That seems like it might be used by some manufacturers as an excuse to effectively prevent selling of used devices. Which is not to say that it would be a net negative—just that it can be abused.
I do tend to try to optimize my code, but at the same time, I tend not to be particularly bothered by doing repetitive tasks by hand (or at least, much less than most people), so it does not seem to be caused by that in my case. Some repetitive things are pleasurable (e.g. raking leaves), & once you automate something, it either does not account for edge cases or grows into a giant nest of special cases, unless you have a very good model when writing the initial code.
There very much would be a reason to change programming languages. With infinite speed, you could do an exhaustive search for proofs of correctness, so you could write the requirements for the program & have the language formally verify it without any extra effort (provided a proof of correctness exists at all).
For that matter, why not just write test cases & constraints & have it find the simplest program that passes all of them? At some point, you would either have enough constraints that the simplest program is correct, or you would realize you did not actually know what you wanted.
I have an alarm clock that repeats once every 5 minutes after the set time until you silence it. Once in a dream I heard the alarm & then heard it again about 10 subjective minutes later after having done some other random things (that would in reality take more than 10 minutes, but of course, dreams can be unrealistic). When I woke up, I saw that the alarm had only gone off twice, so I definitely perceived the time span differently rather than just missing an alarm in the middle.
Of course, getting engrossed in something (especially something that gets progressively faster, like certain video games) can give a subjective speedup while awake, too.
But (as has been pointed out below) the semicolon before "and" later on is an instance of the Oxford comma, which suggests whoever wrote that sentence may have intended to use it, regardless of whether the manual says they were supposed to.
Lack of save backups sounds like a good reason to hack the device & may encourage people to attempt hacking it that would otherwise not bother (no interest in homebrew or piracy).
Which works great until the government splits a zip code. Then it takes years for some merchants to decide the new zip code is valid, & until then, transactions that attempt to verify zip code fail—either enter the right zip & get rejected by the merchant or the wrong one & get rejected by the bank. (That actually happened to me at a gas station once.)
Actually, it seems they work (at least for IBS) even if you are explicitly told it is a placebo: Placebos without Deception: A Randomized Controlled Trial in Irritable Bowel Syndrome Although possibly not as well...it does not seem that study had a group that received a placebo without being told (just the group that was told & the group that received no treatment at all).
To think it is a living animal (presumably a small donkey) would presumably require they have sufficient knowledge of Spanish...which would in turn likely imply they already know it is a food item. (I know, woosh.)
String theory is mentioned in a few places, but there do not seem to be any equations involving actual vibrating strings, but only things derived from string theory. AdS/CFT does come from string theorists, but is actually a conjecture (at least, so says Wikipedia) about how certain string theories may be equivalent to certain theories based on the usual sort of non-stringy quantum fields. While they claim a connection to string theory, it seems plausible that some other underlying theory could end up satisfying the same entropy bounds & thus be subject to the paper's arguments (if they are in fact correct).
We need a proof that a vote has been correctly counted that cannot be forged (produced without actually including the vote in the total) except by the one who voted. (It needs to be possible for them to forge so that nobody else can trust it.) I am pretty sure there are papers attempting this, but I do not have time right now to check if any of them have succeeded; I would not be surprised if they have (feasibility of implementation notwithstanding).
The problem is that while quantum superposition can be thought of as "all possible states simultaneously," it is not in general possible to choose properties of the state you get at the end (called "postselection" in the quantum computing literature). All you can do is adjust the probabilities of the different states, & for some problems, we do not know a way to make the desired state likely enough to do any better than a square root improvement in running time over a classical computer. So for that sort of problem, an O(2^n) algorithm would become O(2^(n/2)).
Apart from quantum suicide (which depends on various unproven assumptions & is technically nontrivial even if theoretically possible), there is no known way to do postselection.
I have seen my phone's battery discharge while "charging" if it was doing something with, say, the CPU, GPS, & Bluetooth at the same time. They need to allow drawing power from the battery, even when plugged in, because the USB port (& the charger to which it is attached) does not necessarily supply enough power to run, just to charge at whatever rate they deem appropriate.
Certain platforms have rampant trademark infringement in the programs offered on them, especially games. Does the fact that trademark holders (including Nintendo) continue to ignore them cause their marks to be genericized on those specific platforms? (Or maybe they are unaware of the infringement...quite possible, but I am not sure if that matters legally.)
(Not asking for legal advice—just curious...I was actually wondering about that just a few days ago.)
Regarding lazy programmers: I have written programs where I used packed bitfields & still ended up needing around 4-8 GB RAM. I was counting how many of something existed & marking them off as they were discovered—enumerating in (much) less space would make it take a lot longer, barring a computational complexity breakthrough (or maybe spending weeks discovering a different special-purpose enumeration method).
But for the most part, programs do seem to take up more space than necessary these days. E.g. a text editor should not need over 1 GB RAM. Even with unlimited undo & 30 or so documents open, each is not very large (under 128 KB), & I cannot type that fast.
When I was a little kid, I once said I wanted a terabyte floppy disk & a 6 GHz CPU (& was told something similar to that being either never needed or not possible). A terabyte of flash is smaller than a floppy disk, but I still want my 6 GHz CPU. (With air cooling & 85 degrees Fahrenheit ambient, that is.)
I have run out of Latin letters & started using Greek ones a few times. In my defense, I was just grabbing elements of small nested lists (via Haskell's pattern matching) & permuting them, & a comment saying what the permutation meant (or better yet, a good function name) would be a lot clearer than trying to give meaningful names to 32 (or however many it was) variables used only once.
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That seems like it might be used by some manufacturers as an excuse to effectively prevent selling of used devices. Which is not to say that it would be a net negative—just that it can be abused.
I do tend to try to optimize my code, but at the same time, I tend not to be particularly bothered by doing repetitive tasks by hand (or at least, much less than most people), so it does not seem to be caused by that in my case. Some repetitive things are pleasurable (e.g. raking leaves), & once you automate something, it either does not account for edge cases or grows into a giant nest of special cases, unless you have a very good model when writing the initial code.
But if they are boring, why would they bother communicating?
There very much would be a reason to change programming languages. With infinite speed, you could do an exhaustive search for proofs of correctness, so you could write the requirements for the program & have the language formally verify it without any extra effort (provided a proof of correctness exists at all).
For that matter, why not just write test cases & constraints & have it find the simplest program that passes all of them? At some point, you would either have enough constraints that the simplest program is correct, or you would realize you did not actually know what you wanted.
I have an alarm clock that repeats once every 5 minutes after the set time until you silence it. Once in a dream I heard the alarm & then heard it again about 10 subjective minutes later after having done some other random things (that would in reality take more than 10 minutes, but of course, dreams can be unrealistic). When I woke up, I saw that the alarm had only gone off twice, so I definitely perceived the time span differently rather than just missing an alarm in the middle.
Of course, getting engrossed in something (especially something that gets progressively faster, like certain video games) can give a subjective speedup while awake, too.
But (as has been pointed out below) the semicolon before "and" later on is an instance of the Oxford comma, which suggests whoever wrote that sentence may have intended to use it, regardless of whether the manual says they were supposed to.
IV=4 & V=5 as Roman numerals (as is 0.999...=I)...the derivation appears to be a math pun of sorts.
Lack of save backups sounds like a good reason to hack the device & may encourage people to attempt hacking it that would otherwise not bother (no interest in homebrew or piracy).
& those who think ternary jokes are better.
Which works great until the government splits a zip code. Then it takes years for some merchants to decide the new zip code is valid, & until then, transactions that attempt to verify zip code fail—either enter the right zip & get rejected by the merchant or the wrong one & get rejected by the bank. (That actually happened to me at a gas station once.)
Actually, it seems they work (at least for IBS) even if you are explicitly told it is a placebo: Placebos without Deception: A Randomized Controlled Trial in Irritable Bowel Syndrome Although possibly not as well...it does not seem that study had a group that received a placebo without being told (just the group that was told & the group that received no treatment at all).
To think it is a living animal (presumably a small donkey) would presumably require they have sufficient knowledge of Spanish...which would in turn likely imply they already know it is a food item. (I know, woosh.)
String theory is mentioned in a few places, but there do not seem to be any equations involving actual vibrating strings, but only things derived from string theory. AdS/CFT does come from string theorists, but is actually a conjecture (at least, so says Wikipedia) about how certain string theories may be equivalent to certain theories based on the usual sort of non-stringy quantum fields. While they claim a connection to string theory, it seems plausible that some other underlying theory could end up satisfying the same entropy bounds & thus be subject to the paper's arguments (if they are in fact correct).
We need a proof that a vote has been correctly counted that cannot be forged (produced without actually including the vote in the total) except by the one who voted. (It needs to be possible for them to forge so that nobody else can trust it.) I am pretty sure there are papers attempting this, but I do not have time right now to check if any of them have succeeded; I would not be surprised if they have (feasibility of implementation notwithstanding).
The legislators are answerable to their constituents, but citizens are not answerable to each other.
The problem is that while quantum superposition can be thought of as "all possible states simultaneously," it is not in general possible to choose properties of the state you get at the end (called "postselection" in the quantum computing literature). All you can do is adjust the probabilities of the different states, & for some problems, we do not know a way to make the desired state likely enough to do any better than a square root improvement in running time over a classical computer. So for that sort of problem, an O(2^n) algorithm would become O(2^(n/2)).
Apart from quantum suicide (which depends on various unproven assumptions & is technically nontrivial even if theoretically possible), there is no known way to do postselection.
Regarding #1, there is the red herring principle, although that is in mathematics (& has no bearing on the other points).
That looks more like an attempt to obfuscate a backdoor.
This sounds suspiciously like part of the story in Hackers.
I have seen my phone's battery discharge while "charging" if it was doing something with, say, the CPU, GPS, & Bluetooth at the same time. They need to allow drawing power from the battery, even when plugged in, because the USB port (& the charger to which it is attached) does not necessarily supply enough power to run, just to charge at whatever rate they deem appropriate.
Certain platforms have rampant trademark infringement in the programs offered on them, especially games. Does the fact that trademark holders (including Nintendo) continue to ignore them cause their marks to be genericized on those specific platforms? (Or maybe they are unaware of the infringement...quite possible, but I am not sure if that matters legally.)
(Not asking for legal advice—just curious...I was actually wondering about that just a few days ago.)
Regarding lazy programmers: I have written programs where I used packed bitfields & still ended up needing around 4-8 GB RAM. I was counting how many of something existed & marking them off as they were discovered—enumerating in (much) less space would make it take a lot longer, barring a computational complexity breakthrough (or maybe spending weeks discovering a different special-purpose enumeration method).
But for the most part, programs do seem to take up more space than necessary these days. E.g. a text editor should not need over 1 GB RAM. Even with unlimited undo & 30 or so documents open, each is not very large (under 128 KB), & I cannot type that fast.
When I was a little kid, I once said I wanted a terabyte floppy disk & a 6 GHz CPU (& was told something similar to that being either never needed or not possible). A terabyte of flash is smaller than a floppy disk, but I still want my 6 GHz CPU. (With air cooling & 85 degrees Fahrenheit ambient, that is.)
Just because math or programming allows something does not mean it should be done. Conventions help with readability & thus avoidance of bugs.
I have run out of Latin letters & started using Greek ones a few times. In my defense, I was just grabbing elements of small nested lists (via Haskell's pattern matching) & permuting them, & a comment saying what the permutation meant (or better yet, a good function name) would be a lot clearer than trying to give meaningful names to 32 (or however many it was) variables used only once.