Perhaps I'd become effortlessly fluent in Aramaic if I had to read enough articles in it, but absent some substantial benefit I'd prefer to keep with standard English.
Because x8 is simply shifting 3 bits left so it's "free" (fixed-sized shifts are very simple to implement), whereas generating the x7 would require the additional circuitry, which additionally will be more expensive than the x3 was (since it's another shift+add beyond what x3 required)
At Symbian defects were classified from P1-P4, with the inevitable shit-fights about adding magic runes to the title so everyone knows that your P1 is more important than theirs.
The day came when, after prolonged hand wringing and with stern observations about great power and great responsibility, the priority could be set to P0. But like any bunch of junkies we came off this new high all too quickly and the P-1 classification arrived, the showstopper of showstoppers.
In hindsight what I most regret is that we stuck with an integer field; we were denied the expressive power of fractionally critical issues.
Planned range for the Boom Overture is 4900 miles, so only a little better than the 4500 miles of Concorde, which occasionally had to make a refueling stop going westward over the Atlantic. So it won't have the capability for transpolar or Trans-Pacific flights.
Slash-Dot chortled at that mail but I yearned to work for a software company where the CEO would spend their after-hours time actually eating some dog food & providing feedback (at the time I worked for a mobile phone company and all the mails from the C-suite to the world at large ended with "sent from my (competitor device)" because they preferred to use them and seemingly didn't care to drive improvements to their own products.)
That's too bitter. Speaking as a westerner married into an East German family, what people seem to crave more than anything is stability, which the dead hand of The Party delivered. When I talk to them about the comforts and freedoms of their post-1990 life there's a long list of details but behind it there's a ground state of "Ostalgie", gentle yearning for a time when if tomorrow wouldn't bring especial wonders nor would it bring calamity. And crucially this would be true for everyone in your community: with far less latitude for personal decisions of consequence nobody was far ahead or behind.
That description of heavy lead shielding of a power plant on Mir surprises me since photos show it as having solar arrays. Wikipedia also gives the power source as solar with no mention of lead components. Can you add further details of this?
It was just my off-hand recollection. I could be mistaken or possibly conflating Mir with some other space craft that was de-orbited in the past. I'm fairly confident that the Mir de-orbit was notable both because of its size and that it was expected to have an unusual degree of debris surviving re-entry and reaching the surface.
After the external auditors resigned saying that the financials couldn't be trusted the fact that an internal report run from the board of the directors clears them mightn't be as generally reassuring as you seem to find it.
