Captain Aggravated

Name and shame company.

Go back over the part where “We made the amazon rainforest” for me?

ffs, personal shit on personal devices, work shit on work devices. That way you don’t fat finger dick picks to colleagues.

In moon landing units that’s ~186 miles per hour, which is around three times the speed limit of an average American interstate highway. I would not expect the average passenger car to be able to achieve that speed, but there are sports cars that can. You’re probably looking at an uprange Corvette, some of the higher end Porches, a lot of Ferraris, Lambroghinis etc. Something Jeremy Clarkson would describe in an impressed tone of voice. It is my understanding that a lot of supersport motorcycles are limited to exactly that speed; most liter bikes have no problem powering themselves that fast, the question is maintaining control. If there’s a pothole or some sand or a slight curve, will the rider survive encountering it at 3 miles a minute?

Going that fast in a car, you start to wonder how long the tires are going to hold up. At its top speed, a Bugatti Veyron will actually run out of tires before it runs out of gas.

In New World landing units, it’s ~161 knots. This is very close to the V_NE of a Cessna 172 Skyhawk. The Never Exceed speed, top of the red arc. Go faster than that and the airplane is just going to break. It’s the approximate cruise speed of a Beechcraft Bonanza and the higher end of landing speeds for a Boeing 737.

I could see having lights on a somewhat sophisticated timer. Like having bedroom lighting that simulates dawn, fades on etc. Maybe making a thermostat a little bit more sophisticated. I’d like to live in a world where I could trust the power company to tell me when electricity is abundant and scarce but we’re gonna have to win Civil War 2 before we get that. My toilet and faucets do not need any digital technology at all.

I’ll tell you the most important thing to keep in mind when playing Battletech: Have a good time. Sometimes ya just gotta open up an alpha strike at point blank range, overheat and stackpole. When you do, make it as hilarious as you can.

I have never actually played a game of tabletop battletech. I’ve been a fan of the Mechwarrior sim games since I was a kid (Mechwarrior 2: 31st Century Combat blew my 9 year old brain) and I rather like the novels, they’re a guilty pleasure of mine.

Big jump from a mercenary company to the battle of Tukayyid. Comstar brought 50 regiments to that fight and butt wrecked five whole clans. That’s a biggie.

Chess needs ERPPCs and Streak SRMs.

Natural colonic more like

and really disappointed with his visit to a therapist.

I remember some guy, anthropologist or something like that, was trying to figure out why it was that people in cities made on average more money than people in small towns or rural areas, until it hit him: That’s why cities exist in the first place.

(explaining the joke for those unaware: The Battletech setting is a “nuked ourselves from interstellar space travel back to the stone age” type scenario. An interesting component of the setting is Comstar, the AT&T-like telecommunications monopoly mutated into a religious order which 1. as basically the only extant vestige of the old Star League are convinced they will someday return enlightenment to humanity, with increasing fanaticism, 2. carry telegram-like messages at telegram-like speeds throughout known space, 3. Operate as the de facto international bank and issuer of currency (the C-bill) because milliseconds of transmitter time is the only stable monetary base, and 4. the shifty fucks will sabotage any attempt to climb out of the dark age that isn’t under their control.)

Well we see what actually scares them.

The peace of Blake be with you.

solid Major League reference.

Someday you’ll try that over SSH once.

Once.

I have no idea why it is the way it is.

The sound bite I heard was “the unsafe keyword makes memory bugs greppable.”

I don’t think the shape of a bar of soap is copyrightable.

If it is a functional design, like about a decade ago I saw an ad for a system of soap where, as the bar wears down, you snap it into a new bar that has a recess in the top so you never have a small sliver of soap. That could be granted a utility patent that would expire in 20 years.

For an aesthetic or branding design, it’s possible you could take out a utility patent.

My parents used Dove soap when I was a kid; the shape was like an inch and a half thick pringle. This shape doesn’t pack efficiently; they could nest vertically but they were usually packed in rectangular cardboard boxes with a lot of space in them. Dial soap, I’ve noticed, tries to do something similar by making a roughly rectangular bar with semi-circular hollows, one running along the bar and one across. Other than making it tend to do thin in the middle and break in half this doesn’t achieve much.

Actual answer:

Rust is a relatively new programming language. Similar to C or C++ it compiles directly into executable binary code so it can be used for bare metal or low level operating system programming. It is thus relevant to Linux kernel development as things like drivers can and are being developed in Rust.

Compare this to the likes of Java or C# which get compiled to bytecode or a kind of pseudo machine code that gets run in a virtual machine, which has advantages for application development, or something like Python which is interpreted (or just-in-time compiled) at run-time, useful as an end user scripting language.

Rust is designed from the ground up to tackle some modern problems, a key one being memory safety. It’s a lot more paranoid about memory allocation and access and it’s structured around this. Older languages like C allow the programmer a lot more absolute control over the hardware, which effectively means the C programmer has a lot more footguns in his toolbox. Theoretically, Rust offers fewer opportunities for the developer to shoot himself in the foot.

Rust also comes with some really cool tooling. Compiler errors usually point straight at the problem and say something like “Shouldn’t there be a colon here?” The build system, called Cargo, is really slick in a lot of ways, handling linking, compiling, even library package management in a very automatic fashion. It’s real slick to work with.

As with anything, fans of the language can be a bit much; they stereotypically suggest rewriting everything under the sun in Rust whether it makes sense or not, and this includes the Linux kernel, which has caused some friction in the community; Linux contributors are often very accustomed to C and some don’t want to deal with anything else.

Oh it’s not like esperanto or something?