lol! You must be referring to the ICFP contest 2015. http://icfpcontest.org/

I was actually inspired by the concept that lovecraftian horrors can be accessed and interacted with programmatically, prominently featured in Stross's Atrocity Archives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Atrocity_Archives

Will new solar panels last 25 years? Most of stuff on the outside on my house doesn't have a lifespan that long. You could end up paying off the loan after the panels have stopped working.

Most are warranteed at a particular percentage of nameplate capacity (95%+) at delivery and then in a straight-line decay after a certain point out to a certain level (75-80%) at 25 years.

http://us.sunpower.com/sites/sunpower/files/media-library/wa... [edit: better link], for example. that is 95% through year 5, then .4% linearly through year 25, or 87% of nameplate at year 25. They are a premium vendor, but the warantee structure is fairly standard across legitimate vendors.

edit: http://www.yinglisolar.com/assets/uploads/warranty/downloads... - 98% at install, 92% at 10 years, and 82% at 25 years.

edit: http://www.trinasolar.com/downloads/us/products/EN_Trina_War... 2.5/3.5% in year 1, 0.7/0.68% through year 25 (80.7/80.18 % at end) for poly/mono- crystalline products, respectively ... and so on.

an upvote is not enough, thank you for a response with hard numbers and multiple linked sources.

Many have guarantees of 20 years. Whether there will be someone around to honor that guarantee is another matter, of course.

Another reason stencil shadows are difficult in a production environment is that any model that casts a shadow needs to be watertight (i.e. a manifold). Models need to have to full geometry for things like hair, thin fins, and grass.

If a triangular surface has a hole (a cycle of one-triangle-only edges) it's manifold but not watertight.

I while ago I bought a webcam, plugged it in and entered my wifi password. I little bit later I realized that it had reconfigured my router and was broadcasting to the internet. Wow, I'm all for easy to install, but that's crazy. I couldn't believe that my router was configurable automatically without entering the password. I fixed my router, but you have to be pretty tech savvy to understand that your cheap baby cam is broadcasting pictures from inside your house to the entire world by default.

I wanted to get a video baby monitor for my twins, but gave absolutely no thought into getting an internet-connected one. I just didn't see the benefit and it seemed super creepy having the camera accessible over the internet.

Now, after about two months, I realize that I hardly ever use the video feature and the audio is almost always enough. I guess we'll see if I change my mind as the babies get a little older, but I'd rather have my $250 back and just have gotten a simple audio monitor.

This is the purpose of unpnp port forwarding. Devices can request an open port from the firewall. I have yet to see a consumer router where this was off by default. Its dangerous stuff for those with no idea what's going on. At the very least it should be off by default.

Unlike Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft, OneDrive doesn't seem to sync a folder on my PC. You have to manually drag files and folders to upload them. But free (I already have Prime) is a good price to backup my 500GB of photos.

Are you saying that the Amazon Cloud Drive client is allowing to access files on the cloud, that are not synchronized to your machine? If that is the case, this is a first, and it is great to hear!

When Vista first came out, Microsoft forced OpenGL to be a layer above DirectX. But they pretty quickly backed down and let people build direct OpenGL drivers again.

Ah, this is where I got it from. I didn't realize they changed it back.