Terrorists don't give a shit about American freedoms, budgets, and personal dignity. They want US forces out of the Middle East and freedom to impose their medieval theocracy on anyone they can reach.
Of course they don't care about our freedom, etc. Their goal is to make our lives worse in whatever way they can until they get what they want.
So far, the score in the War on Terror is probably a Nil-all draw between Team America and Islamic ultra-conservatism.
You're right that the terrorists haven't achieved their end goals in any significant way, but they've certainly had a lot of success with their intermediate goals. I think they have a commanding lead, because we've chosen to give it to them.
However, if enough people turn what would be a 30-second check into a 3-minute check, they will eventually have to hire more staff to process the normal flow of people.
So we can waste our time AND increase our federal debt!
I understand your point, but I don't think this sort of protest will accomplish anything. If we want to change it, we need to apply political pressure to the top. We need to convince our congressmen to impose limitations on the TSA.
On a less serious note, you could try to turn up the volume by not bathing for a couple of weeks before your trip. See if you can make yourself so nasty that the TSA employees refuse to pat you down. Please let me know when you're going to do this, though, so I can make sure I don't end up having to sit next to you on the plane.
And we have a Supreme Court that could even then nullify it on constitutional grounds.
Wouldn't even require the Supreme Court, and whichever federal court shot it down wouldn't have to appeal to the Constitution.
An Executive Agreement has the same legal standing as an Executive Order -- meaning it can only address things that are within the president's scope of authority. If the agreement were about, say, the positioning of US air craft carriers, then the president could sign that because he has the authority to order our air craft carriers to go wherever he likes. He can also tell various federal bureaucracies what to do. But when it comes to defining copyright and patent terms, the president has no authority.
I guess that's sort of an appeal to the Constitution, in that it goes back to the constitutional division of powers.
If Obama signs this, I expect it to get challenged and the first federal court to strike it down immediately. I doubt the Supreme Court would ever see it, either because the government would be smart enough not to appeal the first ruling or because the Supremes would just decline certiorari and let the lower court ruling stand.
Executive Agreements can have essentially the same scope as a Treaty. The primary difference between a Treaty and an Executive Agreement in its effect is the priority of supremacy they are applied.
No, that's not the difference. The difference is that Executive Agreements are only commitments by the president and not by the country. What does that mean? That means that only powers delegated to the president can be used to carry out the terms of the agreement. If the president has the authority to order done all of the US obligations, then it can be an Executive Agreement. If the agreement would mean the country has to do things the president doesn't have the authority to do then it can't be an Executive Agreement.
Well, technically, it can, but the parts of it that exceed the president's authority will be unenforceable.
An Executive agreement tends to sit just slightly above federal laws, but they cannot contradict any treaties or the Constitution itself.
No, an Executive Agreement sits below federal laws, alongside Executive Orders. And no laws or treaties can contradict the Constitution.
Odd. I sat in those chairs for about 17 years myself, and nearly all of it in a part of the country where a humid day might reach 50% relative humidity and the average day is less than 30% -- and I never once got shocked by the chair. I'm not doubting you, just wondering what the difference is.
I need lots more detail to believe this is even remotely feasible. If this was a small American company I would be sure it's a scam designed to extract money from gullible investors. For some reason, the fact that it's German gives me a little more credulity -- but not enough.
The whole thing that makes eReaders so brilliant is the reflective screen. I'm fine with backlit screens, but for laptops and desktops. For reader things, a reflective screen is the way to go not only for battery life but for all purpose readability as well.
I disagree. I've avoided the e-ink screens so far for exactly that reason -- no backlight means I can't read in the dark. I do much of my reading in bed at night and a nice backlight, turned way down, is perfect: great visibility, no extra light to muck with and dim enough that it doesn't keep my wife from sleeping.
So far, I've gone through a Rocket eBook, a couple of RCA REB-1150s and now I use my iPod Touch, until I get an iPad -- or maybe the new Nook. A backlight is essential. Battery life really isn't that much of a problem; my iPod Touch only runs about 10 hours, which is marginal but acceptable, while the dedicated readers were 20+ hours on a charge.
Oh, and all of the above were perfectly readable in full sunlight as well. A backlight doesn't mean the screen can't also be reflective. Laptop screens aren't, but that's because they're generally intended to be used indoors.
As for "looking like paper", who cares? Paper may be what we're most accustomed to reading on, because it was the best mass-produceable printing technology we had for centuries, but that doesn't mean it's the only option, or even the best option.
There were some areas in which German arms were significantly better than anything the allies fielded, though. The first that comes to mind is the MG 42. There was just no comparison between it and the M1919, M1911 or Bren, in terms of reliability, simplicity of operation and certainly not in firepower. The much higher cyclic rate meant the 42 could lay down an tremendous volume of fire. German infantry was organized around the machine gun and was significantly more effective on a per-man basis because of it.
The malloc/new that fails causing a process to crash might not be the process that is consuming huge amounts of memory in the first place.
It might not, but it usually is. The probability that a given process will be the one that triggers the OOM killer is proportional to the amount of memory that process is allocating. If one process is allocating 99.9% of the memory, there's a 99.9% chance it will be the one that triggers the OOM killer.
But, actually, Linux doesn't just pick the process with the failed allocation to kill. Instead, when a process makes a memory request which cannot be fulfilled, the OS runs a quick calculation of the memory usage "badness" of all processes. The base of the badness score is the processes resident memory, plus the resident memory of child processes. Processes that have been "nice'd" get a score boost (on the theory they're likely to be less important), but long-running processes get a score decrease (on the theory they're likely to be more important). Superuser processes have their score decreased. Finally, processes have their scores decreased by a user-settable value in/proc//oom_adj (default is no adjustment). Also, if/proc//oom_adj is set to the constant OOM_DISABLE, then the process is not killable.
When memory runs out, Linux kills the process with the highest score. If a single ordinary user process, especially a short-lived desktop process, has consumed nearly all of the system RAM, and no one has messed with oom_adj for that process, then it WILL be the one that dies.
Here's a (probably excessively long and complex; I'm no shell guru) one-liner that will show the current OOM scores for all of your processes, sorted from lowest to highest:
How about when systems are hacked and they crash due to bad pointer manipulation and buffer overruns... and people die?
Performance isn't everything.
That's why C++ is better than C. With C++ you can ban naked pointers from your code and use bounds-checking objects for buffers. With a little care, you can do it with negligible overhead, too -- preserving the "fast" part.
Of course, there's a lot of C++ code out there that uses naked pointers and fixed-sized unchecked buffers, but that's the programmer's choice. C++ makes it easy for programmers to be safe, but doesn't presume to force it on them. The only real complaint I have about the language is that its multi-paradigmatic approach and the practical constraints under which it was designed have led to a great deal of complexity. That's not an issue for me when I'm the only coder on a project, but when it comes time to build a team it can be hard to find a sufficiently-competent group, and training competent C++ programmers up from zero takes years.
Not monitoring anything isn't good parenting either.
Very true.
Also, believing the same parenting approach works with every kid is also bad parenting. Different kids require different degrees of supervision. With some, parents need to exercise significant control over their environment because the kids make such bad choices that left to their own they wouldn't survive to adulthood. I have a daughter who would not be alive today if we hadn't intervened and taken complete control of her life. Of course, she's not normal. In fact she suffers from a serious mental illness -- though we didn't learn that until we got professional help later.
For those who want to discount my experience, saying "Yeah, but that's different"... mental illness is far, far more common than you realize, and distinguishing it from the normal hormone-driven semi-rationality of adolescence is often very hard for parents to do, partly because we're not trained psychologists and partly because we're too close.
With other kids, that degree of control will be stifling and just cause the child to do everything he or she can to break free. With still others, that degree of control will be accepted and perhaps even welcomed -- but with the effect that the child never develops the confidence or ability to make decisions. Some kids need to be reined in, others need to be pushed out of the nest, most need some mixture of both to develop into the best people they can be.
Parenting is the single hardest thing you will ever do in your life, and it's impossible to do it without making some bad decisions along the way, simply because there's often no way to know at the time what the right decision is.
IMO, parents should evaluate the usefulness and the advantages and disadvantages of every tool that comes along. I have no doubt whatsoever that there are some kids whose parents need to exercise control over their texting. I think it's more likely that a lot of kids just need to have the phones taken away from them, or at least to have texting disabled entirely (text-only communication and emotionally-volatile teens are a really, really bad combination). For my daughter, what I wish we could get is a restricted phone -- no texting, and only the ability to call a specific set of numbers, but something that doesn't look like it's for pre-schoolers (she's 15). For now, she just doesn't get a phone until she can demonstrate that she can deal with the stresses of high school without self-destructing.
You legalize pot, kids will have a much harder time getting their hands on it. Won't be impossible, of course, they can get an adult to buy it for them as they do with alcohol. However it'll be harder than it is now.
So... kids will have to switch to meth for their parties instead of pot, because it will be easier to get?
That may be an unpleasant unintended consequence of the legalization of pot.
With NAT, I can keep my internal IPs constant even if I switch ISPs (be it a backup connection or whatever). Only the NAT router needs to know that the external IP changed, other PCs usually don't care. And internal IPs stay constant.
In the v6 world you use unique local addresses to address this. In v4 world, each network card typically has only a single IP address. In v6 world, each device typically has at least two addresses, and may well have more. The two that every device has are a link-local address and a globally-routable address. If you want stable local addresses you can add a third address to each NIC, a unique local address.
Unique local addresses begin with FDxx:xxxx:xxxx:yyyy::, where the x's represent a 40-bit globally-unique ID and the y's represent a 16-bit subnet ID. You pick your own global ID by generating a 40-bit random number. You can then create whatever subnets you like, up to 65536 subnets, each of which can contain up to 65536 hosts.
So, you can provide permanent local addresses for all of the hosts on your network that will not change when you change ISPs or whatever. Doing this should be as simple as telling your RAD or DHCPv6 (whichever you're using) to assign unique local addresses. Consumer-grade devices should even automatically choose a random global ID for you, if you don't want to enter your own.
I don't think your second example is an extremist -- meaning someone who cares deeply, even excessively, about an issue. Rather, that sort is just an immature blowhard who likes to spout off but obviously doesn't really care about the issues at all.
I agree with you on that, but it doesn't lower my opinion of Stallman. Important ideas often require extremists to push them. More "reasonable" people won't make the effort required.
If you just force farmers to pay their workers what citizens here will accept, the prices of produce will go up, people will import their produce instead and the farmers will lose their farms because no one will buy their product.
That is a very valid point.
If we want to deal with illegal immigration and rampant outsourcing, we need to improve the standards of living elsewhere. Or make it cheaper to live here.
Somehow, your post manages to sound informant without saying anything meaningful. The point was that all the "getting started" time lag for torrents make them infeasible for smaller files (under 100 MB or so) such as are typical of Linux distro package files. The specific reasons for this aren't important, the fact that those reasons cannot be changed is.
The specific reasons aren't important? Maybe not to you. For others, this site is "News for Nerds", and we nerds appreciate those kinds of details. They may not have any effect on the discussion at hand (or they may -- in technology details are often crucial!), but they're interesting nonetheless. And how do you know they can't be changed? Perhaps the GP just triggered someone to get creative and to invent a next-generation BT protocol that can improve startup time. An efficient way to cache piece bitmaps in the tracker perhaps? Designation of some "default seeders" that the client can start getting data from instantly until it finds some good peers? Something else?
I posit that the primary reason BT startup is slow is because the applications it was designed for don't require fast startup. Change the design requirements and the result will change.
The solution is to remove the cheap labor from the equation completely
Here's a better solution: Make it easy for the cheap labor to come into the country legally. The farmer would then have to comply with all of the labor laws to employ them, including minimum wages. No more $2 per hour melon pickers.
Most of the problems with illegal immigration (the actual problems, not the imaginary problems) boil down to having this class of people in the country who don't dare interact with the US legal system. Make them legal, and all of those problems disappear.
Make it a crime to employ an undocumented worker.
It is a crime. It needs to be a bigger crime, though, and we need a good way to catch such employers.
I suggest turning the people who absolutely can't be fooled about the employee status against the employers. Who absolutely knows the legal status of the employees? The illegal employees themselves. Offer a green card to any illegal who rats out their boss, throw the boss in jail, and very quickly you'll find that no one is willing to employ anyone who can't prove they're legal.
Make it a crime to pay someone less than minimum wage
Again, it is a crime. And because it's a crime, it doesn't happen -- except when the employees are afraid to use the legal system.
or better yet, a crime to pay someone less than fair market wages
What's a fair market wage? And how can the market set a fair wage if no one is allowed to pay one penny under whatever that wage is? Markets require a range of prices offered to settle on a price that is fair. This suggestion makes no sense.
Geez, just tow a small trailer with a generator. Sure, it's using gas, but not much.
Yes! I'm really surprised we haven't seen any designs that take this approach. Pure EV for commuting plus a smallish generator maybe 40 HP (30 KW) on a trailer for longer trips. Heck throw an inverter in and the generator could double as a home backup power system.
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Terrorists don't give a shit about American freedoms, budgets, and personal dignity. They want US forces out of the Middle East and freedom to impose their medieval theocracy on anyone they can reach.
Of course they don't care about our freedom, etc. Their goal is to make our lives worse in whatever way they can until they get what they want.
So far, the score in the War on Terror is probably a Nil-all draw between Team America and Islamic ultra-conservatism.
You're right that the terrorists haven't achieved their end goals in any significant way, but they've certainly had a lot of success with their intermediate goals. I think they have a commanding lead, because we've chosen to give it to them.
Anyone else starting to see the TSA as a bigger problem than actual terrorists?
The TSA is the terrorists' success. They've forced us to waste billions, reduce our freedoms and even give up our personal dignity.
However, if enough people turn what would be a 30-second check into a 3-minute check, they will eventually have to hire more staff to process the normal flow of people.
So we can waste our time AND increase our federal debt!
I understand your point, but I don't think this sort of protest will accomplish anything. If we want to change it, we need to apply political pressure to the top. We need to convince our congressmen to impose limitations on the TSA.
On a less serious note, you could try to turn up the volume by not bathing for a couple of weeks before your trip. See if you can make yourself so nasty that the TSA employees refuse to pat you down. Please let me know when you're going to do this, though, so I can make sure I don't end up having to sit next to you on the plane.
And we have a Supreme Court that could even then nullify it on constitutional grounds.
Wouldn't even require the Supreme Court, and whichever federal court shot it down wouldn't have to appeal to the Constitution.
An Executive Agreement has the same legal standing as an Executive Order -- meaning it can only address things that are within the president's scope of authority. If the agreement were about, say, the positioning of US air craft carriers, then the president could sign that because he has the authority to order our air craft carriers to go wherever he likes. He can also tell various federal bureaucracies what to do. But when it comes to defining copyright and patent terms, the president has no authority.
I guess that's sort of an appeal to the Constitution, in that it goes back to the constitutional division of powers.
If Obama signs this, I expect it to get challenged and the first federal court to strike it down immediately. I doubt the Supreme Court would ever see it, either because the government would be smart enough not to appeal the first ruling or because the Supremes would just decline certiorari and let the lower court ruling stand.
Executive Agreements can have essentially the same scope as a Treaty. The primary difference between a Treaty and an Executive Agreement in its effect is the priority of supremacy they are applied.
No, that's not the difference. The difference is that Executive Agreements are only commitments by the president and not by the country. What does that mean? That means that only powers delegated to the president can be used to carry out the terms of the agreement. If the president has the authority to order done all of the US obligations, then it can be an Executive Agreement. If the agreement would mean the country has to do things the president doesn't have the authority to do then it can't be an Executive Agreement.
Well, technically, it can, but the parts of it that exceed the president's authority will be unenforceable.
An Executive agreement tends to sit just slightly above federal laws, but they cannot contradict any treaties or the Constitution itself.
No, an Executive Agreement sits below federal laws, alongside Executive Orders. And no laws or treaties can contradict the Constitution.
Odd. I sat in those chairs for about 17 years myself, and nearly all of it in a part of the country where a humid day might reach 50% relative humidity and the average day is less than 30% -- and I never once got shocked by the chair. I'm not doubting you, just wondering what the difference is.
I need lots more detail to believe this is even remotely feasible. If this was a small American company I would be sure it's a scam designed to extract money from gullible investors. For some reason, the fact that it's German gives me a little more credulity -- but not enough.
The whole thing that makes eReaders so brilliant is the reflective screen. I'm fine with backlit screens, but for laptops and desktops. For reader things, a reflective screen is the way to go not only for battery life but for all purpose readability as well.
I disagree. I've avoided the e-ink screens so far for exactly that reason -- no backlight means I can't read in the dark. I do much of my reading in bed at night and a nice backlight, turned way down, is perfect: great visibility, no extra light to muck with and dim enough that it doesn't keep my wife from sleeping.
So far, I've gone through a Rocket eBook, a couple of RCA REB-1150s and now I use my iPod Touch, until I get an iPad -- or maybe the new Nook. A backlight is essential. Battery life really isn't that much of a problem; my iPod Touch only runs about 10 hours, which is marginal but acceptable, while the dedicated readers were 20+ hours on a charge.
Oh, and all of the above were perfectly readable in full sunlight as well. A backlight doesn't mean the screen can't also be reflective. Laptop screens aren't, but that's because they're generally intended to be used indoors.
As for "looking like paper", who cares? Paper may be what we're most accustomed to reading on, because it was the best mass-produceable printing technology we had for centuries, but that doesn't mean it's the only option, or even the best option.
There were some areas in which German arms were significantly better than anything the allies fielded, though. The first that comes to mind is the MG 42. There was just no comparison between it and the M1919, M1911 or Bren, in terms of reliability, simplicity of operation and certainly not in firepower. The much higher cyclic rate meant the 42 could lay down an tremendous volume of fire. German infantry was organized around the machine gun and was significantly more effective on a per-man basis because of it.
The malloc/new that fails causing a process to crash might not be the process that is consuming huge amounts of memory in the first place.
It might not, but it usually is. The probability that a given process will be the one that triggers the OOM killer is proportional to the amount of memory that process is allocating. If one process is allocating 99.9% of the memory, there's a 99.9% chance it will be the one that triggers the OOM killer.
But, actually, Linux doesn't just pick the process with the failed allocation to kill. Instead, when a process makes a memory request which cannot be fulfilled, the OS runs a quick calculation of the memory usage "badness" of all processes. The base of the badness score is the processes resident memory, plus the resident memory of child processes. Processes that have been "nice'd" get a score boost (on the theory they're likely to be less important), but long-running processes get a score decrease (on the theory they're likely to be more important). Superuser processes have their score decreased. Finally, processes have their scores decreased by a user-settable value in /proc//oom_adj (default is no adjustment). Also, if /proc//oom_adj is set to the constant OOM_DISABLE, then the process is not killable.
When memory runs out, Linux kills the process with the highest score. If a single ordinary user process, especially a short-lived desktop process, has consumed nearly all of the system RAM, and no one has messed with oom_adj for that process, then it WILL be the one that dies.
Here's a (probably excessively long and complex; I'm no shell guru) one-liner that will show the current OOM scores for all of your processes, sorted from lowest to highest:
find /proc -maxdepth 2 -name oom_score | while read i; do echo -n "$i "; cat $i; done | sort -n -k2
How about when systems are hacked and they crash due to bad pointer manipulation and buffer overruns... and people die?
Performance isn't everything.
That's why C++ is better than C. With C++ you can ban naked pointers from your code and use bounds-checking objects for buffers. With a little care, you can do it with negligible overhead, too -- preserving the "fast" part.
Of course, there's a lot of C++ code out there that uses naked pointers and fixed-sized unchecked buffers, but that's the programmer's choice. C++ makes it easy for programmers to be safe, but doesn't presume to force it on them. The only real complaint I have about the language is that its multi-paradigmatic approach and the practical constraints under which it was designed have led to a great deal of complexity. That's not an issue for me when I'm the only coder on a project, but when it comes time to build a team it can be hard to find a sufficiently-competent group, and training competent C++ programmers up from zero takes years.
Not monitoring anything isn't good parenting either.
Very true.
Also, believing the same parenting approach works with every kid is also bad parenting. Different kids require different degrees of supervision. With some, parents need to exercise significant control over their environment because the kids make such bad choices that left to their own they wouldn't survive to adulthood. I have a daughter who would not be alive today if we hadn't intervened and taken complete control of her life. Of course, she's not normal. In fact she suffers from a serious mental illness -- though we didn't learn that until we got professional help later.
For those who want to discount my experience, saying "Yeah, but that's different"... mental illness is far, far more common than you realize, and distinguishing it from the normal hormone-driven semi-rationality of adolescence is often very hard for parents to do, partly because we're not trained psychologists and partly because we're too close.
With other kids, that degree of control will be stifling and just cause the child to do everything he or she can to break free. With still others, that degree of control will be accepted and perhaps even welcomed -- but with the effect that the child never develops the confidence or ability to make decisions. Some kids need to be reined in, others need to be pushed out of the nest, most need some mixture of both to develop into the best people they can be.
Parenting is the single hardest thing you will ever do in your life, and it's impossible to do it without making some bad decisions along the way, simply because there's often no way to know at the time what the right decision is.
IMO, parents should evaluate the usefulness and the advantages and disadvantages of every tool that comes along. I have no doubt whatsoever that there are some kids whose parents need to exercise control over their texting. I think it's more likely that a lot of kids just need to have the phones taken away from them, or at least to have texting disabled entirely (text-only communication and emotionally-volatile teens are a really, really bad combination). For my daughter, what I wish we could get is a restricted phone -- no texting, and only the ability to call a specific set of numbers, but something that doesn't look like it's for pre-schoolers (she's 15). For now, she just doesn't get a phone until she can demonstrate that she can deal with the stresses of high school without self-destructing.
Dude, it was a joke!
Whoosh!
In case it's still not clear, go re-read your sentence, looking especially for spelling, grammatical structure, typos, etc.
Regions of long-term zero gravity are hard to find on Mars.
You legalize pot, kids will have a much harder time getting their hands on it. Won't be impossible, of course, they can get an adult to buy it for them as they do with alcohol. However it'll be harder than it is now.
So... kids will have to switch to meth for their parties instead of pot, because it will be easier to get?
That may be an unpleasant unintended consequence of the legalization of pot.
Yeah it's just too bad hardly anyone knows that the real reason for making it illegal did'nt have any6thing trying to stop people from smoking it...
All I can conclude from that sentence is that both you and the moderators who modded you up have been smoking some good weed.
OK, how about this:
With NAT, I can keep my internal IPs constant even if I switch ISPs (be it a backup connection or whatever). Only the NAT router needs to know that the external IP changed, other PCs usually don't care. And internal IPs stay constant.
In the v6 world you use unique local addresses to address this. In v4 world, each network card typically has only a single IP address. In v6 world, each device typically has at least two addresses, and may well have more. The two that every device has are a link-local address and a globally-routable address. If you want stable local addresses you can add a third address to each NIC, a unique local address.
Unique local addresses begin with FDxx:xxxx:xxxx:yyyy::, where the x's represent a 40-bit globally-unique ID and the y's represent a 16-bit subnet ID. You pick your own global ID by generating a 40-bit random number. You can then create whatever subnets you like, up to 65536 subnets, each of which can contain up to 65536 hosts.
So, you can provide permanent local addresses for all of the hosts on your network that will not change when you change ISPs or whatever. Doing this should be as simple as telling your RAD or DHCPv6 (whichever you're using) to assign unique local addresses. Consumer-grade devices should even automatically choose a random global ID for you, if you don't want to enter your own.
I don't think your second example is an extremist -- meaning someone who cares deeply, even excessively, about an issue. Rather, that sort is just an immature blowhard who likes to spout off but obviously doesn't really care about the issues at all.
That all closed source software is "immoral"
Yes, he does believe that.
I agree with you on that, but it doesn't lower my opinion of Stallman. Important ideas often require extremists to push them. More "reasonable" people won't make the effort required.
My opinion is that GPL is great but that people still have the right to not release their code under it.
That is also Stallman's opinion. What is your disagreement with him?
If you just force farmers to pay their workers what citizens here will accept, the prices of produce will go up, people will import their produce instead and the farmers will lose their farms because no one will buy their product.
That is a very valid point.
If we want to deal with illegal immigration and rampant outsourcing, we need to improve the standards of living elsewhere. Or make it cheaper to live here.
Both will happen. It will be painful (here).
Somehow, your post manages to sound informant without saying anything meaningful. The point was that all the "getting started" time lag for torrents make them infeasible for smaller files (under 100 MB or so) such as are typical of Linux distro package files. The specific reasons for this aren't important, the fact that those reasons cannot be changed is.
The specific reasons aren't important? Maybe not to you. For others, this site is "News for Nerds", and we nerds appreciate those kinds of details. They may not have any effect on the discussion at hand (or they may -- in technology details are often crucial!), but they're interesting nonetheless. And how do you know they can't be changed? Perhaps the GP just triggered someone to get creative and to invent a next-generation BT protocol that can improve startup time. An efficient way to cache piece bitmaps in the tracker perhaps? Designation of some "default seeders" that the client can start getting data from instantly until it finds some good peers? Something else?
I posit that the primary reason BT startup is slow is because the applications it was designed for don't require fast startup. Change the design requirements and the result will change.
The solution is to remove the cheap labor from the equation completely
Here's a better solution: Make it easy for the cheap labor to come into the country legally. The farmer would then have to comply with all of the labor laws to employ them, including minimum wages. No more $2 per hour melon pickers.
Most of the problems with illegal immigration (the actual problems, not the imaginary problems) boil down to having this class of people in the country who don't dare interact with the US legal system. Make them legal, and all of those problems disappear.
Make it a crime to employ an undocumented worker.
It is a crime. It needs to be a bigger crime, though, and we need a good way to catch such employers.
I suggest turning the people who absolutely can't be fooled about the employee status against the employers. Who absolutely knows the legal status of the employees? The illegal employees themselves. Offer a green card to any illegal who rats out their boss, throw the boss in jail, and very quickly you'll find that no one is willing to employ anyone who can't prove they're legal.
Make it a crime to pay someone less than minimum wage
Again, it is a crime. And because it's a crime, it doesn't happen -- except when the employees are afraid to use the legal system.
or better yet, a crime to pay someone less than fair market wages
What's a fair market wage? And how can the market set a fair wage if no one is allowed to pay one penny under whatever that wage is? Markets require a range of prices offered to settle on a price that is fair. This suggestion makes no sense.
Geez, just tow a small trailer with a generator. Sure, it's using gas, but not much.
Yes! I'm really surprised we haven't seen any designs that take this approach. Pure EV for commuting plus a smallish generator maybe 40 HP (30 KW) on a trailer for longer trips. Heck throw an inverter in and the generator could double as a home backup power system.