Visual Basic went to .Net five versions ago. It was acceptable to take VB to mean classic VB in 2003, but in 2014, you have to say so if you mean the old stuff. The VB6 development environment doesn't even run on any supported operating system. VBA is still around, but it's always been incorrect to refer to VBA as VB.

I think it's interesting that you know Visual Basic, but want to get into C#. My first question would be "Why?". Both run on the same framework and both are equally capable. All you're doing is learning new syntax to do things you already know how to do. After that question is the comment "You pretty much already know C#". Sure, it's a different language from VB, but that's the easy part. It uses the same tools and libraries, so you know 95% of it already.

You are absolutely 100 percent technically correct. But whoever gets their power at hydro rates is the consumer of hydro power. If Robert Moses was shut down, the customers paying the lower rate would either have to pay more or stop receiving power (or the person who wrote the contract would lose money). The people paying coal rates would be easy to serve by bringing power from coal plant at other points on the grid. So, for all intents and purposes, they are getting the power from Robert Moses.

We could extend this process to things like carbon credits and any future non-renewable tax. The providers would only be able to sell a certain quantity of "penalty-exempt" power. That would drive the market for that power, even thought the customer may not receive exactly the electron they paid for. So, there is some value to speaking about power as if the whole grid concept didn't exist.

The factory will be 30 miles from one of the largest hydroelectric power plants on the planet. Unfortunately, it's more "economically advantageous" to transport that power to the New York City area and backfill Western New York with local power. Most of the local power comes from the Huntley Generating Station, which is a gas turbine plant that has been converted to coal. To add to the CO2 concerns, the way to use coal in a gas turbine plant is to crush the coal up so fine that it can be injected into the turbines using nozzles that were designed for methane. That makes Huntley one of the dirtiest places on earth.

As for nuclear, it will be more than 100 miles from the nearest nuclear power plant and that's only a small 600MW plant - the smallest in New York.

So, the biggest solar panel factory in the world is almost certain to be powered entirely by coal.

They didn't have enough cash. The reason they are building the plant in Buffalo is because New York State as paying for most of the up front capital. Before Musk, they had to find creative ways to grow the company and were likely to get trampled in the market by a competitor with the money to make market moves that Silevo couldn't afford to do. With Musk behind them, they can grow at whatever pace they can convince Musk they can be profitable at.

He's mostly right in practice. If you take an entire semester worth of AP credits and graduate early, then you save money. However, most schools have a full-time rate that applies for any amount of credit hours over twelve. Going from 21 hours down to 13 your freshman year isn't going to save you anything. Going from 21 to 5 will save money by allowing you to register as a part-time student, but that my effect room and board arrangements. Trying to graduate a semester early is a possibility, but some classes are very difficult to take in the other semester from the one their "supposed" to be taken in, plus you'll have to make up the remained of the credits that you didn't AP out of to add up to an entire semester. If you only took one AP, that's almost the same work as just doing a four year degree in three and a half, so the savings is mostly attributed to your hard work, not the AP.

I took AP calc when I was in high school and I got a four an the exam. I just took it again in college for the easy A, that was a bigger benefit for me than skipping it since it wouldn't have saved any money. An A thrown into my GPA was worth more to me than a few hours of down time in the middle of the day.

More than half of all movies currently can't be streamed. How can a delivery format go away if content providers won't move most of the content to alternate media?

Article: The car won't so much be hovering in free space as "a little bit away" from the road. This is more likely to mean microns than inches...

Summary: We aren't talking Jetson's flying car, more like a car that merely hovers "a little bit away" from the road. Probably a few inches...

To me hovering a few microns sounds like hydroplaning on purpose. Sounds like a great idea if you never want to turn or stop.

It doesn't really matter. I was responding to a statement that said that if something receives signals and fires thrusters, then it must be a computer. Any definition that broad would be indistinguishable from "circuit" and would make the word "computer" redundant. I hate it when language evolves to a point where it's hard to express thoughts accurately.

This is the same problem I have with people accepting the phrase "I could care less" as meaning "I don't care". It makes language much harder to use. Imagine trying to explain the meaning of that phrase to someone learning English, they would come away thinking that each collection of words has some fungible meaning that is totally separate from the meanings of the individual word and the rules or grammar.

A collection of discreet electronic components hardly qualifies as a computer. Receiving radio signals was something done long before the first computer was invented.

Which leads to the summary's statement of "They have to install dependencies, compile code, start servers and open ports. At each step the errors are difficult to diagnose and time-consuming to fix." Visual Studio runs the servers and opens ports for you based on what type of program the project says it is.

One of my rules at work is: "If I check it out in Visual Studio and press 'Start', it better compile and run". It's not acceptable to make the next guy figure out how to run a program. Everyone I work with thinks I'm overreacting at first, but when they go to fix an issue in four-year-old code they've never seen before, they suddenly get it. Bonus points for starting the test suite by default instead of the actual program.

On my former Dodge, you popped the button off and stuck the key in the recess. The key is inductively powered by the car in this mode. On my current Mazda, you walk.

... then you push the button twice without your foot on the brake. It goes to run mode just like the second detent of a traditional key. Pressing once goes to accessory mode. More presses simply cycles between accessory...run...off.

But that's only because Intel let the marketing department make engineering decisions and kept making chips with higher and higher clock frequency. As soon as they regained their sanity, they once again dominated the benchmarks.

I do love how AMD brilliantly capitalized on the blunder. By labeling their chips according to the clock speed of the performance equivalent Intel chip - every time Intel put insane engineering effort into ratcheting the clock up 10% and only getting 1% better performance, AMD simply made their chips a tiny bit faster and labelled theirs the same as Intel's.