The BBC Micro was terrific. It was entirely made of off the shelf components like the 6502 and 6522 so understanding its design was easy and transparent. The BBC Micro was probably the best computer to teach assembly programming on as the 6502 assembly was such as joy to learn and use.

is what it's going to do if it comes across a turtle lying on its back.

I don't have a kindle nor do I know what they use but the blog-to-podcast engine Audiodizer uses a very good TTS engine that I find is good enough even for long articles (not sure I would hear it read an entire book though) and it seems to improve on a regular basis. Here's a sample of how it sounds: http://www.audiodizer.com/Clients/PhysOrg/physorg/news217488993.mp3

>what can it do that my phone can't?

Display stuff at a screen that's comfortable for prolonged reading/viewing.

I realize I'm in the minority here but I'm not impressed with modern smart phones. They are just a tad too large to be comfortable in my pockets but not large enough to be comfortable web browsers, ebook readers etc.

My needs would be covered by two devices, a smartphone in the size of say the fith generation iPod Nano and a 10 inch tablet. So far the market has only deilvered the latter so that's what I have.

The GM volt drives the wheels from the engine when the battery is depleted AND the speed is more than 70mph. Both conditions have to be met before the outer ring of the planetary is unlocked and powered by the gas engine.

The claims made by Nissan are yet to be tested in practice. I doubt that car will go anywhere near 100 miles on a charge. 60 is much more probable.

What if we turn this around and consider that maybe those who apply for jobs to screen the internet already have an unhealthy fascination with weird and/or illegal content? Maybe the post-contract counseling only reveals all the issues they harbored prior to starting the work?

I'm not saying this is the case, but it's a possibility...

I wasn't aware of this company or its technology. But to me this is something that programmers would really enjoy (and other workers stuck in front of an LCD for 8+ hours a day). They need to get the size and resolution much higher up though. I'd pay north of $900 for something like this but in a 23" format with a resolution of 1920x1200 or higher.

Sounds like Marissa may accidentally find herself without a job.

> Funding will be used to kill human fetuses. I did not have the choice to opt out of paying for your idiotic war on Iraq. Screw you and your right wing fetus obsession.

Are you very fat? Anything below 20C and I feel like putting my jacket on.

Given the axial shift will that have a measurable impact on the climate in a measurable way?

...or war.

Lines of Code is as good an estimate of a programmer's skill as MHz is a good estimate of a CPU speed.

Here where I work we have two Russian guys working on the back end of our system. I doubt those guys produce more than 10,000 lines of code per year. Yet their code just works. And it is infinitely scalable, super flexible and plain just works.

When you find a "bug" in their code you better have your shit together because 9.99 times out of ten it's a problem on your side not their. It's also perfectly flexible. Any time I need to use their code and come to them and tell them about the mountain of code I have to write they always say (with a thick Russian accent): "Bob, do not do that. You don't need. You just have to implement this one interface and instantiate this thing here and you can use our stuff and it will do what you need. Actually it's even simpler, you just need to post that message here and the system will do everything!"

Nobody, counts their lines of code. Their shit just works and is great. It's the backbone of our product and the competitive advantage we have in our vertical field.

The old adage goes that 20% of the code provides 80% of the functionality. Those Russian guys wrote THAT 20% for us.