A classic problem with fuel cells is extreme intolerance to contaminants. Even trace amounts of contaminants tend to damage fuel cells. Hydrogen fuel cells need cleaner hydrogen than is normally available commercially. Research continues on making fuel cells more tolerant of contaminants, but it's hard. Fuel cells are surface chemistry systems. 40 years of research hasn't solved this problem.

Reverse osmosis water purification systems once had the same problem. Today they routinely take in raw seawater and pump out clear water. They just need a backflush cycle once in a while to flush the crud off the membranes. Fuel cells aren't there yet.

DirectTV has a satellite downlink, with their own satellites and antennas. AppleTV just has the Internet. Only in countries with net neutrality will Apple TV win out over the offerings of cable TV companies and telcos. The Comcast 300MB data cap is good for maybe 60-70 hours of HD video. Average American TV consumption is 5 hours a day.

Right. That's what happened to newspapers. Newspaper production used to require a huge labor force. Look at all those people. 67 linotypes! A room full of proofreaders to catch typesetting errors. Hundreds of people moving paper around, making printing plates, loading them onto presses, running the presses, handling the printed newspapers. Compared to the army needed to print the papers, the reporting staff was tiny, a small expense. The reporting and editing staff, the composing room, and the printing plant were all in the same building. Any separation would slow things down, and the competition would "scoop" them.

Now compare a modern large newspaper plant. There are people around, but not many. There's essentially no direct labor. All paper and plate handling is mechanized. The files to be printed are created elsewhere and come in over a data connection. The printed newspapers leave in big trucks. Many different papers are printed in the same plant. The plant is far from the reporting and editorial staff, and is run by a separate corporation from the "newspaper".

So, to newspaper management, reporters are now the big labor cost, the first thing to cut.

The intent of the new syntax is that &char[n] buf means passing a reference to an array of size n. char[n] is an array type, something C currently lacks. Syntax like this is needed so that you can have casts to array types.

I've had a few go-rounds at this syntax problem. See "Strict pointers for C". Unfortunately, there's no solution that's backwards-compatible with existing code. However, mixing files of old-style and new-style code is possible, and mechanical conversion of old-style code to new-style code looks possible.

It's worth looking at this again now that C's market share is back above that of C++.

I have a BA in Math and am 2 credits away from an MA in Secondary Education. I've been a web developer for about 10 years now. A math degree is pretty much universally applicable to any profession. Just doing student teaching I found a school district I'll never set for in or have my daughter set foot in. I've had jobs not work out. I live in AZ and currently work for a company in CT and have a handful of other clients. My boss in CT recently mentioned that he may be able to get some work in Data Analysis since I have a math background. There's tons of opportunity out there if you know math. And apparently he's billing his clients at over $200 an hour to do analysis. So it's lucrative as well if you can find work. I'm not sure what entry level pay would be.

It doesn't matter what career you are in, you're going to find places that you just don't fit. You can't change a company. You can't change a district. And you're probably not going to change yourself, so try a different company or district.

One bad experience doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't teach. Take what you learned from that experience and move forward. I switched to a different district for the second half of my student teaching and things worked out very well. I had a student transfer from the first district with a failing grade, she was only at my new school for a couple weeks and got about a 75% on a test she expected to fail. It just re-enforces the idea that the first district can pound sand. I'm very good at what I do and if I end up at a district that won't let me do my job I'll happily work somewhere else.

Genesis also says everything was created from nothing. Even the order of creation in Genesis matches evolution's version of events. The only thing Science hasn't proven about Genesis is that God did it and that he went back to dirt to create man, he didn't grab a couple apes.

What porn? I have over 10,000 edits on Wikipedia and don't recall seeing any porn. Wikipedia has bios of porn stars and links to their work, but they rarely host actual porn content. It has to be both notable and freely licensed to get into Wikipedia. Commercial porn doesn't qualify.

Is the problem here some religious group with a modesty fetish, or what?

If you want porn, search videos with Google or Bing and you'll find whatever you're looking for.

Google Shopping isn't even in their main toolbar. It's now hidden under "more".

The article is stupid. But the language and OS problem is real.

First, we ought to have secure operating system kernels by now. Several were developed and passed the higher NSA certifications in the 1980s and 1990s. Kernels don't need to be that big. QNX has a tiny microkernel (about 70KB) and can run a reasonable desktop or server environment. (The marketing and politics of QNX have been totally botched, but that's a different problem.) Microkernels have a bad rep because CMU's Mach sucked so badly, but that was because they tried to turn BSD into a microkernel.

If we used microkernels and message passing more, we'd have less trouble with security problems. The way to build secure systems is to have small secure parts which are rigorously verified, and large untrusted parts which can't get at security-critical objects. This has been known for decades. Instead, we have bloated kernels for both Linux and Windows, and bloated browsers on top of them.

On the language front, down at the bottom, there's usually C. Which sucks. The fundamental problems with C are 1) "array = pointer", and 2) tracking "who owns what". I've discussed this before. C++ doesn't help; it just tries to wallpaper over the mess at the C level with what are essentially macros.

This is almost fixable for C. I've written about this, but I don't want to spend my life on language politics. The key idea is to be able to talk about the size of an array within the language. The definition of "read" should look like int read(int fd, &char[n] buf; size_t n); instead of the current C form int read(int fd, char* buf, size_t n); The problem with the second form, which the standard UNIX/Linux "read" call, is that you're lying to the language. You're not passing a pointer to a char. You're passing an array of known size. But C won't let you say that. This is the cause of most buffer overflows.

(It's not even necessary to change the machine code for calling sequences to do this. I'm not proposing array descriptors, just syntax so that you can talk about array size to the compiler, which can then do checking if desired. The real trick here is to be able to translate old-style C into "safe C" automatically, which might be possible.)

As for "who owns what", that's a language problem too. The usual solution is garbage collection, but down at the bottom, garbage collection may not be an option. Another approach is permissions for references. A basic set of permissions is "read", "write", "keep", and "delete". Assume that everything has "read" for now. "write" corresponds to the lack of "const". "delete" on a function parameter means the function called has the right to delete the object. That's seldom needed, and if it's not present, the caller can be sure the object will still be around when the function returns. "Keep" is more subtle. "Keep" means that the callee is allowed to keep a reference to a passed object after returning. The object now has multiple owners, and "who owns what" issues come up. If you're using reference counts, only "keep" objects need them. Objects passed without "keep" don't need reference count updates.

Do those few things, and most low-level crashes go away.

I won't live to see it.