Unfortunately, it is not obsolete, as much as I'd like it - any legal document as well as prescription receipts I send still need to be faxed, even if I fax it from a computer to another computer without printing it. The problem is signatures are still legal if faxed, but not if sent by other electronic means including email (at least that's what the lawyers told me - IANAL). Go government - your technology requirements are stuck in the 1980s!
My wife plays board games already sometimes, and has played RPGs. When she tries to play video games, it is always at parties or when I have friends over and she wants to join in... but lacks controller skills to even play Little Big Planet. I own a PS3 and several gaming computers and she can practice any time, but she only wants to play when people are doing it socially. Unfortunately, she gets frustrated with me as a teacher and won't do it alone
Says the person that never used a Disk ][. The C64 disk drive was only marginally faster than the C64 tape drive, which is to say, go take a nap while loading or saving anything. Also the C64's lack of expandability made it obsolete faster.
I'm not saying the C64 was bad - great graphics and sound for the price at that time compared to pretty much anyone else, but certainly not better in every way. Now Amiga OTOH...
That's right - the rev B motherboard. That was required for double high rez with the 80 column card. I was lucky my mom got a rev B because I had no idea, nor should I have had any idea at that age. Not sure what other features the rev B had though. I do know it was also expandable to about 1.5MB of memory using every slot (we used 4 slots and had around 768k, but I think only Appleworks really took advantage of it).
Yes, most ][+ users added a 16k card. The
The first computer I ever used was an 16k Apple ][ with tape drive at my elementary school. It was a real pain to load or save data on it. The next year (or maybe it was 2 or 3 years later, but still elementary school) the school got 4 48k Apple ][+s with Disk ][ drives and those were far and away superior. The old machine got put in a corner and I doubt it was ever used again.
The US/US industry doesn't care about thorium reactors - the industry is only interested in the Integral Fast Reactor, burning uranium. At least IFR can burn nuclear waste, so it isn't a total loss, but we've already lost the race to develop them to Russia by continuously canceling our test reactors (Russia has two ~2000MW online and is building a full scale reactor from what I remember). The industry estimates that IFRs burning just nuclear wast can power the world for 1500 years. When the US (and British) nuclear industry talks about thorium, they ALWAYS mean in solid fuel reactors where it is an inferior fuel. When thorium advocates talk about thorium, they ALWAYS mean in a liquid fuel design based on the 1960s molten salt reactor experiment (MSRE).
The private industry, China, and France seem to be the only ones that like LFTR (liquid fluoride thorium reactor, the modern update to the MSRE, though France's is liquid lithium, a less toxic salt, so it should be LLTR, but they call it something else), so even if the US eventually goes that direction, we will be last to develop a reactor and buy that tech from other countries. The US is no longer an innovator in this area, we are a consumer, and the NRC and congress is at fault for most of it.
Actually, the first assertion is very close to the truth - the NRC highly regulates access to thorium because of proliferation concerns, even though you'd need a nuclear reactor to make it into a useable nuclear weapon and it wouldn't be terribly effective in a dirty bomb. China just dumps it into landfills. It is an insoluble metal, so worries about it getting into the water table (alpha emitters are only really only dangerous if ingested, and thorium is a relatively slow one) is probably a non-issue.
If you look at the facts, and even if you could tie violent video games in as being the primary factor in this crime (good luck with that), the shooter was still old enough to buy both guns and violent video games on his own. The assault rifle was his mom's, and banning that type of weapon really won't stop the problem because the cat's out of the bag and people own them already (unless you make them illegal to own and ask all owners to turn them in... good luck with that - a friend of mine will let you take his assault rifle collection when you pry them from his cold, dead fingers). Banning guns and taxing violent video games is a knee jerk reaction that ignores the primary problem - the need to improve the mental health program and fix databases used for criminal background checks (for instance, the Virginia shooter wasn't in the background check database despite having mental health and violence issues).
He is dead on with the state of STL 10 years ago, as STL wasn't standard in compilers yet and add ons like STLport were buggy on some platforms. I remember supplying plenty of bug fixes at least, and that certainly wasn't 10 years ago.
As for the article and as an old C programmer that moved to C++, I agree for the most part. I do admit I don't like public val and prefer getVal() setVal() functions, or the opposite of what he said; they may add code, but using them also forces encapsulation, and friend functions have caused debug hell for me more than once (I despise the f**kers, but sometimes they are necessary).
It still would take years to get past the public perception of nuclear, despite the fact that a reactor in cold shutdown would have little risk, even as a "dirty bomb" explosion that spread all of its radioactive materials around. Public perception is still any amount of any kind of radiation is bad.
The USSR had a bunch of nuclear powered spy satellites, but AFAIK, the only non-radioisotope reactor the US has launched into space is SNAP-10A (in fact, confirmed). I vaguely remember the Soviets had nuclear powered spy satellites, as well (also confirmed - they were called Upravlyaemy Sputnik Aktivnyj or US-A, lol).
While I agree with the modding, I'd flip that around - the US is a republic by definition; it uses (and has always used) representative democratic principles to elect its representatives in that republic. There has not been a democracy (form of government) since ancient Athens because, like true communism (and I mean not the dictatorships we have called communism), it doesn't scale well.
The problem is increasing taxation isn't really fixing the problem. Even increasing taxes on the top 2% like Obama demanded only affects about 15% of taxpayers; the rest pay AMT or capital gains taxes only. And don't think people in the top 15% are rich - that is only about a joint income of ~$80000 I believe ($100k was top 8-9% when I checked last). Also using income alone as judgment for taxation is a bad measuring stick - I know a married doctor and lawyer, and by occupation I'm sure you think they're loaded, but they have over $350000 in student loan debt and the wife/doctor didn't work several years after school because she was bearing/rearing her two children.
Also the Iraq war is over; Afghanistan was never about oil because they don't have much, if any. If you want to see oil companies being enriched, look at how they are taxed, or rather how they are not taxed and subsidized and pay negative taxes while reaping billions in profits.
Never saw a briefcase model, but I do remember the old DynaTACs that I think were about $4000 (probably 10k it today's dollars). My mom had the successor to that (miniTAC iirc), which was one of the first non-car cell phones I personally saw, but that was more like 1990.
Well, it is possible, since cell phone networks were first set up in 1978, and my wife still has her (deceased) mom's 1979 cell phone - it requires a cigarette lighter plug (no battery) and is meant to be used in a car. The thing is enormous and heavy and I'm not sure why she keeps it other than sentimental value, as I'm sure it is useless now, but is kind of a cool conversation piece. That said, I was also in my late 20s before I got one, but my brother has had one since he was 20 (his college internship business paid for it) and he is also 42.
I imagine that depends on where you live... for a time I lived on the Canadian border with the nearest town about 15 minutes away across the border and the nearest US town bigger than 26 people (which consisted of a post office and a bar and was about 3 miles away, so not much of a town) over an hour away. I couldn't drink in the US bar because I was 19/20 when I lived there, so my housemate and I crossed the border to hit the bars pretty much every weekend. In any case, having km/h was a nice thing because my housemates 1960s era muscle car didn't have it.
Serving coffee on aircraft causes turbulence.
