Actually I find a good bit of truth in that comment. Many people think that the next big thing will "change everything" and somehow magically fix all their problems. I see it all the time in various jobs. Actual discussion the other day (names of things changed to protect the guilty):

One of those people: "Well, SuperProgram 11.7 can track events and send them to the manager's Blackberry!"
Me: "I could do that ten years ago by stringing shell scripts together and running it via cron. It's called email. Is there even a defendable business reason to that? The business requirements we have in front of us say that it needs to display an alert on terminal emulator screen that the actual users are used to using."
One of those people: "But why would you keep using that old terminal thing. SuperProgram 11.7 will make it all point and click and put it in a browser!"
Me: "Again, business reason to do that? Right now they spend all day on their terminal. Now you're going to make them pick up the mouse and switch between applications. And spend more money on this product to do it. These people are really fast with the interface they've gotten used to over the last twenty years."
One of those people: "But nobody knows how to use a terminal, and you can't do it on a tablet!"
Me: "Correction: you don't know how to use a terminal. We have lots of training material on how to use this thing. And there are no tablets in our data entry office. There are a bunch of people very skilled at using their terminal based app for data entry and retrieval, and a bunch of machines already set up to do that."

People always think the big shiny new thing is "better", rather than the old boring workhorse. Do those technologies have a place? Absolutely. Is there anything wrong with sticking with terminal based text apps written in C and ncurses? Hell no, especially if you can't produce data to show that the users would be more productive on the new stuff.

I consider myself to usually be on the bleeding edge of technology, but phone-based boarding passes are right out. I've never had a piece of paper run out of power, but I've had my phone die halfway through the travel day for reasons unknown (turned into a little toaster and burned through its battery - presumably the radio got in a weird state) and have had it stolen while traveling. I keep two boarding passes, typically - one folded in my pocket, and one in my carry-on. If I lose one, I just grab the other one.

And yes, most of the time when my guests want to borrow a machine, it's because they need a printer for boarding passes.

Yup, the one I got rid of two years ago was 17 years old and had 308k miles on it. I still see it on the road around here from time to time. The "new" one that I found out in California last year is now 17, and only has 192,000 on it at the moment. Mid-1990s Hondas run like a top forever if you take care of them.

Plus there's my restored 1932 Chevy in the garage next to it, but it's only got about 50-60k on it total (and 10k since I last rebuilt the engine). So only eighty years there.

I have to agree with the parent - neutral or just shut the key off (though obviously not all the way to lock - that too would be seriously bad). Neutral has the downside of possibly leading to engine destruction depending on the failure mode (though very unlikely with modern ECUs and injection), but it's better than destroying the whole car and killing people in a wreck. I know some dingbats might not think of that in a crisis (my ex wife being a great example), but surely the police would think of that as a better idea than trying to clear miles and miles of freeway for this guy to burn up all the gas.

Yup, but your shiny new AP1000 runs day or night, rain or shine. Also, 16GW of nuclear is going to take up a whole lot less space than 16GW of PV.

Quite frankly, solar energy isn't that dense (only a couple kW per square meter) and aircraft require a tremendous amount of power to actually be able to move useful loads at useful speeds. Jet engines are usually rated in pounds of thrust, which I'm too lazy to go find the thrust-speed-altitude relationship to convert that to power. A number I could find was that a single C-130 turboprop engine is rated at about 3.3MW of output. So with four of them for one of these cargo haulers, that's about 13MW of power. Even assuming 100% conversion efficiency and 3 kW/m^2 at cruising altitude (it's roughly 1kW/m^2 at sea level, and 1.5kW/m^2 at 6000 feet, so this is probably close or a bit generous), you'd need 4333 square meters to collect enough power. The wingspan of a C-130 is 40 meters, so you've basically only got at most maybe 160 square meters of collecting area on the wings. And that's at 100% efficiency. Now consider that the overall system efficiency for photovoltaics would be around 10%, and that you'd need storage so you could take off, land, fly in the dark, and fly through clouds, and you've created something about the size of that flying quad-copter fortress from Avengers without all the actual coolness (or, say, adequate lift).

Nothing beats good old liquid hydrocarbons as fuel sources in terms of flexiblity and energy density.

Or that you don't give a rat's ass about 99% of the stupid shit your "friends" post on FB. Most of those people who instantly tried to friend me were people from high school, many of whom were too cool to talk to my nerdy self back then. I didn't like them then, and they've been out of my life for 15 years. I couldn't care less that their baby did something today. Heck, my aunts, uncles, and grandparents use it all the time, so I don't think age is the delineating factor. It's more that I have way more things in my real life than I can keep up with, and I'd much rather be social over a pint at a pub or a MakerFaire or a reprap get-together than on some website with people that don't matter in my life anymore.

I kept my account for about three months, mostly to see if I could find a couple old girlfriends and see what they were up to after my ex and I split. After that, I removed any content I could (I basically only ever uploaded one bland picture and some trivial details) and then told them to delete it. It was just adding to the noise side of the SNR in my life, so I just decided I was done with it. It does seem to be deactivated, but I suspect the Eagles were right on this one - you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

Oh, and just for good measure...
GET OFF MY LAWN, YA DAMN KIDS!

If you're sitting down and not wearing your seatbelt, you're a dumbass. I fly all the time (and used to fly jumpset on cargo jets, who don't tend to take the "easier on the passengers" route), and have lost two laptops over the last twenty years to sudden drops and ceiling impacts. I've also seen my coworkers hit the ceiling and then drop to the floor, often resulting in at least a nasty headache. This shit happens; wear your seatbelt. And yes, if you're instructed by the flight crew while in US airspace, the FAR dictates that it's a lawful order you must obey.

Selfish in what way? Does the world not have enough individuals breeding like rabbits?

As a former DINK and now one of a pair of SINKs (divorced a couple years back, still friends), I have to agree that I don't see what the big deal is with kids, or why people think we should all have them. WTF do I care if my genetic lineage carries on? I'm dead eventually regardless. Makes absolutely no difference to me. I share with the future generations in other ways - I create, I share, I teach, I mentor. I just don't do it on my own biological spawn. I have no great and noble family line to carry on and I'm just a pretty average guy (and one with a congenital genetic defect that doesn't matter until after the usual kid-producing cycle, and then kills you slowly and painfully - not looking forward to my 60s). It's in fact better that I proceed with being a rich capitalist yuppie pigdog and let my particular mutation die with me.

The core of it really was that we both wanted to do things with our lives that didn't involve taking an 18 year break to raise kids, so we did.

>Time to join the 21st century grandpa. FILE* leaks.

Hell no. And get off my lawn.

printf() isn't typesafe, but it's a fuckton more readable than all that cout formatting stuff. Also, the fact that it's not typesafe isn't really an issue if you don't suck - trivial unit testing will pretty much show any problems immediately. Besides, gcc/g++ is nice enough to warn you about egregious ones now.

FILE* leaks? I assume by this you mean when sloppy programmers fail to close their files and you start burning through file descriptors. Sounds like a bug to me, and again, stop sucking. Or do what we do - throw an object with a destructor containing fclose() around it. Then you get all the awesomeness of of FILE* (including those awesome formatting commands like fprintf and fscanf) without the danger of your file staying open when something goes nuts.

Why on earth would you want memcpy() to call anything? It's a low level byte move. Anybody with five minutes of familiarity with it should know that. If you wanted something different, use the assignment operator.

void* have all sorts of applications, most recently to me in writing architecture neutral VMs where really all the native machine knows is that it's moving around some sort of pointer.

Now the custom string and array classes? That I'll agree on. Troll on.

Holy shit - we finally get strongly-typed enums? Finally. No, I'm not the type to RTFA. :)

If your compiler is doing anything different with p++ and ++p in that expression, it has a sucktastic optimizer. There's no reason it should create a copy when the value of the expression is thrown away.

One of my coworkers was asked to sign something similar when he joined the company, and he just amended the agreement to say that work only owned what was developed on work time or with work resources. Legal just signed off without any argument.

Clarifying this stuff up front would have been best, but you can approach your HR/legal department and explain what you're doing. Most of the time it's just there to keep you from developing something great related to your field and then running off selling it to whomever, rather than keeping it in house as a competitive advantage (or selling it through the company). My employer could care less if I design/sell stuff on my personal time, as long as it's not related to work.

Seriously? The entire Rio Grande Valley - which pretty much covers a north-south line right down the middle of the state - is a rift valley. The continent has been splitting and spreading here for millions of years. It's an interesting measurement, to be sure, and it's nice to have confirmation, but it shouldn't come as much of a surprise.

Well partially, but I'd argue the addresses have a lot to do with it, too. My home subnet is 192.168.77.0/24. My firewall blocks anything coming from the outside world bound for 192.168.77.0/24. That's nice, but doesn't really ever do anything because damn near every router between me and a potential attacker drops packets that are to or from the reserved networks, because it has no idea where to send them. About the only way it would be a viable attack is from somebody who had control at my upstream ISP.

A non-NAT scheme depends - almost entirely - on my firewall not sucking. I try, but I have in the past screwed that up when changing rules and haven't realized it for days until something seems to be a bit wonky. My motto is if you can't get a packet to it, you can't attack it.