Why optical? You introduce two extra conversions which are possible causes of error and adds a small amount of latency. Copper S/PDIF works better, and the cable won't break if you bend it or step on it.

How can you say that is most likely?
HIV does not spread easily. The panic times when people wore gloves and masks around the HIV infected are long gone, thankfully. The HIV virus spreading to family members is quite rare.
Diseases staying dormant for a long time is, however, not unusual at all.
So again, on what basis do you draw the conclusion that a re-infection is most likely?

Curiously, 17 of their husbands died in battle after being drafted past the age of 90 . . .

hawk

>up and thought 2-digit years would be enough,

When economists actually looked at the *data* for the "Y2K problem," they found that it would have cost, in discounted real dollars, three times as much to prevent the problem as it would have to avoid . . .

doc hawk, economist

My Uncle looked at his draft number, and enlisted (more control over assignment).

He was right.

My grandmother forwarded his induction notice to him in Viet Nam.

He had the cook lay down, poured catchup over his head[1], and stood with his foot on the cook--and sent the picture back, from Viet Nam, to the draft board.

hawk

[1] Kind of silly to worry about color for a B&W picture . . .

I ran Minix for a year or more on my Atari ST - having a UNIX-like operating system on a machine I could have at home was a truly awesome thing. Tanenbaum's work is fascinating, useful and will be around for a good while...which is more or less the definition of "successful" in academic circles.

The debates with Linus were interesting - but I always felt that they were arguing at cross-purposes. Linus wanted a quick implementation of something indistinguishable from "real UNIX" - Tanenbaum wanted something beautiful and elegant. Both got what they wanted - there was (and continues to be) no reason why they can't both continue to exist and be useful.

Tanenbaum's statement that the computer would mostly be running one program at a time was clearly unreasonable for a PC - but think about phones or embedded controllers like BeagleBone and Raspberry Pi? Perhaps Minix is a better solution in those kinds of applications?

I haven't met many fellow Americans who are willing to pay for healthcare for anyone. Half of them are willing to subsidize private health insurance, which is still a right-wing approach seen from a world perspective.

It seems like another way to move money from the middle class to corporations, giving the lower income workers extra expenses they can ill afford, even subsidized. It doesn't help to have health insurance if you cannot afford the co-pay and OOP expenses.

The very idea of funding healthcare directly, not going through private insurance intermediates who milk the maximum amount of money from both sides, is one that seems alien to Americans, no matter what party they claim to support.

You could say the same about the difference between shopping malls and individual shop units. With housing, terraced homes are more energy efficient than detached homes since the common walls are usually at the same temperature compared to the outside.

Imagine you divided the space up into cubes, each the side of a shop. Each side of a cube can be outside air, insulated wall, uninsulated wall, open space. Suppose you have 1000 units. With individual stores, that's 5000 sides that need to be insulating. If you have one shopping mall, with shops side-by-side, there are only 500 sides that need insulating. Even with the extra floor space for plazas, staircases, that's still no more than a few hundred rooftops.

It's no different from an office block. Some modern designs actually have separate frameworks for the exterior walls and the floors, so you have a greenhouse architecture where each can be modified without affecting the other. It's just a dome but with flatter sides.

Ideally to power something like that, they'd really need to a giant massive solar power plant somewhere in the middle of a large desert, and maybe some energy storage based on pumped water.

That one really blew my mind. I don't see how it's any different from, "We're going to let you rot in prison until you take us to the body, even though we don't have the evidence to convict you without it," which is pretty much exactly what the Fifth Amendment was supposed to prevent.

Humans nearly died out entirely from hunger and thirst, it was visionaries that led them out of a dying region of Africa into Asia, by a route that appeared to defy reason to any non-visionary of the time.

Pre-humans nearly had their brains the size of a grapefruit and wired backwards. It was visionaries who developed fire, 2.5 million years ago, providing the much-needed nutrition that allowed us to avoid the same fate as every other lineage of hominid.

Visionaries allowed the Norse to split quartz in a way that permitted them to track the sun even in cloudy skies and well into twilight, giving them greater access to the seas, trade and food than any other society of that time.

Visionaries developed cities to handle the logistics of the brewing and baking industries, again counter to any "obvious" logic that farming and hunting were how you got food.

Visionaries are the reason you can post stuff on the Internet, and why persecuted minorities around the world can have a voice and education.

So don't tell a visionary that he is defying your common sense. His work may have implications for society that you cannot imagine simply because he has the imagination and you don't. That does not mean that it will have such an implication or that he does have that extra imagination. It simply means that visionaries have a track record of saving people from starvation.

What about normal people? Those are usually the ones who manufacture conditions suitable for mass starvation. They're the ones who create nothing but buy the rights to sue to oblivion those who do. They're the ones who have allowed security holes to develop in critical infrastructure, like nuclear power stations, and then place said infrastructure on the public Internet where anybody can play with it. They're the ones who deny Global Warming and have endangered all life on this planet.

At this point in history, we'd be better off if the normal people were rounded up, put on some nowhere continent, and left to rot at their own hands. This would also solve much of the operpopulation crisis, as they're also the ones that breed morons like rabbits. If they choose to become civilized, they're free to do so. That would be helpful, in fact. But as long as they remain normal (read: proto-human), their fate is their lookout but they've no business making it everyone else's fate too.

Some companies only look for people with MSc's or a PhD, but then there are those companies which only consider those with higher qualifications for non-programming jobs. So it's something to think about if you consider doing a MSc as as "refresher" to learn new skills when the job market is tight.

But an assembly line manned by robots? Why should that be cheaper in China? Is capital that much cheaper?

Even if wages and other costs were equal, the location advantage is substantial. It's not that it's cheaper in China, but that it's cheaper in the huge manufacturing hubs. You have suppliers and manufacturers for just about every single component you need without long-distance shipping, and a deep pool of design and manufacturing expertise working in the area.

That's not to say you can't manufacture efficiently elsewhere (we have plenty of recent examples such as the Raspberry Pi), but that the advantages has as much to do with the concentration of resources as with the cost of labour and regulations. And of course, as this inudstry becomes ever more automated, it no longer matters much for jobs where it happens any longer.