If you haven't already, get some tandem breakers :)

My service was upgraded to 150, and I have natural gas. My panel is completely full, and that's with tandem breakers (and a sub-panel!). Very few singles left.

I figured they'd tackle something more ambitious than that with their drone offerings - a drone that (barring instructions to do otherwise) follows you around whatever you're doing and keeps the camera on you, trying to get the most epic shots. E.g., you bungee jump off a bridge, it races you to the bottom, keeping whatever distance and filming style you told it to.

But maybe it's just another remote control drone.

They are all listed as having flown Shenzhou missions

It's great that Freescale is making a version of the ultralite that's easier to manufacture - but it'd be even better if they had a non-BGA version. BGA means "ball grid array", and it's one of the more difficult component in terms of electronics assembly.

Some companies charge a 3x premium if there are any BGAs at all. Having version that has the pins on the side (QFP), even if it was huge, or had less functionality, would allow for easier prototyping and assembly.

There'd be a market for it.

You might want to ask these people if China has a man-rated launcher.

Very true. The rational man realizes this, and doesn't hold strong political opinions on the rest of it. We're all going to be ignorant of most science in the modern world - the time has long passed when the educated man could know all of the scientific knowledge there was. It's important to therefore set arrogance aside, and not try to tell others they're idiots, or force your uneducated opinion on others by law, unless you actually care enough to do the diligence first.

Far too many people mistake fashion for education. If you're going to call others fools for trying to stop the teaching of "evolution" in schools, call them fools because you took the time to understand the science, the counter-arguments, and why a smart, ration person could somehow not believe in evolution. Until you understand the other side, and why it's wrong, stay out of the argument. For the evolution case: if you had a solid biology class, this takes just a few days of reading the talk.origins site. It's not an undue burden, and otherwise arrogance about your uninformed opinion is just idiocy.

For newer fields like the climate change debate, it will take longer to dig up the details, as there isn't a handy website that collects all the pro and con arguments. For climate change, can read through the pro and con sites and understand where they're coming from, understand the Vostok ice core data for perspective, spend time pondering the satellite temperature data, and so on.

For any such issue, treat both sides as intelligent people who are in earnest in their beliefs and not trolling, and read enough to understand how this can be true. When you understand how intelligent people can disagree on the issue, and see where both sides are coming from, then you can act out of knowledge instead of arrogance, and stop polluting the debate with idiocy. If your only basis for argument is "everyone knows the smart people believe X, and the losers believe not-X", well, that's fashion, not knowledge. This pretty much applies to anything being debated politically, BTW, not just the science stuff.

So you mean get rid of wide-character encodings and only use UTF-8 where unicode characters are needed? I agree. :)

Yeah, this is the age of the 21st Century food pseudoscience, damn it!

Why wouldn't you use broccoli to lose weight? It's one of the few healthy sides that even seem worth the trouble of eating, for me.

That's not C++. That's "C with classes". (No true Scotsman uses C++ that way!) There should really be a new C standard that adds classes, C++-- or something. (BTW, a sure sign that people don't understand C++ is when they argue that the STL is slow.)

It's funny to hear game devs argue that C++ is too abstract, and then in the next breath wonder how they're ever going to get their code to use more than one core. I hope you're not that guy!

I'm in a different world. To me, performance means infinite horizontal scalability. Clarity and performance of work distribution across N machines (for arbitrary N) is where the fun is. Counting cycles and optimizing bytes got boring when machines got fast (a Raspberry Pi blows away the mainframes I started on).

Only catch exceptions that you can fix is the rule. If you can't actually do something useful about an exception, why would you catch it? There's nothing worse than Pokemon code!

catch(...) make perfect sense in one place - in main(), followed by logging the exception and terminating the process.

The whole point of this entire mindset is to stop checking for errors individually after each call. This lets you eliminate about 2/3s of your lines of code, all boilerplate, and reveal the actual business logic of each function by sweeping away the clutter. But there's a whole crowd of devs who like the clutter. They're not actually very good at coding, but mindless repetition they can do. This mindset is anathema to those guys. RAII without exceptions leaves half the clutter, and so doesn't achieve the goal.

If you don't really need to make systems calls, that's absolutely the right answer IMO. I only favor C++ if I need to do platform-specific messing around with filesystem behavior, or low-level netcode. As soon as you need to do any sort of bit-twiddling, or you care at all about asymptotically-constant-time performance improvements, Java stops being useful (and I always prefer C# to Java where practical - same functionality with half as many lines of code).

I really don't see the point of using C (or C-style coding in C++) outside of kernel-mode stuff, however.

A new hire from college is not a "beginner", at least not anywhere I've worked recently. If you choose to interview in C++, you had better know the basic STL classes (string, vector, map) as well. Sure, it's rare to see an interview question that would probe RAII/resource management for entry-level, but knowing that stuff coming in would really help. (We don't care what language someone is good in for an entry level job, but they have to demonstrate some depth in one language of their choice.)