There are about 10^80 atoms in the observable universe, so we should be quite safe with 128 bits addresses.

It is trivial to add this capability to any RC aircraft. Just stick an ArduPilot in and you are done.

Neptunium-237 is weapon-usable as well.

Given that inmates don't have internet access, yes.

What makes you think China can't do the same ? They are probably the one you'll be buying the robots from anyway.

The problem with SDI was not the science, but the political idiocy of spending a fortune undermining deterrence instead of working toward mutual disarmament, and the economic impossibility of dealing with countermeasures.

Since you can't negotiate with an asteroid, and that they tend not to deploy decoys, this should work a lot better than SDI.

I think we could take care of the obviousness criterion with something like this:

To submit a patent you should be required to provide a spec, an implementation, and a reward. Then the spec is published and if anyone can come up with an alternate implementation within a few days (or weeks), or prove that the submitted implementation doesn't work, he gets the reward and the patent is refused, otherwise the submitter keeps the reward and the patent is granted.

In addition, every time you submit a patent that gets rejected, the reward doubles.

Rocket technology is dual-use, it can be used to deliver warheads or launch satellites. It is quite reasonable to be interested in both applications. Just because they are emphasizing one or the other depending of the circumstances doesn't mean there is a contradiction.

Or you could just use Minix 3 and let it die.

How does that work exactly ? You shoot at a border agent and then what ? Guns are not a solution to everything.

You don't need a terminal emulator for that. A simple output only console is sufficient to display kernel messages.

Oh thou who art awake, would you care sharing with us exactly what you are doing to curb the police state (apart from ranting on /.) ?

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This post is certified 100% sarcasm-free.

Black Americans represent 28.0% of arrests, and 12.6% of the population, which works out to 2.2 times the per-capita rate of all other Americans. This ratio is higher for murder and robbery. Thus it is perfectly normal that black identifying names correlate better with arrest records.

No bias here. If I was one of this guy's students, I'll ask my money back.

assert() causes a *deliberate* termination, in the sense that the programmer explicitly intends the program to terminate at that point if the assertion fails.

This contrast with an unintended termination, as caused by something like a SIGSEGV.

assert() doesn't *gracefully* terminate, as exit() would, but that is a separate issue. And it is done that way because the state of the program can no longer be trusted at that point. Of course you might want to have more granularity than just assert() and exit(), but you need something that can do an "emergency stop" in some cases.