Rust can give you precise control of memory layout, and supports inline assembly as well as calling C functions. So it ought to have everything you need for controlling hardware.

Rust the language is young but stable (code you write now should continue to work in newer releases). And it sounds like this is a relatively small project that shouldn't need a ton of 3rd-party libraries, so the maturity of the library ecosystem isn't as big a concern.

My experience was that Rust took a little getting used to but it's a pretty nice language. In addition to the safety guarantees, it gives you a lot of expressiveness compared to C++ and (especially) C -- algebraic datatypes, very nice iterators, lambdas, generics, etc. And I expect that any well-rounded developer with a good grasp of C could learn Rust pretty quickly.

Apparently a lot of the rat addiction studies are flawed, in that they keep the rats in cages without social interaction or other forms of entertainment, so whatever drug/electrical stimulation the researchers provide is their only possible source of pleasure. Rats kept in more stimulating environments are much more resistant to addiction. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...)

I recall reading recently that a similar effect can be seen in humans. People who can get their jollies elsewhere mostly don't become addicated to drugs.

Interesting article. But I don't think it reaches the conclusion that you're suggesting.

Some people like to use the salmon study as proof that fMRI is woo, but this isn't the case, it's actually a study to show the importance of correcting your stats.

So basically fMRI studies are only as good (or as bad) as the statistical analysis you do of the data. Which is probably the case for a large portion of modern science.

But my editor can do the indentation for me based on the braces. And if I change the control flow (for example, moving a block of code into an if), the editor can easily reindent the whole block. So using whitespace for indentation doesn't save me any work and in some cases takes more work (when I have to manually adjust indentation because the editor can't figure it out).

It's a relatively minor annoyance, and I'm actually a big fan of Python. But I sometimes wish it had an "end" keyword like Lua or Ruby.

in North America, all native berries with a blue or purple color are edible

Pokeweed has purple berries and some species are poisonous: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

According to the linked article they are native to North America. They certainly grew wild all around my house when I was a kid.

Fire burns up undergrowth and dead branches on the forest floor, but the larger trees mostly survive. Logging removes the large trees and allows brush to grow up in its place.

So logging has a totally different ecological impact, and probably increases the risk of fire.

I'm using a VirtualBox VM for Netflix streaming and it actually works pretty well for me. Haven't had to boot into windows for a few months now. The only issue I had was some audio lag which turned out to be caused by PulseAudio.

What problems have you run into?

Or even better, use RLM. Same basic idea as FlexLM (and written by the same guys, I believe), except with some of the most egregious annoyances fixed. And their pricing is a lot more reasonable.

20 year copyright term limits are very reasonable. The current term limits + options to extend are absolutely unreasonable, and they drive people to rebellion.

I mostly agree with you, and I definitely favor shorter copyright terms. But I doubt that 20+ year-old works make up a significant chunk of online piracy. People are largely downloading recent movies, games, and music, and limiting copyright to 20 years probably won't put much of a dent in it.

I can see where the GP is coming from. I suppose it depends on your definition of productive -- there are lots of things in life that can produce feelings of accomplishment and satisfaction even if you don't make any money at them (playing music, studying martial arts, hobby coding, etc). I personally classify those as "productive" activities.

Gaming can be a good way to relax or kill time if you're bored, but in the long run I don't find it as rewarding as my other hobbies. On the other hand, if I'm a bit tired/unmotivated, and have a good game at hand, it's easy to spend all day playing it. But at the end of the day I'll be less happy than if I did something "productive".