest.

Too easy.

As long as my smartphone lasts through a long, busy day, I'm fine with the battery. I used to have an Android phone, and carry two extra charged batteries. However since the iPhone 6 Plus, I'm coming home with 70% charge left.

You needed patents to figure that thing out? It was obvious how it worked from the games. When you press the trigger the screen goes black, except for white boxes over the targets. It's a simple light sensitive diode and a lens.

I see, so this is the latest revision huh? It's not about Quinn, all that harassment and rage was, er, some other guys or something... The people on the /gg and /GamerGate forums, the ones in the IRC channel talking about harassing her, that wasn't GanerGate. Okay.

And it wasn't there original claim that Depression Quest was promoted, that turned out to be a lie so now it's her game jam. Have a link for that? Didn't think so, like the Depression Quest review it doesn't exist.

There is one thing where the UK would have had a role even if he hadn't fled bail, in that the UK would have been the EAW "sending state". Under an EAW surrender, the sending state has certain rights and responsibilities - for example, if a request comes for extradition to a third party, it has to not only go through the receiving state's judiciary system, but also the sending state's judiciary system; the receiving state can't just hand off someone that they received under an EAW at will. Which is one of the things that makes the whole thing even more ridiculous - Assange had so much faith in Sweden's independence against the UK (such as their ban on extradition for intelligence crimes and 2006 Swedish special forces raids to shut down the US's rendition flights secretly moving through their territory) that he called it his "shield" and was applying for a residence permit there. But suddenly, practically overnight, Sweden transformed into Evil US Lackeys(TM) when he was accused of rape. So then he went to the UK where he talked about his great respect for their independence and impartiality and promised to abide by whatever rulings their judicial system made. Until he ran out of appeals, wherein the UK also turned into Evil US Lackeys(TM). Funny how he felt just fine walking around freely in both of these countries all this time, having only one of the two countries as barriers against US extradition, but adamantly fought the situation that would make them both be barriers to extradition.

Which is, of course, false. AA has accused Assange of lesser sexual crimes, and SW has accused him of rape. There are no counts of rape against Assange concerning AA on the EAW, only three lesser counts (2x molestation and 1x unlawful sexual coersion). There is one count of rape on the EAW (count #4) concerning SW, in line with what the women have accused him of and also in line with what the Svea Court of Appeals has found probable cause for. Both women sought and retained legal representatives who have pushed the case forward for them (initially, both of them retained Claes Borgström, who was the one whose appeal got the closed portion of the investigation re-opened. More recently AA fired Claes because she thought he wasn't doing a good enough of a job with the case and was more focused on self aggrandizement; her new legal representative since started a new push to get Assange handed over to Sweden).

There's a lot more detail on these topics and more here.

The Assange-echo-chamber meme "Neither of the women involved have ever accused Assange of rape" is based on a simple distortion of a key element. SW (the one who the rape charge is concerned) didn't want to have to file charges - she only wanted to force Assange to take a STD test. She didn't want the thing to turn into a giant media circus that basically ruined her life and forced her into hiding from angry Assange fans. But there's a difference between not wanting to file charges and not accusing Assange of rape. She did accuse Assange of rape - first in conversations with her friends while coming to grips with what happened, and then went to the police station, where they told the officer on duty that they wanted advice on how to report a rape (see the statement by Linda Wassgren, the on-duty officer on the 20th). They were then interviewed separately where she described being raped, and after the interview she took a rape kit and sought a legal advocate (getting, ultimately, Claes). Since the leak of the Memoria file (a scummy act on Assange's side, I should add, as it's full of identifying personal details about his accusers and their families that have been used to harrass them - and we know it came from Assange's side because the cover page has a note to Assange's attorney telling him that it's confidential and must not be released), there have been a number of other followup interviews and investigations, and at no point have any objections from AA or SW been recorded. There is absolutely nothing in the record supporting a claim "Neither of the women involved have ever accused Assange of rape". SW has pretty much had to disappear after the event; AA went into hiding for a while but has since resumed taking part in some of the old forums that she used to; last fall she mentioned the case for the first time since the one brief statement she had given to the press after going to the police, mentioning offhand in an unrelated thread that a couple years ago she was the victim of a sex crime and that the perpetrator still hasn't been brought to justice, but rather she's still attacked by his fans for daring to report it. She didn't mention Assange by name, but it's obvious who she was referring to.

Most people who are raped don't want to file charges. They don't want the viscious attacks that come with it and want to shove the event in the past and not have to keep reliving it. A hundred times over when the accused is someone famous who has a lot of loyal fans. But claiming "not wanting to file charges" means "wasn't raped" is a massive distortion.

You are talking about charges and the prosecution that the state brings. Merely being arrested often does not lead to a charge or prosecution. Arrest is not the state making a legal judgement and acting, it's the police making a judgement which is then supposed to be checked and overseen by the state.