I have a 93 Mercedes with this system and I love showing off the wiper. Its unexpected motion brings joy to both mechanical nerds and regular people. No joke, people see it and can't help but grin. It's that perfect combination where it looks odd but also is immediately recognizable as clearly superior.
Must have been patents that kept it from catching on?
No such thing as eval in non-interpreted languages. Unless you're crazy enough to invoke the compiler and exec() the result.
I used eval too in my Perl days which is why I specifically called it out. IMO any time you see eval used there should be another, more proper way to do it.
These microplastics are digestible by your immune system, though, which makes them ultimately harmless. PLA is used for drug delivery for this reason.
Being concerned about incomplete PLA degradation is like being concerned about a piece of wood breaking down into micro-woods. Yet even if you get a dangerous shard of micro-wood embedded in your skin, your body can deal with this cellose polymer just fine.
Ultimately it will break down completely someday and in the meantime, nothing will be harmed.
I love the term "write-only code", it's perfect. I used to love Perl as it felt like it flowed straight from my brain into the keyboard. What a free and magical language.
So it turned out I had ADHD. Took meds, went back to C/++ with renewed appreciation, haven't touched Perl since as it horrifies me to look at it. What a nightmare of dangling references and questionable typing. Any language that allows you to cast a string to a function and call it really needs to sit down and think about what it's doing.
I've been collecting any and all documentation pertaining to this machine and in many cases the guys I've ended up talking to are the only ones who haven't retired. Fortunately everyone so far has been happy to give me a huge data dump of everything on their drives, knowing that nobody on their end will be available to support it in a few years.
What really scares me is not the software but the aging protocols that talk to obsolete hardware. Lose one of the old AC servomotor drives and good luck finding a way to integrate a modern unit. Easy enough to mate something up to the motor and feedback, not so easy to get it to speak whatever specific flavour of SERCOS was used on the machine. At least it isn't a proprietary protocol... I'm still hoping I never have to do it.
Between GPS (jammable but likely gets you into the target area), dead reckoning, optical flow sensors and increasingly impressive onboard camera processing, RF jamming will soon be irrelevant.
Almost a decade ago I was flying agricultural mapping missions that were 99% autonomous, and the parts that weren't were problems a military drone doesn't have (soft launch and landing)
The clear counter is autocannons, likely fully automated themselves to manage large swarms. The other would be cheap anti-drone missiles that either are basically a drone themselves or a glorified model rocket. Possibly tiny, cheap and fast interceptors launched from fixed-wing drones. The weak point of drones is literally their physical weakness.
We're still running a CNC mill powered by DOS. It's in great mechanical shape, the legacy software makes a specific product that we have a good market for, it's obviously a completely standalone unit with no security concerns.
It's kind of ridiculous actually, we've upgraded the mainboards and processors from 486 to Celeron, SSDs with SATA-> IDE adaptors etc but the software and the hardware drivers run on DOS and there's no practical upgrade path. We will run her until she can't make tooling anymore
I believe there was a case made to chuck something out perpendicular-ish to the ecliptic to see what shape the heliopause and solar wind take out there, what gases are kicking around etc. Maybe check out one of the high inclination objects kicking around out there as they tend to be odd ones. Almost all exploration has been done in-plane for obvious reasons.
Commercial launch providers have made launching everything way cheaper, so I can see an agency doing this one someday even if it has to take a pile of gravity assists from the sun. As a bonus you also get a new Voyager traveling in a new direction.
I also can see a lot of people being confused as to why it couldn't take pictures of the solar system from up there that look like the textbooks... Possibly creating a whole new generation of flat-earth-esque conspiracies lol
As a barn cat owner, everything on that list goes down the cats. They are my cleanup crew. Especially chicken bones as I don't trust the dogs with them.
No cat has ever choked on bones or become sick from eating scraps. If there are things like onions, they just don't eat them. In fact none of my cats have ever died of anything other than being eaten by coyotes or run over by trucks 😥
You finally described a reason for these otherwise frustrating cables to exist! Though I like the other suggested method better, a charge-only adapter that you apply to the end of a full featured cable.
Which is a good test for the new pharmacare system, because it's cheap anyways. Hopefully it progresses to actual full drug coverage and we can kick these worthless private insurers back to hell where they came from.
I've never run Arch itself but have been super happy with Manjaro. They do the testing and batch up the updates for you. 6 months in on several different machines with no issues at all, honestly better than any Debian based desktop I've run.
Almost anything I've ever wanted has been in either the main repo or AUR, no more hassle with stale versions of this or that when I want to run some hot new software of the week. Everything just works.
However as mentioned elsewhere it's all Debian all the time for my servers, where stability is the name of the game.
True survivalist/libertarian types have always loved solar power.
I don't know how solar lost its space age coolness, though, aside from active lobbying from the fossil fuel industry to try to kill it. For awhile solar was undoubtedly the power source of the future, the same thing that was on our space probes and satellites.
I have old oil-crisis era books and magazines on my shelf which absolutely loved solar power and billed it as the cheap energy solution for the common man. Somewhere we went wrong, and I think it was Reagan (in many ways...)
I have a 93 Mercedes with this system and I love showing off the wiper. Its unexpected motion brings joy to both mechanical nerds and regular people. No joke, people see it and can't help but grin. It's that perfect combination where it looks odd but also is immediately recognizable as clearly superior.
Must have been patents that kept it from catching on?