--unless the lightning strikes you.

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

Roland posted a lot of garbage that no one was interested in, with links to entries on his own blog that he used to generate ad traffic. Then he died, and the groupthink consensus was that it wasn't worth hating the dead.

Please stop approving Bennet "stories." He's a Roland Junior that everyone loves to hate. You're tech savvy, aren't you? Surely you know this submission is some pretty rank tripe.

TYVM HAHNY

Other posters have pointed out a 128GB SSD that is compatible with Acer's C720 Chromebook, for a total price under $300.

Just fine, at least I do. Just different sets of optimizations to keep in mind, as well as different expectations. I don't think any reasonable person would approach the two problems the same way, but it all boils down to basic computer science.

Light up pin 1 when the ADC says voltage is dropping which indicates that pressure is too low on the other side of the PPC. Compare that to indexing a few gigs of text into a search engine. Completely different goals, completely different expectations. I'm not master of the embedded domain, but I don't think it is a dark art.

Perhaps I'm looking at it the wrong way or perhaps my experience is unique or at least rare, but in my eyes it is all the same thing at different scales. Tell me my app is using too much memory then I'll first look at how I can reduce memory pressure, then I'll tell you what is and isn't possible to do and give you a list of sacrifices that would be needed to reduce memory pressure (time to refactor, concurrent operations, latency because of disk, etc etc etc. Not just talking about capabilities but the whole deal). Find the balance and go for it. On the embedded side the same sorts of compromises are made but the scale is just so much smaller. Finite number of IO pins, time to optimize your code to accommodate a new feature, meeting real-time, writing something in ASM to get around a GOD FREAKING AWFUL EMBEDDED COMPILER, etc etc etc.

I dunno, do I have my head on straight here? All seems fairly straightforward in the end. Specialists can do their bits faster than someone less familiar but with equal skill and understanding. Thats what earns the bucks, getting things done in a timely fassion.

((Or at heart I'm an embedded guy. Possible!))

If you think governments are benevolent authorities you might not have been paying attention to the 20th century, in which hundreds of millions of people were killed by national governments. What exactly do you imagine is scarier or more dangerous than a state?

I'm not a Libertarian. Maybe that assumption is why you're arguing against positions that I haven't advanced.

There isn't any reason that inspection can't be done without a government and that is what I suggested above. There's no need to wait for injuries to occur. A surety bond (or a similar arrangement with funds in escrow) doesn't require any lawyers or lawsuits. Relying on the government for arbitration is giving it yet another role to which it isn't suited.

Why do you think that it's a good idea to rely on regulatory agencies staffed by people from the very industries they're regulating? If you don't trust Tyson executives now, why do you suddenly trust them once they're federal employees? The best possible system doesn't require trusting anyone.

Regulations can be voluntary in the sense that they're opt-in and still totally enforceable. Here's the first example I could think of. Excuse me if it's a bit rough. In the case of food safety or quality control, corporations could voluntarily purchase surety bonds or a similar type of insurance payable to affected consumers and submit to independent inspections in a publicly auditable way. If it was common practice, there would be a strong incentive for companies to comply--consumers wouldn't buy products that weren't provably safe.

You seem to have read a lot of things into my comment that weren't there and missed what I did write.

First, I don't think that the absence of an independent, trusted governing entity means the absence of regulation. I tried to give examples of regulated systems organized on a peer-to-peer basis. You're conflating independent governing entities and regulation, which isn't surprising since they are usually closely related, but my point was that latter can exist without the former. In fact, current systems of government have shown themselves extremely susceptible to regulatory capture, so the whole thrust of your comment is a bit off, because your nightmare scenario is not far from how things are today.

I completely agree with you that corporations have too much power relative to the individual.

You might want to check again, because that's exactly the position you're advocating.

The government itself is outdated. In the Leviathan Hobbes assumes that a commonwealth must be run by a man or a group of men. In our age, decentralized software and protocols like TCP/IP, HTTP, TOR, bittorrent and bitcoin have demonstrated that self-interested parties can cooperate in the absence of a trusted mediator, according to rules that they agree upon in advance (with varying degrees of reliability). Ideally the future will see an increasing number of diverse services that can be provided by decentralized, voluntary interactions of individuals, and national governments will become gradually less relevant as their remaining roles shrink.

Are you seriously suggesting that the journals are taking any financial risks at all?

Are you kidding? The bank isn't the one paying interest! The grocery store doesn't make Frosted Flakes, either. Anyone who's paid on a loan knows exactly where interest comes from.

The bank doesn't create anything at all. It acts as a mediator between willing parties on both sides and then takes as large a cut as it can. If those parties instead cooperate, there's no need for a profit-seeking third party. That's the whole idea behind a credit union. Providing those same services in a wholly automated way through software running on a peer-to-peer network potentially removes the risk of mismanagement and reduces fees to the bare minimum needed to pay for the electricity used in processing (e.g. losses to mining).

Do the things in your vacuum chambers levitate? If not, there should be quite a bit of sound transmitted through the sides (including the bottom) of the chamber...

It must be nice to be so naive and/or deluded.