I hope this is sarcasm, because the Montreal Protocol is widely hailed as one of the greatest successes in international cooperation and pollution control. As a result of the treaty, ozone-depleting chemicals in the atmosphere (as measured in equivalent chlorine) have declined by 10%, and the ozone hole over Antarctica is poised to have resorted by 1 million square km (of a peak of 25 million square km) by 2015.

Really, the only failure of the Montreal Protocol was the promotion of HCFC-22 which does less ozone damage but is a major greenhouse gas. (It's being phased out for more ozone-safe refrigerants, but it'll be up there for centuries.)

Well, when the alternative is carbon monoxide, unburned gasoline, and NOx, I think we'll take the CO2 and water. But just because it's non-toxic doesn't mean that it's not a pollutant.

Here's a homework assignment for you. What is the layout in memory and total size in bytes of the following struct on x86 and on ARM?

struct account {
      short account_number;
      char first_name[30];
      char last_name[30];
      float balance;
      char account_type[3];
      int ssn;
};

Ignore endianness or, I suppose, continue ignoring endianness.

Imagine how much weight they'll lose if droughts like last year's put an end to meat and dairy production. Global warming will make America a vegan's dream come true!

Oh, if only they could save us as much as dumping the costs of production on our children and grandchildren has!

Most people, I find, aren't really aware of the ramifications of Administrative Law and the evolution of the Executive Branch. Over the past couple of centuries, Congress had passed laws and created agencies under the purview of the President to administrate. Over time, this has resulted in a massive federal system of administrative agencies who have the power to issue regulations based on their interpretation of the law. This has been found Constitutional, since it's nothing but the natural outgrowth of "Congress makes laws, the President executes them," but sometimes it produces shocking results to the lay person. Kind of like the patent system and "limited time," perhaps the administrative apparatus has gone far beyond its original intent, but by the letter of the law, that's perfectly fine. It's a matter for the voters and Congress to fix it, not the courts.

I've been posting AC for months; I might as well go ahead and login and admit that I've relapsed on Slashdot...

Analyzing a proposal in a vacuum creates shortsighted governance. Management of common resources like clean air or the radio spectrum or water usage require attention to be paid to other inputs into the system. If you don't, you end up with the death of a thousand paper cuts. Building a pipeline that makes cheaper the development of tar sands oil encourages its exploitation and use and puts everyone at risk of worse impact from climate change and threatens the waterways of the US due to the inevitable failure of the best constructed pipelines. (And this pipeline isn't one.)

While I'd rather see the pipeline's approval denied, offsetting its impact is a compromise. (Though, once again, Obama negotiates and make concessions with himself before negotiating with the opposition.)

I tend to find that when all people can say for a project is that it "creates jobs" or "will contribute tax dollars to the local economy" that they damn it with faint praise. Anything you pay people to do "creates jobs." Paying someone to shovel sand from one pile to another and then back "creates jobs." Whorehouses and drug dealers "create jobs." That doesn't mean that the activity itself is a net contribution. Look up the Broken Windows Fallacy.

But, I guess it will provide lots of long-term jobs in the future if the nightmare of the Pegasus pipeline spill cleanup is any indication.

Space exploration is an intellectual curiosity. Space colonization and exploitation is, in the medium to long term, the only thing that matters.

...huh? Do you need a hug?

Lawsuits.

If you're thinking of the PowerMac 5300, no, nobody counts that as the Pro line.

What are you going to do? Not pay for the free service?

I think this latest X-51 flight may have been longer than the sum of hypersonic burns on all tests thus far, but I may have overlooked some of the more recent ones.

Suffice it to say, a several-minute burn, with acceleration, is not a trivial accomplishment.

So what's your beef?

The power tools built by their subsidiary are works of art.

http://festoolusa.com/