Indeed; the compiler's even allowed to assume signed integer overflow doesn't happen, which is where you get into trouble.

Translation: In their attempt to make the spec as portable as possible, they gave compiler writers too much freedom. Honestly, the first time I heard about this problem... maybe a decade ago... my immediate reaction was, "Why don't they just change the spec to say that those optimizations aren't allowed?"

I still maintain that tightening the C spec is the correct fix, and that all the monkeying around with checking to see if the computation would overflow by subtracting one operand from or dividing one operand into INT_MAX and comparing the result against the other operand is just silly. After all, a sufficiently smart compiler, given the assumption that integer overflows are impossible, should optimize out those pre-tests anyway, by virtue of the fact that you're about to add them, and integer overflows are impossible. And it wastes a tremendous number of CPU cycles doing throwaway computation for no reason other than working around the C spec being utterly and completely brain damaged.

They're not becoming resistant to our germ killing soaps and lotions...

Actually, they are. Resistance to triclosan (one of the more popular germ killing agents used in soaps and lotions) is on the rise. The triclosan-resistant MRSA strains are particularly disconcerting, as they make disinfection in hospitals a lot harder. And given that the epidermal varieties of staph are showing increaed triclosan resistance while S. aureus (which is mostly found inside the body) isn't, there's little question at this point that the widespread use of triclosan in soaps has resulted in evolutionary selection for triclosan resistance in methicillin-resistant staph.

Sorry, but that's etymologically incorrect. Mayday (with no space) is derived from French "m'aidez", meaning "Help me". It is an internationally recognized distress call that dates back almost a hundred years. The fact that socialists latched onto the preexisting "May Day" holiday (which dates back thousands of years) and turned it into the Eurasian equivalent of Labor Day results in an unfortunate name collision.

Because there's nothing to stop an incumbent from getting publicity during an electoral cycle just by doing his job and making the news.

Actually, there is, and it is enshrined in communications law, but thirty years of weak, ineffectual FCC commissioners has mostly gutted it, between the removal of the fairness doctrine in 1987 and the consistent failure to enforce the equal time rule....

Meg Whitman spent more on her campaign than any other non-presidential candidate. She lost. Money certainly helps, but plenty of elections are won by the less well funded candidate.

Ironically, she was too well known to win in California. To be precise, most Californians had actually used eBay by the time she ran, and nobody wanted someone who could create that kind of train wreck to be in charge of the entire state. :-)

Are there autism-related charities capable of putting forth the $150 million [fastcompany.com] typically required to pay for FDA's approval?

Why would they need approval? I think Suramin is already approved and on the market as an antimicrobial/antiviral medication for treating certain diseases, so ostensibly doctors can just prescribe it off-label. AFAIK, the only reason to get FDA approval would be so that the manufacturer would be allowed to actually market it as a treatment for autism.

That's curious. Almost all of the drive failures I've seen can be attributed to head damage from repeated parking prior to spin-down, whereas all the drives that I've kept spinning continuously have kept working essentially forever. And drives left spun down too long had a tendency to refuse to spin up.

I've had exactly one drive that had problems from spinning too much, and that was just an acoustic failure (I had the drive replaced because it was too darn noisy). With that said, that was an older, pre-fluid-bearing drive. I've never experienced even a partial bearing failure with newer drives.

It seems odd that their conclusions recommended precisely the opposite of what I've seen work in practice. I realize that the plural of anecdote is not data, and that my sample size is much smaller than Google's sample size, so it is possible that the failures I've seen are a fluke, but the differences are so striking that it leads me to suspect other differences. For example, Google might be using enterprise-class drives that lack a park ramp....

I think you missed the all-electric part.

What makes electric cars great is that they are incredibly simple. They aren't loaded down with ten thousand dollars worth of emissions control parts that fail every time someone sneezes. They don't have vacuum lines that get clogged with carbon deposits because some Ford engineer put a hole in a metal baffle, causing the EGR hose to suck oil straight up out of the valve cover and into the intake manifold. And so on.

Hybrids, by contrast, are unnecessarily complex systems that combine all of the reliability drawbacks of an internal combustion engine design with nearly all of the drawbacks of an all-electric design with the sole exception of the range limitation.

Thanks, but no thanks.

I'll be interested in a hybrid the minute the ICE becomes a replaceable, standardized, outboard component. If Tesla sold a $500 "Tesla Pod" that hangs an off-the-shelf AC/DC electrical generator from your back bumper for when you want extended range, that might be interesting. As long as the ICE is an integral part of the vehicle, it's a maintenance headache that I'd much rather do without. And if I'm going to have the maintenance headaches of a built-in ICE, I expect to also get the benefits of an ICE, like all that extra torque from a V6.

Too bad folks haven't done the whole mass shotgun extinction trick with the European starlings. You've never seen such a mess as when a flock of those things descends on your yard. There's something inherently wrong about looking out at your yard and seeing nothing but black where the grass should be, because they've completely blotted out the ground. And the next morning, your sidewalk is practically solid white with bird crap. Just disgusting. I don't think "invasive species" quite covers it. :-)

Question: Is pulling over for 30 seconds to reprogram your toy really that big a deal?

When you're driving along an interstate and are trying to figure out what exit has food, yes. Yes, it is. There's no valid reason not to allow a passenger to change the destination while the vehicle is in motion. It's an unnecessary safety misfeature that reduces usability while providing no benefit whatsoever. (The in-dash GPS is pretty much useless for the driver anyway, because it isn't readily visible, and there's no way that any driver could feasibly program it while driving, so if somebody is reprogramming it while the vehicle is in motion, it is almost guaranteed to be a passenger, not the driver.)

There are still plenty of effects in real pianos that are not emulated properly. Two examples: resonances in the other strings of the piano when you strike a string, and striking a key, leaving it half-pressed, and striking again. The piano pedals are also not easy to emulate, I understand, but I don't know the details.

No question about it. There are things I can do on a grand that I can't do on any synth that I've tried. One trick I like to do is bell tones, where you give it just enough sustain pedal to get a little bit of ring and then play semi-staccato. That falls pretty soundly under "extended techniques", of course. In principle, it shouldn't be hard to make a software synth that can emulate that behavior, just by using a volume pedal instead of an on-off switch for the sustain pedal, and writing the software to model the instrument's behavior sufficiently. AFAIK, nobody has done it, though.

For that matter, I have yet to hear one that emulates the extra richness you get from a piano when you push the sustain pedal, but I haven't used any recent piano VIs, so I'd imagine somebody has done it by now, given how trivial it should be to emulate.

Either way, digital simulations of pianos are good enough to be generally usable. That's more than can be said for any digital brass I've heard to date. For example, consider the Garritan family of trombone sounds. Despite the fact that pretty much any normal tenor trombone played by any professional (and most high school and college students, statistically) has an F rotor, none of their trombone sounds go down below an E except the bass trombone stop, which makes them all almost completely and utterly useless for real-world use, where non-bass trombone parts routinely drop into that range.

The bass trombone stop has the range, but unfortunately, it has a very slow attack (which is somewhat realistic for larger bore trombones, mind you). To sound correct, the player should compensate for the slow attack and should play slightly ahead of the beat like a real trombone player does. Unfortunately, it doesn't, and as a result, in fast music, it ends up playing a quarter beat behind the rest of the ensemble, and it sounds like utter crap.

And those are just the problems that are bad enough that even the most tone-deaf person would notice them if you didn't work around them. Compared to that, getting a "mostly good enough" piano sound is easy. :-)

True, and it also depends a lot on how thick the orchestration is. In the middle of a dense mix, I'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference between the real thing and a virtual instrument. In a solo passage over thin orchestration, the difference is usually glaringly obvious, at least to people who have spent any significant amount of time listening to the real thing.

BTW, what does a cimbasso sound like? I'm guessing it's a lot like a bass trombone, just judging by the shape of the tubing. No?

Even during a deep traversal, AFAIK, it is just using modification information in the filesystem, not reading the entire file. Otherwise, a deep traversal would take as long as a full backup (days) instead of a tiny fraction of that time.

Now if the length of the file changes because of filesystem corruption, that's another matter.

I suppose it depends on the ensemble as to who says no. Either way, the problem is that someone says no. :-)