That's probably because you've never done anything that's unsupported and unblessed by the chipset vendor.

Use case: rooted American Android phone. Gimped Broadcom radio driver that has FM reception disabled at carrier request, even though the hardware capability is present. Alternate .ko ripped from the European or International model's ROM dump and hacked to support American frequencies. Copy the .ko file to the phone, remount system as read/write, insmod.

Use case #2: rooted Sony Android phone. Camera crippled because Sony put the drivers for the advanced low-light and image-enhancement features in ARM TrustZone & throws away the encryption key if you unlock the bootloader via the Sony-blessed method. Acquire leaked files documenting what the code that was hidden away does, and build your own kernel module for the camera that implements everything in normal kernelspace (instead of TrustZone). Post to XDA, then go to bed happy, knowing that you're doing your part to fight The Man and bring Power to the People. ;-)

Define what you mean by "C++".

C++ firmware for an Atmel AVR microcontroller?

C++ native Android loadable kernel module?

C++ MFC Windows app?

C++ hardware driver for Windows?

C++ Linux app built for GTK+?

The borderline-useless artificial construct college textbooks pretend is C++ for the sake of having something consistent and coherent to teach students for a few years at a time?

My point is that knowing "C++" (as an abstract, academic construct) barely equips you to do anything commercially useful with it. Probably 60% of what you need to know to do anything useful in C++ is platform-dependent, and another 20-30% is IDE-dependent (at least, in the Windows & Android realms, where trying to do anything independently of Visual Studio or Android Studio is an exercise in masochistic frustration (because both platforms are so tightly-coupled to their respective IDEs).

Android Studio beats Eclipse for Android development like an unloved child in a trailer park.

Seriously. Night-and-day improvement. No more times when you have to cut something into the clipboard, save the empty file, and paste it back to make Eclipse realize that it's imagining all the errors it thinks were in it. No more "type a semicolon, then have the cursor inexplicably move back so that the carriage return a moment later pushes the semicolon to the next line and breaks the code." No more situations where the IDE forgets what R.java is, where it came from, or how to regenerate it.

Just make sure you use the official Google version of Android Studio, and NOT IntelliJ. As I mentioned in an earlier post, IntelliJ 14 with the Jetbrains Android plugin is neither directly-equivalent nor a consequence-free superset of Android Studio.

One warning -- Android Studio != IntelliJ Pro

Both are forks of a common ancestor, but the core IDE code bases diverge enough that Jetbrains basically has to backport Google's changes to IntelliJ every time there's a new release.

Maybe my opinion was skewed by horrible bugs in IntelliJ Pro 14.0.x that no longer exist in 14.1.x, but my advice is to just forget that IntelliJ Pro exists (even if you own a copy) and use Google's official Android Studio instead.

I never managed to successfully import an Eclipse Android project into IntelliJ. With Android Studio, it effortlessly worked on the first try.

Ditto, for creating a new app that used the Google Maps API. I fucked around with IntelliJ for WEEKS trying to get it to work, and had little besides inexplicable Gradle build errors to show for it. Android Studio automatically downloaded the SDK files it needed, and even made it blatantly obvious where I had to paste the API key.

For Android development, at least, Android Studio just feels a lot more refined, polished, and streamlined than IntelliJ.

> I think more of the problem is so much stuff gets sent by truck when rail would be cheaper and faster.

Er.... I assume you've seen THESE, which seem to address your concerns quite thoroughly:

http://www.railpictures.net/im...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

> Big oil and their lackeys the car manufacturers all would love
> to see rail transportation disappear completely.

Assuming "Big oil" or "the car manufacturers" even noticed the impact passenger rail has on their bottom lines (read: statistically, none at all), it's still a pretty big reach to argue that the amount is even big enough to justify paying the salary of a single lobbyist or two.

Remember, outside the northeast, American trains are almost universally DIESEL. And Bombardier's non-electric Acela-type trainset (designed for Florida's HSR about 10 years ago) burned JET FUEL & had per-mile fuel costs that would have made an airline blush (google: "JetTrain" -- it was basically a TGV/Acela power car carrying a jet turbine engine to generate its own power supply. At full speed, the economics weren't too awful... but by virtue of how turbine engines work, it burned almost as much fuel pulling the train at 70mph as it would have taken to pull the train at 180mph).

Cities didn't rip up their trolley tracks 50 years ago because evil industrialists were scheming to force everyone to buy a car... they did it because ripping up the trolley tracks was politically POPULAR with middle-class voters. They did it because it gave them room to widen roads to 6 lanes & build left turn lanes.

Don't forget, CAHSR will also INDUCE a lot of new travel that wouldn't have otherwise occurred, and will probably lead to a huge real estate boom in the central valley driven by exurbanites who work in Los Angeles and San Francisco & treat it like their version of the Long Island Railroad. Its value doesn't lie merely in the number of people it will take off the existing roads... its value ALSO includes travel that will exist mainly BECAUSE it exists.

American rail is made more expensive by urban sprawl, but not quite in the way most people think. If you compare somewhere like South Florida to Germany or Italy and look at how many people are likely to be within 5 miles of a given station, we really DON'T look all that different. Well, except Miami has a lot more skyscrapers sprawled across the entire metro area (even Broward has gotten into the act... witness "Tao" -- two 30-story towers built next to Sawgrass Mills mall whose balconies literally overlook the Everglades).

Anyway, the BIG difference between Florida or California and Europe is that in Europe, once you get out of the city... it tends to become rural & stay that way for a while. In contrast, if you were to build brand new tracks from Miami to West Palm Beach within 5 miles of I-95, you'd LITERALLY be plowing through a hundred miles of solid low & medium-density suburbia almost every inch of the way. In contrast, a comparable route in Europe would pass through at most a half-dozen cities, and run mostly through areas that were farmland or forest.

This used to *really* piss me off when I had a pre-Obamacare individual policy (because I was a contractor) that excluded coverage for anything that I'd ever received treatment for in the past. Specifically, the fact that if they DID exclude something from coverage, they didn't even have the decency to at least soften the blow by letting you pay the steeply-discounted rate THEY would have paid the doctor if it were a covered procedure. It felt like getting doubly-screwed... not only did they refuse to pay, but the amount I had to pay was several times the amount they would have paid. It just seemed like the ultimate "fuck you" gesture from them.

Actually, a restored copy (or even a digitized copy) would be a derived work. Derived works can be copyrighted independently of the foundation work, as long as some degree of artistic creativity was involved. If I digitally-restored an old film that was in the public domain, digitally-watermarked it, and you distributed unauthorized copies of it, I could most certainly sue you for infringement. I couldn't stop you from independently obtaining a copy of the original work and doing YOUR OWN restoration on it (and getting your own copyright), but I CAN stop you from using MY restored copy as your source.

Here are some other examples:

The original German text of Grimm's fairy tales: public domain

A translation of them (with a few artistic liberties) published long ago: public domain.

A new translation of them: the lines you changed are a derivative work & copyrighted. The lines that were unchanged from the original translation are public domain. The limits of how far someone could go republishing your translation with your own changes slightly paraphrased: anyone's guess, but likely to be messy.

You print an anthology of public domain works. I OCR them, and typeset & sell my own anthology. You MIGHT have a valid (if weak) copyright claim if my book had a 1:1 correspondence with yours (every story in one was in the other, in the same order, but without any interpretations/footnotes/etc added by you), but the more my book diverges from yours in form and content, the weaker your claim would be.

You print an anthology of public domain works. I scan each page, and use the images to publish my own anthology. You can absolutely sue me, because I violated the copyright on your "performance" of the original public-domain works.

I record myself playing a Beethoven fugue. You copy and sell verbatim copies: I can sue. The content itself is public domain, but my specific recorded performance of it is not. The process of recording, mixing, and editing added copyrightable value. On the other hand, if I performed it in a public place & you made YOUR OWN recording, I'd probably have no valid claim against you. And I absolutely couldn't stop you from performing the public-domain work YOURSELF, recording it, and releasing it on your own.

Serious question... I have a desktop w/HD5450 and three monitors on a desktop PC running RHEL 6.5. How do you build & install this driver without completely breaking RHEL's package management for everything else in the process, breaking the kernel configuration, or anything else that might render the computer nonworking?

I *tried* installing ATI's binary Catalyst driver a few months ago. Unfortunately, I think it made some naive assumptions about the underlying filesystem that aren't quite right when you have a spinning HD and a SSD, and both use LUKS for whole-drive encryption. I desperately want to upgrade the video driver, because the performance totally sucks (even for things like dragging a browser window to another monitor), but I don't want to end up burning another day undoing a failed upgrade adventure.

TL/DR: Want to build & install ATI's new driver. Running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5. Not allowed to upgrade to 7, and a prior attempt to directly install ATI's Catalyst binary driver rendered the system unbootable [most likely, because of issues with LUKS whole-disc partition encryption]. Yes, I'm root.

Hopefully, they'll be manufacturing iBots, too.

For those who don't know, the technology behind Segway was originally developed for use by the ultimate robotic wheelchair. The last iteration before manufacturing was shut down (iBot 4000) could climb stairs, effortlessly navigate curbs, raise the user to eye-level by going up on 2 wheels a-la-Segway, drop down to 4 wheels for extra stability/traction (like at the beach, in grass, etc). I believe it even had a feature that allowed it to automatically climb onto its rack on the back of the user's car after he moved himself into the front seat & return to the car door after parking at the destination.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

Actually, if you were a tetrachromatic woman, you'd have likely grown up thinking YOU had a weird color vision defect of some kind that caused you to "confuse" hues of orange with yellow and red. In reality, there would be a whole bunch of distinct hues that everyone else insisted were "orange", "yellow", or even red or green, but to you would be like trying to approximate green by mixing cyan & pink-orange light.

Let that sink in for a moment. In a world where literally everything -- including non-incandescent light bulbs -- assumes that red, green, and blue are holy, sacred, and the only hues that ultimately matter, a woman for whom yellow-orange is a pure primary color is going to be in a world of hurt where just about everything looks like muddy brown under artificial lighting or video/print.

Could gene therapy extend red a bit? Probably. But like a tetrachromatic woman, unless industry started making cameras & video displays that reproduced that "near-infrared" hue as a primary color, you'd be permanently destroying any sense of color aesthetics you've ever had and guaranteeing that nearly everything would look worse under most real-world non-daylight lighting conditions.

UV? Not happening without artificial corneas. Normal human corneas yellow with age & filter out UV light.

Not quite. It's not that one of them is "switched off", it's more like the distribution of the two variants isn't necessarily gaussian... she could have large clumps predominantly of one or the other. Likewise, the two most common pairs of red & green peaks are within 2nm of each other, so even well-distributed combinations of both would be unlikely to make much of a difference.

The one specific combo that seems to be discernible is a woman with two red variants... one that would cause her to be deuteranomalous if she were male & had only one (or if she lost the dice roll and ended up with two copies of it), but acts kind of like a hypothetical "orange" cone when she has a second red variant at the lower end.

From what I've read, even in THOSE women, it's less a matter of "seeing colors others can't see" than "color reproduced in print, photos, and on video displays never *quite* looks "right", and no adjustment can fix it". In fact, most women who have been identified as tetrachromats actually grew up believing they had mild color-blindness (because they'd get into arguments with people about whether something was red or orange & disagree, ultimately concluding that THEIR color vision was the deficient one)..

In theory, and under very specific conditions... yes. Under VERY dim light, rods can act kind of like hypothetical "blue-green" cones. If you found the right pigments (no combination of common "process-color" red/cyan/magenta/black pigments will work for this), you could theoretically mix two paint shades that looked absolutely identical to most people in bright light, but were distinctly different when viewed in dim light using only peripheral vision.

There are some men (I don't think women have ever been identified) who appear to be "protanomalous, without red dimming". It turns out, they're REALLY deuteranopes with only blue & red cones, but for some reason ALSO have rod cells that don't shut down in brighter light & act kind of like slightly-odd green cones.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

This is also why some argue that medical marijuana can treat color blindness. Some cannabinoids are believed to induce a state of higher tolerance for brighter light in rods... effectively inducing a state similar to the deuteranopes-who-appear-protanomalous.