The bottom line direct from NASA is that there's a 12% chance every decade (or 72% chance every century if you do the math) of a direct hit from the sun. Such an event could send us back to the middle ages, or at least cause widespread destruction and panic (no water, electricity, transport, etc. for days, weeks, possibly months, and all or most computer circuitry, including SSDs (though not optical media) would be frazzled).

I'm going to temper that apocalyptic-looking premise with a quote from that NASA article which may provide a little... comfort.

So, that's 'only' up to 3x as bad as an event that happened in 1989, and we seemed to have got through that okay (their power was cut for 11 hours apparently).

Maybe even NASA is over-reacting a bit on this then..... But like CO2 emissions, it's best not to take the chance. It is possible to protect the grid to a large extent if the world cared enough the risk. I think we're talking in the range of $billions of investment to save $trillions of damage when the inevitable happens (definitely a question of when, rather than if).

I believe in souls/spirits/whatever, but some kind of god? Neah... probably not. At least not one who interacts with anyone, but probably not anyway.

So we have this weird universe where all these soul thingies are eternal. No god needed.

You're right. People aren't appreciative *enough* of him.

Let's see. Creates the best car ever, creates rockets for fun and as insurance to potentially save humanity by going to Mars, going to create rockets at least half the price as competitors, and potentially 100x cheaper, wants to save the Earth from CO2 and is beginning to do it, amazing engineer, helped create Paypal (when it was good), open-sourced patents, envisaged design for hyperloop, building the largest battery factory ever made by an order of magnitude or more, wanted to originally research supercaps (great area to study!), cares about quality rather than just money. Put every last penny he had at his own cost in order to save Tesla and SpaceX. Speaks frankly during interviews.

No one like him.

He's possibly the most creative, intelligent, thoughtful, forward-thinking person on the planet. For so many reasons. Your knowledge of him must be minimal.

That XKCD would need to be modified slightly for the success story of UTF8, despite the countless text formats that preceded it.

The computer OS is too important to be left to market forces and fickle managers.

There should be a worldwide effort to create a single free unified OS (with a metadata filesystem, and 100% scaleable GUI!) for everyone, which dumps the bloat and legacy code of old OSs (including Linux) and starts afresh. It won't happen now, or even soon, but sometime within the next 1000 years it is almost definite.

Such an OS won't drastically change over the years, but keep with a consistent theme (no flatland design!), only changing if a consortium of thousands of the brightest software engineers, mathematicians, scientists, and designers agree it's for the best. Everyone writes software for it, and there are no worries of cross-porting or compatibility issues. All software will be completely self-contained (no external libraries, or preference files scattered over the OS), and 32 bit would be a thing of the past. Searching for files and programs takes the OS less than 0.05 seconds in all cases.

I would dig that OS.

What you say is a fair point, but I also despise the opposite direction where everything is locked down. I'm impressed Windows allows you a program to change the colour of the screen for instance, or tinker with basic window moving/resize functionality.

Actually I dream, but the other way - making the power higher. Who knows what kind of devices we could have if 480v was common.

Why doesn't the US just keep to a single 240V for all power outlets, rather than complicate things unnecessarily?

Amazing to think that we're finally catching on to the 60fps standard that we had decades ago.

It's only a matter of time before 120fps+ (which can look a lot better than 60fps) itself becomes the norm. Having a black screen inserted between every 1/120th frame (to make a pseudo 240fps) would help blurriness etc. even more.

That's a problem with those keyboards then. If had my own way, I'd have a single press key for the curly braces, or perhaps move to square brackets instead.

A future programming language would simply assume UTF-8 from the start, and not worry about trying to support the other encodings. Such a language would have a lot less bloat attached to it.

Having not yet touched Haskell, I love the terseness of the Haskell example. To me it feels like a high level function, like as if it could be rewritten:

items = [1, 15, 27, 3, 54]
result = items.filter(<, 10)

Perhaps all Haskell functionality can be converted like this?

I've often thought about a programming language where you only need to write the smallest possible amount of code to achieve what you're trying to do. And have it clear too (so not Perl style).

No bloat, no header files, no semicolons at the end of lines, swap functionality of && with & and || with | (colour coding them too), power-of symbol (^), terse Haskell-style functionality, and even no forced declarations (the IDE can colour code variables according to whether they're int, double, string etc. automatically, and the scope is automatically defined as the outermost appearance of the variable). The compiler would do ALL the hard work to optimize the program.

The former is obviously much better. It's not just better to read but also to write without the mind veering off from solving the problem at hand.

Those who harp on about verbosity being a good thing don't realize how good things can be.