helicon

Begs the question why does the IMDb voting system allow reviews before the movie's release date?

Posts like this are why I love HN. I recently wrote a program to find anagrams of a given string (a Countdown solver if you live in the UK).

It includes a really naive method for generating all possible permutations of the string, but reading this post I can immediately see a far better way to do it.

That's my weekend taken care of! thanks to the poster and author.

Forgive me if this is a silly question but when he talks about "beautiful solar-roof-with-battery", is he talking about car roofs or roofs of buildings?

An electric car with a solar roof that charges all day would be pretty cool.

Not wanting to be overly dramatic, but as someone who wasn't around in the sixties this feels like our moon landing!

I don't mean the range so much as it sounds like he could be hinting that the car will be capable of being fully autonomous. Considering the price point for the entry level version is ~35k, could we be about to see the first mass market self driving car?

"the power is on your decision not to buy any products from them"

The problem is our power is diluted.

Ah... But let's say you and I have already met up in a training camp in Afghanistan or Syria and installed an apk on our smartphones!

But those are interesting points.

But the fact is we can't stop people cooking up nerve gas and anthrax in their garages if they want to. Just like we can't stop them building their own encrypted apps. Banning it won't stop a determined group.

The IRA were known to recruit top stem students from universities in Ireland during their campaign to make bombs. Surely an entity as large and as well financed and ISIS would have little trouble finding bright young engineers & technologists sympathetic to their cause to simply build their own encrypted services? And then so much for the spooks 'backdoors'

I took it to mean the laser would be based on the station and so could transmit directly to a ground station cutting out the extra 22,000 mile extra hop to the geosync satellite?

I disagree. Although that technology is wonderful, you will still always need the kind the drive and determination to do figure things out for yourself.

It's one thing being shown how to do something, it's another thing to work it out for yourself, in much the same way as studying maths or physic etc.