In many cases, tunnel boring machines are custom built and buried in a side channel once construction is complete...

https://untappedcities.com/201...

There are hundreds of such machines buried across the world. They are just written off as part of the construction expense, as no one really wants the cost of extracting them overground.

The commodity PC wars in the 2000's drove down the price of desktop systems down to less that $600. This made the price of the Windows OS way more conspicuous to vendors and customers, who disliked the fact that the OS (which they called the Microsoft Windows Tax) cost a good percentage of the price of a new PC even with vendor discounts and the fact the users weren't planning to use Windows.

Then laptops and netbooks became powerful enough to read email and surf the web. These are quickly followed by netbooks and smartphones. Users weren't willing to fork out another hundred $$$$ every year for upgraded Microsoft Word/Spreadsheet and other applications. So they all have had to move to the "service" model with annual or monthly licenses, and advertising in order to continue to bring in revenue. The problems with malware led to the development of app stores. Virus databases on PC's were taking up 250 Megabytes of disk space.

The problem is the hardware is so complex now. All that logic in CPU's,GPU's, bus protocols, is usually patented protected, cross-licensed, NDA, DRM and DMCA restricted, Sometimes the driver code is actually used to prevent combinations of hardware settings that work but aren't licensed, aren't in the specification or are going to be patented in future. It takes teams of 200+ developers to get all the device driver software for a GPU: Windows/Android/Linux window system support + actual hardware.

Linux is the last option left now.

BYTE magazine would be a good indication. There are online manuals which cover the bus and CPU's:

http://www.s100computers.com/M...
http://www.pestingers.net/page...

Before home computers, if you wanted a computer system, you had to build it yourself as a S-100 rack mounted system. You could buy all sorts of add-on boards (CPU, speech synthesizer, text display video board). Everything was rack mounted. CPU's were beefy for the time: 68030

http://www.s100computers.com/H...

There used to be competitions to be in the most remote location and take a photograph of yourself. That was before the days of Photoshop, Gimp and other utilities. So people would go hill-climbing or sailing out in the ocean, or find some generic bit of sand dune and say they were in somewhere exotic. Much easier if you can just fake your GPS coordinate.

They do admit to logging keystrokes so they determine best usage of menu options and to provide hints on how you can be more productive through keyboard shortcuts.

Others fear they might be collecting code fragments to provide as "Snippets" for others to use.

If they come from a country that permits polygamy, you end up with a whole developer team coming across and living in the same house.

This is California They would mandate the temperatures that water boils and freezes at.

Try reading a book and skip the odd page or two. I used to make that mistake while reading a short story for English class at high school.

"Dr Evil ran from compound with the secret weapon he had stolen from the research lab and ran towards his waiting escape ..." [NEXT PAGE] ... "donkey. He put his belongings in the satchels on either side, climbed into the saddle and gave the creature a gentle kick. The donkey brayed and he begin his slow ascent up the mountain. Behind him he could hear men shouting, but soon the voices died away. He was all alone in the wilderness in the dark where no one could find him..."

It was the same decades ago. And it's the same with a lot of embedded/electronics companies. They stick to hardware they know that will work, even if it is decades old, because that's what the whole company and the principal engineers used back then. And if they do have the newest/latest hardware, all the software must be backwards compatible with the old hardware, so you won't get to use the new features of the new hardware. Anything career building will be outsourced to a contractor, to make sure you don't learn anything transferrable. You'll have a three month or six month notice period which makes it impossible to change jobs.

They might have found it so hard to find staff that they offshore some work. So then they need headhunters to literally hunt down people with embedded experience. And I literally mean "hunt down". Stalking people via LinkedIn by looking for keywords. Even getting GCHQ to monitor Emails and social media for anyone posting a CV, then using those Email addreses and accounts to make connections. Sometimes even sending anonymous Emails or Linkedin messages providing "careers advice".

I think string theory is the obvious answer. Photons and atomic particles are both energy. Atomic particles can be converted into photons when they disintegrate. Two gamma rays can form an electron and positron. When a photon descends a gravity well, the different in energy levels is equivalent to a graviton - the electric and magnetic fields seem to fall apart or contract. If a photon could be made to wrap around a sphere or itself, then it would be possible that the parts with positive or negative electric/magnetic field would be the ones on the outside of the surface. Then these could have positive/negative charge and be matter/antimatter.

No different from bacterial evolution to be able to process a new sugar molecule. An existing colony of mono-culture bacteria will grow and grow while they can use the normal food supply. Then when they run out of that food supply, their metabolism slows down and mutations start to accumulate as individuals live and die. Every individual cycles through random combinations and mutations of genes, and there are billions of individuals. Eventually one lucky individual hits on the right combination and there is a sudden explosion as that new food supply can be utilized. Then the process repeats.

The same happened with the automobiles and steam engines. Thousands of inventors would try adding all sorts of different gadgets and gizmos to improve power and output. Things like carburettors, water cooling, gearboxes, safety valves, piston arrangements like rotary, multi-rotary, V, X and delta. But many inventors killed or seriously injured themselves when their inventions exploded. Then it became better to have trained engineers working in properly funded and inspected labs.

The problem with so many scientists and research labs, is that everyone has to be careful "not to step on anyone else's toes" . So the more people in the field, the narrower the focus for every PhD and post-doc researcher. Plus there is so much commercial software that has been patented in CAD/CAM/FEA/Matlab/Mathematica and animation (3DMax/Unity/Unreal/Maya) that research now is really just analyzing the results from applications or running existing code and not really designing algorithms. Those fundamental science tasks are reserved for"world class" universities.

Someone like James Clerk Maxwell has the full freedom to explore the world of physics and mathematics since there wasn't any other work in the field.But he did write and present research papers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

96% of the mass of atoms comes from the interaction between the individual quarks that make up protons and neutrons and the gluon field that surrounds them. The only way of interacting with atomic nucleii is with magnetic fields and high-energy photons in the gamma ray range of the spectrum.

From the change in mass during fusion and fission, we get some energy released and captured as heat.