Yeah, but the 2.4 GHz band goes through walls and humans easily. 240 GHz is a different story. 50 GHz already has trouble getting through on a rainy day, 240 GHz won't do much better. You'll need some insane receivers for this thing.

Yeah, the actual development was probably done by a slave army of engineering grad students as usual. But putting a high school girl on the poster makes for a better press release. And as long as you get the grant that pays your rent at the end of the month you don't quite care as grad student who the hell takes credit for it.

46 at the moment :P

Yep, Ada and the closely related VHDL are both a success story for a very good reason. Yet a lot of people seem to hate both due to how strictly they enforce their rules. But Ada always wins when reliability is a must.

You should learn to voice your opinion more carefully in that case. Cause the way you said it implies you support their actions.
And I very much know what's at stake here, so calling me a hypocrite is far from correct.

No, you're a disgrace cause you're somewhat supportive for their actions. They use violence instead of reason, proof and logical arguments.

Napalm does though!

You sir are a disgrace to humanity. Not only did this action cause the loss of decades worth of human effort and research. It might have delayed treatment for several diseases. And it has ruined human lives cause of that. Not to mention the graduate students who will be unable to finish their thesis cause they ran out of funding and lost years of their life's work cause of a bunch of idiots.

No, it is actually unfair and holds back development. I've seen total idiots get catapulted into a position simply cause they were of a particular race or female (or both). It's bad for business, it's bad for progress, and it's just discrimination really. So they're fighting discrimination (though in my opinion there isn't any) with discrimination. Is it that hard to apply the same hiring standards for everybody?

Problem is that in the technology business women often simply can't perform as well as men. It's common knowledge that men tend to perform better in abstract thinking, which is necessary in many parts of high-technology business. Good luck developing algorithms, debugging complex designs, etc. without those skills. I simply haven't met a lot of women who perform well at that. I think it's about a 10% group of those that make it into the technology industry that performs well at it. No problem getting beaten by any of those, but damn I'd hate getting pushed aside for somebody who is a plain idiot and gets hired due to gender equality laws (see next paragraph to read what I mean).

A good example is one of the women who was in my class back in school; She had no confidence (didn't dare to turn on a power supply when something was hooked up to it), didn't even know how to hook up a LED now that I come to think of it (fatal flaw as EE I'd say), only passed theoretical exams she could study by heart and for the others she cheated or took several attempts to get through. For labs the professors had to go easy on her cause else the gender equality number for the EE department would plummet (she was the only one that year). So she got let through due to gender "equality" laws, not based on performance in practical or theoretical skills. Sad thing is, she got a M.Sc. due to that and now wants to work in the medical industry. Luckily that market is flooded so it isn't working out for her, because I really think she'll kill somebody at some point due to her incompetence if she does end up in the medical industry; That's gender equality for ya.

For simple tasks they're fine. Now go and try to do something useful on them. I've also seen people attempt to write emails or even reports on them. It's sad to see, and while they have a laptop somewhere near them they still refuse to take it out simply cause they want to use the tablet. It's a disgrace for humanity. It's another fad that I hope will die down soon. It's like the netbooks that they said everybody would have by now. Most people I know who have one have downgraded it down to travel laptop or movie player. Only use I've found for those are presentations, mainly cause the battery lasts so long. But normal laptops are catching up with them in that area.so it's becoming semi useless. Additionally the processor is too slow to live stream high definition video. But to get back to the touchscreen keyboards. They work for typing small text messages. Then again I still give a preference to being social in public. Maybe I'm too old fashioned.

Well yes, but you still need tactile feedback to type quickly. Just doesn't work well without feeling the edges of the key under your fingers. Using a tablet to type is very time inefficient.

Well yes, we also use them as remote control for lab equipment. But the moment you want to visualize complex data you still need to have a computer somewhere to do it. And at that point I found that I can better use a laptop since it can do it without having to mess with remote viewers. Can't run MATLAB on a tablet. And lets be honest, Professional applications still are far more important than home use when considering these things. So I simply drag my good old 15" thinkpad along, I've had a tablet since the early move and I've bought a new one every time the old one became insufficient to run the latest software. But I simply don't see any use for it other than using it as remote control for my media centre at home. For reading books I hate LCD and OLED screens, can't help it. Guess for powerpoint slides during presentations they might be useful if you don't want to wear glasses.

So yeah, I hope this "tablet is all you need" fad goes over quickly and people get some common sense again.

A heat pump transfers thermal energy, it doesn't convert electricity.

And yeah, but a mainframe will often be restarted once in a while for maintenance. Can't afford those going offline unscheduled due to unexpected hardware or software failure.

I'd hate to be typing equations in TeX formatting on a tablet keyboard... Touch screens are inefficient and need to die eventually, we simply haven't found the right solution to the problem according to most people. In my opinion it comes under the form of the keyboard but oh well. And tablets will never be useful for professional activities, for starters they lack the processing power to go through a few gigabytes of data quickly and the quick and easy to use interface. And that's becoming a common requirement these days.

Nothing wrong with netware and pentium 4s. The former's stability record might only come in danger once somebody bothers to leave NetBSD running for over a decade. And the latter is one of the most efficient ways to convert electricity to heat, no need for central heating when you have a pentium 4!

I know most of my class mates hated analog quite badly; I never quite got why they hated it so much. Analog circuits can be very elegant compared to digital. Nothing is brute forced, the component parameters can vary so much so care has to be taken to ensure stability. Probably why I ended up liking RF electronics more than most of my class mates.

But yeah, people often forget that digital gates are still based on analog amplifiers.

Yeah, the skill level in Asian countries for things like "large scale" RF design (antennas, power amplifiers, etc.) is sub par. In fact I've heard only European universities still seem to teach that consistently. It's not an easy subject, a lot of very expensive equipment is necessary and you can't even begin to imagine the amount of time you need to work on the subject to gain some feeling for it. EM waves don't always behave as your brain would expect them to.