Except math is explicitly forbidden from being patented.

They only way you destroy patent trolls is by tying money earned from the patented invention to the cost of developing the patented invention along with some percentage of profits. Thereby, if it costs $1 to create the patented invention you get to hold the patent until you earn $1 and the percentage of profits, which would happen really quickly (sell it one time); it it costs $1000 or $1,000,000 then you would hold it longer - e.g the market decides how long you get to hold it; outright sale of the patented invention to a third party would nullify the patent itself since you would have recouped the costs, and the prime motivator for patents is therefore enforced - that inventors be encouraged to invent new things - while equally destroying the troll market.

Not quite. You can't repeat the pad the same way ever - that is, you don't want to wrap it or reset to known locations using any kind of protocol. You can, however, randomly skip around in some manner, as long as you only go forward and do not wrap. So you're data limited unless you have an infinite data source.

That said, you could probably use a synchronized random number generator as the shared pad data. The other side would only be able to decrypt messages for as long as they buffer the random number data; after which the message is lost to everyone for eternity. This could work for a TLS session where messages are exchanged with only a couple minutes (or preferably seconds) delay so that the buffer does not need to be very big.

True, supposedly so. I know I rarely changed an incandescent - probably once every couple years at most; I usually changed an incandescent because the bulb broke due to the lamp getting knocked over more than anything else - actually seeing the EOL of an incandescent was rare. I expect it will probably be the same with LEDs and CFLs; though LEDs will probably be because the electronics in their base die - capacitors drying out, etc; which will be a lot harder to test what is wrong with them.

Which has the funny aspect of exposing those folk to mercury contamination...

Honestly, we shouldn't be trying to force the public to use one over the other. Let people choose free market style. There was no reason for the EPA to get involved in this. Would people still buy incandescents? Yes; but most would probably skip CFLs and go straight to LEDs as well - which were not really even part of the picture when Congress passed the bill mandating incandescents be phased out; and the phase out had little to nothing to do with the introduction of LEDs when they came.

So a single LED bulb at a sale discount, versus 8 incandescent bulbs. FYI - average price of a single LED bulb is $7+ for 40/60/75/100W bulbs before any sale discounts.

Average prices for a 4 or 8 package of incandescent bulbs before any sale discounts was $2-3; I typically paid $1 for a 4 package at most.

Best price I've seen for CFLs was the occasional Sam's Club pack for $1 containing 8 CFLs (40/60/75/100W); but that's rare. Typically the same pack age Sam's Club is $8+.

And after our 4 yr old broke a CFL in his room (since we couldn't put a new Incandescent in), we replaced it with an LED, which I'd much prefer if not for the expense. Even then, the first one didn't work for some reason; fortunately the store did a return/exchange and the second one (a different brand) worked.

So here's the deal:

• Catalytic Converter: Costs vehicles gas mileage for a minimal return on emissions
• Ethanol #1: Costs all vehicles (new and old) gas mileage; the higher the mixture the worse the mileage - this is all simple fact because even the best ethanol does not contain as much energy as the worse petroleum products.
• Ethanol #2: Actively damages older vehicles, and has lead to numerous leaks when it corrodes through the seals on gas tanks; it also damages boats and nearly all small motors; many small motors (used for lawn care) end up getting thrown out every couple years for no reason other than ethanol damage and it's usually cheaper to replace than fix - again, this is well known because all ethanol is highly corrosive.
• Incandescent Light bulbs are being phased out in favor of CFLs since CFLs use less energy, though they cost more to buy (as do LED bulbs, which are more expensive yet). CFLs like their bigger fluorescent versions use mercury; so dropping and breaking a light bulb can now lead to mercury contamination at a greater scale. Despite this, EPA is focused on removing mercury from power plants which produce less mercury than breaking one of those CFL bulbs. And they've also made a great way to shutdown a store - go break all the CFLs so they have to call in a hazmat team to clean up the mercury contamination. (LEDs do solve this particular issue, but tend to cost 2-5x's more than CFLs which already were 10'x the cost of an incandescent.)

The list goes on.

Now I'm not saying that reducing emissions is not a good thing; or that reducing energy consumption is not a good thing - they are. However, when the cost of doing so ends up incurring an overall higher emissions rate, or more things to be toss out (thus increasing garbage and land-fills), etc...it's over impact is not worth the minor reduction in emissions.

That all depends on the type of ban.

For instance, a sale ban would still effect the company regardless of which of it's international subsidiary's did the actual sale.

A design ban would forbid them from designing in the US and exporting the design to facilities elsewhere to even produce chips matching the design.

So the primary issue for Big Rig trucking is distance.

Drivers often fill up 100-200 gallon tanks, and cover large distances between stops. They might stop for fuel once a day, may be twice while covering 500-1000 miles. Can we build a big rig that has the torque capacity AND the distance requirements? May be.

But then, you also need to be able to manage the batteries well enough too, and be able to recharge quickly.

Battery swapping won't really work. Why? Who owns the batteries? Who's responsible for them? What places are going to swap out batteries?

If the owner of the vehicle owns the batteries, then swapping doesn't work. Someone that just bought the batteries isn't going to swap them for a set of used batteries - that's too expensive.

A network of battery renters could work, but then you have to be able to get to one of their approved locations for a battery swap, so it's not really feasible, though this solution could bring the cost of the big rigs down considerably since they wouldn't have to buy the extremely expensive battery packs with the big rig, just sign up to a renter network.

Even then, who's responsible for batteries when there are problems? Who pays the bill when the battery overheats and blows up? Or who sends out another vehicle to swap batteries when the drain too quickly and the vehicle is stranded?

Yes, lawyers can solve many of the questions, but until that happens in a manner acceptable to the industry then there are problems.

Also, realize that many big rigs are owned by their drivers. Independent truckers are quite common and many trucking companies prefer to use independent truckers over buying their own equipment; often paying barely enough for the guys to be able to maintain the vehicles - it's a very cut throat business. So those buying the big rigs don't necessary have budgets for expensive technology; they just want something that is going to work, work well, be easy to maintain, and be highly reliable - it's very expensive for them to get a tow (loss work, plus the cost of tow and maintenance). So it'll be a very up-hill battle to get them to accept electric vehicles.

For truckers to accept electric trucks, companies will have to get into it first. So FedEx proving that this vendor is reliable with their fleet will go a long way to bringing hybrids to trucking at all levels.

As to the transition of the technology from trains - the really big difference is that for the trains it's generally easy for them to know exactly how much fuel they need for the trip and how much to have in reserve. The fuel tanks are in the thousands of gallons, and they don't have to deal with traffic much. When they do, they'll know how long the wait will generally be and can handle the situation accordingly. It's also relatively easy for them to just fill up the tanks again. Just saying - the two industries are extremely different in many respects; so what one finds acceptable won't necessarily be so for the other.

Because if you need to dispute it saying "I always get my receipts and I don't have one for that" works really well. Otherwise, you're at the mercy of your bank/card company to accurate report what you are spending - not a good habit to be in.

We're starting to, but not in the big rigs; FedEx was reportedly doing a test on their delivery vehicles with a start up from South Carolina at a cost of $100k/vehicle upgrade. A few more players in the market, and the cost will drop significantly.

Nothing; it's actually a perfect business for hotels, restaurants and entertainment venues to get into - put chargers in the parking lots to encourage people to stop in, add a small portion to the bill if they use the charge. They'll very quickly replace the gas stations, which no one really wants to stop at or go inside of.

Agreed. Any cross-platform projects needs to be able to support multiple build systems, whether you like it or not. Tools like CMake/QMake/Qbs/Ninja/etc are just essential.

Agreed. You have version control. That's all you really need. ChangeLogs are generally outdated and for releases (where the VCS won't be available) a dump of the logs in some form should be sufficient, provided you are writing meaningful log messages. IOW, good VCS practices are a must.

Don't know which "christians" you know...but that's certainly not true.

Devil's Advocate: Much of evolution, especially around the "origin of species" is completely untestable and 100% reliant on having "faith" in science.

So aside from the performance hit you take by adding all those applications, you've also increased the footprint of security issues as each of those have issues regarding security that you must now also monitor, not to mention the backdoors that can be taken advantage of.

The open source ClamAV is listed among the best products for detecting viruses last I checked it was one of the top three; McAfee hasn't been on that list in ages. That said, the APIs and drivers they insert into the kernel to work (and interface between kernel and userland) essentially provide big back doors that malicious actors can (and do) take advantage of.

ClamAV for a long-time was a user-space only product - e.g no real-time scanning of the OS, applications, memory - as it was originally (and still is primarily) intended for use by servers to scan traffic going to other systems, namely to desktop Windows users. (Most prominent use is in mail servers.) Recently it's started getting real-time scanning capabilities, enabling it to compete with others on Windows where users still think they need an AV product. ClamAV (and ClamWin) are still probably the best in that respect as they probably have the fewest backdoors of any AV product.

And honestly, I don't advocate to anyone to use an AV or malware preventative product any more, even on Windows, namely because of the issues they introduce. Instead, I advocate the users be more careful with what they do. It's proven quite effective.