Do you have any literature on this being called a pseudo-mode and the tradeoffs between it and "real" modes? I am currently pretty interested in these kinds of topics.
I'm sorry, I don't know of any online resources (and after googling, it seems the more common term is "quasimode") but I can heartily recommend the book The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. It's a seminal book on designing interactions between humans and objects, and was required reading in my human-computer interaction class in college.
On the other hand, people not only drive, but also oppose progress; as a smarter than me person (don't remember who it was) said: Science advances one funeral at a time (it's basically like evolution). If people stop dying (barring accidents), we'll basically stop advancing as well.
Aging eventually impairs the brain. If life extension is possible, it will have to protect pretty much all your organs from aging, and why would the brain be excluded?
Again, you're preseenting assumptions. We don't know that things will still work that way if people lived radically longer. You certainly don't know that well enough to shun people who try to find out.
True, and the functions in which inlining is most effective are small non recursive functions that don't lose any debug info from omitting the frame pointer.
> And good plastics are plastic in the traditional sense of the word: if you drop them, they'll absorb the force by deforming and then spring back into place.
That's not what I was taught plastic meant. I was taught both plastic and elastic materials deform under force, but the elastic ones (not the plastic ones) return to their original form once the force is gone …
"Plastic" actually stands for "thermoplastic", meaning they can be easily deformed when hot. At normal temperatures, a thermoplastic material can be pretty elastic.
If you drop an iPhone hard enough it wil dent. Drop a polycarbonate phone: no problem. Windows phone wasn't a great OS, but the Lumia line were absolute tanks.
Well, a great many connectors (even, or rather, especially industrial ones) are made from PA6 or 66 with some glass fiber fill; including the actual contact carriers (if they are a separate part). FR4 is somewhat hygroscopic as well; moisture expansion causes real problems for some applications. Never heard of issues with PA connectors.
In mechanical engineering, plastic deformation does refer to permanent/non-reversible changes (as opposed to elastic deformation) past the elastic limit. That said, plasticity is more commonly used to suggest malleability.