I thought the point of the charge was to make the "wooly" side-fibers of the strands wrap around the prey's limbs and/or the microscopic irregularities in the exoskeleton, tangling to it. "Tying" the fibers to the prey would have a similar binding effect to gluing them to it, without the need for glue, and lots of little fibers could make a very strong attachment.

(Stretching fibers made of long chains makes them stronger by aligning the chains along the direction of the stretch.)

No, it doesn't. S/MIME, PGP-mail, etc. Of course that only works if the party you're e-mailing can also use client-side e-mail encryption.

Google is working on enabling OpenPGP-encrypted e-mail for Gmail with a Chrome extension: https://github.com/google/end-...

Youtube just switched to HTML5 video by default, so perhaps we can uninstall Flash for good now!

But can it play "Badger Badger Badger"?

Why are they still using C to deal with network protocol? Is the performance so critical that it's worth all the troubles?

Also, because there's a lot of C code that has been in heavy use, and tested for correctness, for decades, suitable for reuse with substantial confidence that it's correct (though you check it anyhow...).

Let's see you find code like THAT for a language that hasn't been AROUND for decades. B-)

Meh. Everything is bigger than Hollywood.

Okay, that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but honestly, on the scale of major first-world institutions that people know and recognize, Hollywood is pretty small potatoes. Apple alone rakes in more than double the entire worldwide film industry's take. 2013 worldwide film industry revenues: $88B, and Hollywood is only about 2/3 of that. 2014 Apple revenues: $183B. IBM also is also bigger than Hollywood. Google is about as big as Hollywood. Ford is bigger than Hollywood. GM is bigger than Hollywood. Exxon Mobil is more than six times as large as Hollywoood.

The film industry is almost noise in the US national economy. It's chump change.

Where Hollywood is a heavyweight, though, is in politics. It has massively disproportionate power in comparison to its segment of the economy. Why? Simple: political power is about influence, not money, and Hollywood has direct access to the voters' brains. Large quantities of money can also buy access to said brains, but there is no amount of money that could buy as much political advertising as Hollywood can pack into its entertainment output. And any individual actor of note can stand up and say something and get press coverage that would cost tens of millions if purchased, free.

Luckily, Hollywood isn't politically homogeneous, so to a large degree the politics of our entertainment media reflect the same varied sets of opinions found in the nation as a whole. Not perfectly, but largely. There are some areas in which the interests of Hollywood are highly homogeneous, however, such as around copyright law, and there they wield incredible clout.

Anyway, my core point here isn't about that, it's just that Hollywood's visibility and influence makes it seem much bigger than its actual economic status.

Why are they still using C to deal with network protocol?

For starters, because it's transparent. The "K&R compliant assembly laguage", as one of my former colleagues once characterized it, translates to object in a clearly understandable way (especially if you turn optimization down or off). Though it gives you more opportunities to create bugs, it makes it hard for the bugs to hide from inspection.

The "higher-level" the language, the more it takes over and inserts its own stuff between you and the metal, and the more opportunity for that to inject an invisible vulnerability - which you might have trouble removing even if you DO discover it.

Meanwhile, many of the things "higher-level" languages protect you from can also be detected and flagged by both modern C compilers and code examination tools - starting with the venerable "lint".

"...realize that trying to maintain this luxury image will kill them."

They just recorded the largest public corprorate profit... in history.

They had to push that back. This is the year of Linux on the Flying Car. We'll get to Linux on the Desktop right after that.

Oh, I certainly don't: there's a permanent speed trap there.

It's conceivable that there's a reason for it. The road as a whole should be a major arterial, but it's got an awful lot of stop lights. (This is just outside of Washington, DC, which has practically no proper arterials.) At rush hour, allowing people to go faster on this section than the overall speed of the road would be worse for traffic.

What's really needed is to substantially restrict access to that road and make it a highway, though I'm sure that the businesses and residences along that road would hate it. The problem is systemic: there are no arteries and nobody wants to turn their stretch of road into one. There are zero interstates, so the roads are under a variety of local jurisdictions. I'm sure plenty of people complained to the county and state about that segment of road, but it's just a disaster for the whole region to deal with. And so it isn't.

Er, anyway, that's kinda beside the point, which is really that what's needed is for the traffic engineers to design for steady flow and for people to follow it, even if they'd be more comfortable at some other speed, especially when lanes are limited. But it's easier said than done in a metropolitan area.

I can guarantee you that if the Govt. left it up to drivers to get the proper training and instruction on how to operate vehicles safely, people wouldn't do it.

Interesting claim - since it doen't work that way for guns.

Where the government requires training, most gun purchasers take the minimum required, then stop. Where it doesn't, most people start with the course recommended by the gun stores (which is far more comprehensive - and more focussed, with less time spent on political indoctrination B-) ) and also do substantially more range time, until they feel adequately competent. (Then there are those that get interested in shooting as a hobby...)

A similar effect is the reason police normally don't shoot at private ranges simultaneously with civilians. Most police are embarrassingly HORRIBLE shots and pistol-handlers - because they do only the minimum training and practice required by the department (which has lots of other stuff for them to do while they're being paid for their time), and almost never have to actually fire their gun during their work.

"Of course, this comparison is also patently unfair -- Windows 7 was written in the 2000s, X11 was written in the 1980s. Expecting them to be comparable in terms of security is pretty ridiculous."

Which could be a good argument for replacing X. It is rather old technology, perhaps it is time to update it to something newer, rather than clinging to it and claiming it is all one needs.

Ford F150 Lariat.

For the 5 1/2 ton towing capacity (which also translates to "won't blow the engine head gasket towing a loaded trailer up CA 88 like the van did" - turns out they designed that vehicle's engine with the cylinders too close together so this one pair had a very thin piece of gasket between them,..).

(No time to get the GVR before I have to get to work...)

I'm going on what the dealer told me. If I was led astray the cost of the vehicle has been a couple grand higher than it otherwise would have been.

You couldn't have possibly meant sarcasm </sarcasm>

(trollface) :-D

Yeah, you probably have it right.

My description of a Software Architect was mostly tongue-in-cheek... at most of the places I've worked they were the ones that determined "high-level" things, like what expensive commercial middleware everyone was going to have to integrate with and spend all of their time coding around its deficiencies. Architects rarely touched actual code. Maybe they had a PHd or something but more often not, but they did get to make decisions that involved the movement of large amounts of capital budget (which of course is completely separate from the labor budgets required to cope with them).

My description of a Software Engineer might have been closer to what's nebulously referred to as a Systems Engineer (which is more of a glorified term for SysAdmin these days). Yours might be closer to what companies refer to as a Software Development Engineer, which is the job code most big software companies hire under nowadays.

But yeah, there's really no difference between any of these categories other than HR labels. And pay grades. And social structure. And job satisfaction garnered from different skillsets and abilities.