"Mongol" or "Mongoloid" used to be the term for someone with Down's Syndrome. The term was more common a generation ago, and was coined and perpetuated largely in ignorance and racism in the 1860s. Those with Down's Syndrome were simply classified as "idiots", and some European doctor thought they looked like ethnic Mongols. He later discarded those beliefs, but the name stuck. Nowadays you don't hear it too much except in less-than-savory company, like with our AC friend above.
BTW, it's really best to ignore the trolls. I'm sort of breaking my own rule by responding at all, but I thought it was worth knowing where that term comes from.
Well, that's the beauty of distributed source control. Everyone who works on those projects has a complete repository of their own. The website provides a convenient synchronization point, but it's only authoritative by designation, not by any differences in the data. If there's a project on Git, and no one else has even bothered to keep a local copy of it somewhere, how much is really lost if GitHub goes away? If it's open source and no one else has even bothered to use the code anywhere else, again, how much are we losing? At that point, the project is already dead, and the general consensus is that it wasn't worth using anywhere. Not all code is really worth saving forever and ever. Hopefully GitHub is taking care to ensure that this doesn't happen, but active projects have no need to really worry.
So, I think the TF isn't really affected by the resiliency of the hosting site for distributed source control projects. The only thing it would do is potentially inconvenience developers for a time as they search for a new method/host to synchronize their development.
Heh, relax. It's been traveling for over nine years to get here, and it's going to take well over a year before we get the full data set from the flyby a couple of days from now, as the transmission bitrate is ridiculously low from that distance. What's a week or two?
On September 14, New Horizons will begin downlinking a "browse" version of the entire Pluto data set, in which all images will be lossily compressed. It will take about 10 weeks to get that data set to the ground. There will be compression artifacts, but we'll see the entire data set. Then, around November 16, New Horizons will begin to downlink the entire science data set losslessly compressed. It will take a year to complete that process.
Have you seen Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? The kids in America are pretty smart. It's the adults that seem to go out of their way not to know anything and try to forget anything that they DID know.
I'm not agreeing with GP in any way, but... That gameshow relies on the fact that fifth-grade material probably hasn't been actively recalled by the adult in many years, even decades. While amusing, it's not a good display of levels of intelligence or education. People naturally will tend to forget material that is no longer relevant to their daily lives.
It's sort of the same thing with the "man on the street" interviews that purport to show how ignorant Americans are. You need to take these with a grain of salt for a few reasons, IMO. First, these interview segments undoubtedly only use the most hilariously bad answers, since it wouldn't be any fun to see someone that can intelligently answer the questions given. Second, most people get really nervous when a camera and microphone are suddenly shoved in their face, and they're asked questions about an unfamiliar subject with no time to mentally prepare. I can't help but think this will affect the quality of the answers.
No one is forced to attend these events. People are still free to practice their faith in a law-abiding fashion as always, and there are many lovely churches, synagogues, mosques, and other places of worship in the area.
Tolerance needs to go both ways to work, and most people in the area, at least in my experience, are fine with a "live and let live" philosophy.
I should have also predicted that you'd double-down on that statement rather than attempting to educate yourself. Did you just see that flash memory was mentioned in an FPGA-related document without actually understanding the context? Because it sure looks like it to me.
Here, I've got a PDF of my own to show you. This one explains quite clearly that there are multiple ways to store configuration data for an FPGA, and that flash-based memory is only one of several options. I'll summarize in the hopes that you or someone else will learn something even without reading the link.
FPGAs are essentially a set of configurable logic circuits, and this obviously requires a set of configuration data to operate as designed. The higher-level nature of the logic circuits makes FPGAs more efficient than a general-purpose CPU for some specialized types of tasks. There are several ways to apply that configuration data on a device:
* Some FPGAs use flash memory or a master computer as a permanent external store, but use SRAM to maintain the internal configuration state. These devices need to be configured after power-up by the external storage (whether flash or something else), and the SRAM needs to be powered to maintain state.
* Some devices use flash memory internally to maintain the configuration state, rather than as a two-step process.
* Some devices uses anti-fuse circuits to maintain configuration state. These devices, once programmed, can't be altered. No flash or other memory is needed for these types, as the circuitry is essentially physically altered in place with the initial programming.
So, in two out of three commonly-used cases, flash memory isn't even used in the FPGA itself. This isn't even counting the early models that could reset their EPROM-based configuration with an ultraviolet light through a quartz window on the chip itself.
Another anti-Amazon rant from reifman? Sigh... Same story, different slant. And predictably, Slashdot is promoting his click-bait nonsense just because a tech company is mentioned.
Sorry, Amazon has been good for Seattle. Jobs are a good thing. Taxes get paid. Rent gets paid. People can eat. They buy things from other local businesses, and the cycle continues. You know... all that sort of stuff. People used to celebrate when they saw that an area was vibrant and growing. 75 cranes in the area? I'd say that bodes well for Seattle's economic future. The Seattle Times calling the area with a massive construction boom "soulless" is pretty sad, and speaks more about their own prejudices than anything else. The article is a pure nostalgia-based puff piece.
Are Amazon, Microsoft, or other northwest tech giants saints? Hell no. Neither are the people who work for them, native Seattlites or not. They can't help that they're largely straight and white, and damn, that shouldn't exactly be held against them. But most of them are probably decent people. We just had a pride celebration after the Supreme Court decision, and an annual pride parade before that, and I didn't hear about Amazon employees lining up and throwing beer bottles at the marchers. Pretty sure I saw a group representing Microsoft in that parade as well. Wouldn't be surprised if there were Amazon participants as well.
Seattle is a pretty laid-back and tolerant area in general. Tolerance means trying to get along with people you don't necessarily like or agree with, not just other people like you. Honestly, it's sounding more and more like reifman is the intolerant and hateful one here. He needs to learn to relax, or he's never going to learn to fit in like a native.
Ideally, yes, but... do they actually know the level of practical danger? That depends on knowing how many organizations are using a specific version of the library, or a feature within the library. I think they probably have a vague idea about these things, but I'm not sure it's a good idea to be trying to scale the level of urgency based on their own interpretation of what may be very incomplete data.
It's going to be difficult for a library developer to know precisely how many people are using a particular feature, even if they have a general sense of feature or version popularity. Moreover, to the relatively few people affected by this, this absolutely WAS a critical bug. Unless you are clear and candid about the seriousness of the bug, those people that need to patch may not hear about it. It's probably best for them not to make wild guesses about who they think are affected. Stick to the facts, and let others determine the ramifications.
I don't really care about "unnecessary panic". Better more awareness of issues than less. The real danger, of course, is that if you overblow the *practical* danger, then people may stop paying attention. It's likely the media jumped on this only because of the recent memory of Heartbleed. Once that gets old, they'll stop with the insta-panic over each new security issue, and we'll be back to normal (which is probably *not enough* panic over serious issues).
Just for the record, I live out in the outer suburbs (the "Eastside" in Seattle parlance, meaning east of Lake Washington that separates us from Seattle) and I work there as well. My jobs have ranged from zero freeway travel to half an hour of freeway travel, but I've *never* actually worked in the city itself. You can't always live right next to where you work. When I did, I really enjoyed biking to work.
Seattle doesn't need 12 lane freeways. But we need better than two or three lane freeways. There's a balance to be struck, but we've neither invested enough in mass transit OR enough lanes. I'm not asking for mega-highways here, but nothing has been done in terms of adding capacity for a very long time. An efficient mass transit system would be fantastic, but we don't have that either. A friend of mine tried taking the bus to work, and it tripled his commute time. That's a hell of a price to pay.
People always get caught up in this "rail vs roads" issue. I'm fine with adding rail/subway over time, but it's never going to replace roads in all cases. I don't think some moderate expansion of the most congested areas of traffic is being unreasonable.
I used to ride my bike when I lived close enough to work, which was fantastic. But when you change jobs and you now have a 20 mile commute, it's not quite as practical. Besides which, Seattle doesn't exactly have wonderful year-round biking weather. Do you ride in the winter as well? If so, bravo, but that's not really practical for everyone either.
The pollution issue wouldn't be as much of a factor if we make the switch to electric commuter vehicles. WA is the perfect state to do this, since most of our power is from green hydro. I'm pretty sure my next car is going to be electric, as I almost never have to drive more than 200 miles at a stretch.
The bridges... yep, I'd agree we could probably use a third one. Going to be a tough sell nowadays though, as there are no obvious corridors to use, at least to my knowledge.
Washington State could use a few more roads... Or rather, we really need some more lanes on our jammed inner corridors, particularly around the I-5 and I-405 corridors in the greater Seattle area. Our WS-DOT is infatuated with massive projects that cost billions but won't substantially reduce congestion. They're putting an expensive new tolling system on 405's commuter lane that will dynamically increase tolls in response to increases traffic so that it stays clear for busses, and 3/4 of the revenue is going to a private company in another state. Of course, that's actually going to make the normal 405 traffic *worse*, because they're simply pushing the traffic into the normal lanes. And of course, the Seattle Convention Center was built over the main freeway (I-5), limiting future lane expansion. Hey, why would we ever need more than two lanes on the only freeway running through a major metropolis, right?
The article mentions Washington State without pointing out the current traffic problems. The traffic in the greater Seattle region is pretty horrible, and there are few practical options other than using a car to get from point to point for most people. The common refrain as to why we didn't build those lanes before is that "they'll just fill up as more people move in, so why bother?", or "You can't build your way out of congestion", with the apparent solution being that we're all supposed to live in downtown high-rises in some urban planning utopia. Well what do we say now? As it turns out, traffic apparently has a peak, because our population is peaking. Who'd have figured?
Do I sound bitter? I try not to be, because I love this area, but the leadership at DOT tends to grate on me at times when I'm stuck in a freeway-shaped parking lot, and I think about the years in Washington State when we actually had a budget surplus and didn't invest in our infrastructure at that time.
They could sell the 120GBs for a dollar, it would just be money losing and stupid. But, it would smash the "barrier".
The "barrier" isn't really about sale price. It's about production cost per GB, which I'd imagine ends up being the most significant factor in consumer pricing of SSDs. No one would consider the "barrier" smashed if drives were sold at a loss, because obviously that wouldn't be sustainable.
..."this over there is my browser cache. In a pinch, you may throw out all of this...
The OS has no need to know about wear-leveling. It's fine as a black box. Write data, store it, read it back. That's it. Do it fast and do it reliably. Wear-leveling is NOT about occasionally throwing out valid data. It's about shuffling physical writes around to different sectors, even if the same few files are being written to all the time. The idea is that they all wear out evenly, which extends the life of the entire SSD.
Make the OS/user determine which files are "important" or not? Good lord... you're going to add a huge amount of additional complexity onto an already complex system. It's not worth it. Unless you're in some pathological case (in which case just use a spinning rust disk), it's going to be many, many years before your drive wears out. When it wears out in a decade or two, SMART monitoring will warn you, and you can go buy a new drive that's five times bigger at half the cost.
People tend to define "bloat" as "all the stuff I don't use". Everything they do use is a "critical feature". Of course, the problem is there's about a few million to a few billion other people (depending on which software you're talking about) that also use that software.
Let's see... where to start? How about all that accessibility code that you never use, because you're not handicapped? Maybe all the Unicode support, because you don't need to read or type Chinese, German, or Russian? Let's also get rid of the GUI altogether, since we're comfortable with a CLI. Grandma will just have to deal with it. And let's strip out all that old hardware support, since my system is shiny and new. Poor people don't need computers, right?
I'm not going to disagree with your point that all that code creates a massive attack surface. But it's completely impractical to suggest that we need to start slashing all that "unused" code. I assure you that somewhere out there, someone other than you IS actually using that "bloat". Unfortunately, I don't think there are any easy answers here.
Since when is a government office using Twitter "merging" with it? When government computers run Microsoft Windows, are they also "merging" with Microsoft? When they use a Selectric typewriter, are they "merging" with IBM?
Governments and private industry always have and always will work together. The government doesn't actually *produce* anything, and as such, relies on the private industry for many products and services, just like other businesses do. That's how things work. I'm a little mystified by the knee-jerk auto-outrage.
Mayor José Antonio Rodríguez Salas (@JoseantonioJun) has encouraged all Jun residents to get a Twitter account to communicate easily with the town government. That way they can report issues about public services and infrastructure, send suggestions, participate in the town decisions and “talk” to the mayor and council members directly.
Hmm, I'd tend to call this the exact opposite of fascism.
"Folks said that Pocket should have been a bundled add-on..."
To which I would reply "Yeah, no shit." The integration of Pocket was a pretty obvious blunder, and not just in hindsight. What's concerning to me is that "folks" actually need to tell this to the Mozilla leadership, demonstrating that either they're horribly out of touch with their users or desperate enough for revenue that they're willing to ignore what's best for their users.
I'm a Firefox user, and don't have any intention of switching browsers, but it's pretty astounding and worrisome to see how they've managed to anger so many of their users in such a short time.
You do live in a democracy right? Why do you elect governments that perpetuate this nonsense?
When a majority of citizens are receiving benefits from the state, why would they vote to curtail those payments the government can't really afford? It's much easier to instead tax the *producers* of society.
Stopped reading when I saw Linus Tovalds on that list. Yes, Linux can and will survive without him, but "doesn't matter"? He's still the curator of the kernel. It's not like he has some sort of ceremonial role now.
The interest is in the physical mechanism used for retaining both flexibility and resistance to crushing, not in the fact that it's a tail. You could design robotic arms that are both flexible and have a protective outer shell, for instance.
Shark bites get attention because sharks are rather terrifying to most people (especially if they've seen Jaws). Yes, you can die from bee or wasp stings, but that doesn't induce raw, primal fear like a shark. The thought of plunging to your death in an airline accident is terrifying to most people, even though you're far more likely to die in a car accident. The notion of a child being abducted by a stranger is a parent's worst nightmare, yet it's more likely to happen by a close friend or relative.
You can't easily quantify, measure, and rationalize human fears. Even logical, otherwise reasonable people can have completely irrational fears. It has nothing to do intelligence... primal fears do a pretty good job of attempting to override intelligent responses. That's why we call it "primal". Yet most people still fly, even if it frightens them to some degree. Most people swim in the ocean, knowing that sharks lurk somewhere beneath the surface. We still send our children off outside of our immediate protection. That doesn't mean those fears went away - just that we need to suppress some of them on a daily basis in order to live our lives.
Oh, and ten thousand people are not dying per day from inadequate health insurance in North Carolina. Way to toss some "hysteria overdrive" of your own into your argument. And many people are very much concerned and saddened when large disasters strike, like in Nepal, as one recent example. That made worldwide news, in case you missed it.
Slashdot Mirror
"Mongol" or "Mongoloid" used to be the term for someone with Down's Syndrome. The term was more common a generation ago, and was coined and perpetuated largely in ignorance and racism in the 1860s. Those with Down's Syndrome were simply classified as "idiots", and some European doctor thought they looked like ethnic Mongols. He later discarded those beliefs, but the name stuck. Nowadays you don't hear it too much except in less-than-savory company, like with our AC friend above.
BTW, it's really best to ignore the trolls. I'm sort of breaking my own rule by responding at all, but I thought it was worth knowing where that term comes from.
Well, that's the beauty of distributed source control. Everyone who works on those projects has a complete repository of their own. The website provides a convenient synchronization point, but it's only authoritative by designation, not by any differences in the data. If there's a project on Git, and no one else has even bothered to keep a local copy of it somewhere, how much is really lost if GitHub goes away? If it's open source and no one else has even bothered to use the code anywhere else, again, how much are we losing? At that point, the project is already dead, and the general consensus is that it wasn't worth using anywhere. Not all code is really worth saving forever and ever. Hopefully GitHub is taking care to ensure that this doesn't happen, but active projects have no need to really worry.
So, I think the TF isn't really affected by the resiliency of the hosting site for distributed source control projects. The only thing it would do is potentially inconvenience developers for a time as they search for a new method/host to synchronize their development.
Heh, relax. It's been traveling for over nine years to get here, and it's going to take well over a year before we get the full data set from the flyby a couple of days from now, as the transmission bitrate is ridiculously low from that distance. What's a week or two?
On September 14, New Horizons will begin downlinking a "browse" version of the entire Pluto data set, in which all images will be lossily compressed. It will take about 10 weeks to get that data set to the ground. There will be compression artifacts, but we'll see the entire data set. Then, around November 16, New Horizons will begin to downlink the entire science data set losslessly compressed. It will take a year to complete that process.
True. But I never claimed we don't have our share of intolerant people on both sides of any contentious issue. I only claimed "most".
Have you seen Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? The kids in America are pretty smart. It's the adults that seem to go out of their way not to know anything and try to forget anything that they DID know.
I'm not agreeing with GP in any way, but... That gameshow relies on the fact that fifth-grade material probably hasn't been actively recalled by the adult in many years, even decades. While amusing, it's not a good display of levels of intelligence or education. People naturally will tend to forget material that is no longer relevant to their daily lives.
It's sort of the same thing with the "man on the street" interviews that purport to show how ignorant Americans are. You need to take these with a grain of salt for a few reasons, IMO. First, these interview segments undoubtedly only use the most hilariously bad answers, since it wouldn't be any fun to see someone that can intelligently answer the questions given. Second, most people get really nervous when a camera and microphone are suddenly shoved in their face, and they're asked questions about an unfamiliar subject with no time to mentally prepare. I can't help but think this will affect the quality of the answers.
No one is forced to attend these events. People are still free to practice their faith in a law-abiding fashion as always, and there are many lovely churches, synagogues, mosques, and other places of worship in the area.
Tolerance needs to go both ways to work, and most people in the area, at least in my experience, are fine with a "live and let live" philosophy.
I should have also predicted that you'd double-down on that statement rather than attempting to educate yourself. Did you just see that flash memory was mentioned in an FPGA-related document without actually understanding the context? Because it sure looks like it to me.
Here, I've got a PDF of my own to show you. This one explains quite clearly that there are multiple ways to store configuration data for an FPGA, and that flash-based memory is only one of several options. I'll summarize in the hopes that you or someone else will learn something even without reading the link.
FPGAs are essentially a set of configurable logic circuits, and this obviously requires a set of configuration data to operate as designed. The higher-level nature of the logic circuits makes FPGAs more efficient than a general-purpose CPU for some specialized types of tasks. There are several ways to apply that configuration data on a device:
* Some FPGAs use flash memory or a master computer as a permanent external store, but use SRAM to maintain the internal configuration state. These devices need to be configured after power-up by the external storage (whether flash or something else), and the SRAM needs to be powered to maintain state.
* Some devices use flash memory internally to maintain the configuration state, rather than as a two-step process.
* Some devices uses anti-fuse circuits to maintain configuration state. These devices, once programmed, can't be altered. No flash or other memory is needed for these types, as the circuitry is essentially physically altered in place with the initial programming.
So, in two out of three commonly-used cases, flash memory isn't even used in the FPGA itself. This isn't even counting the early models that could reset their EPROM-based configuration with an ultraviolet light through a quartz window on the chip itself.
Seriously, just admit when you're wrong.
Another anti-Amazon rant from reifman? Sigh... Same story, different slant. And predictably, Slashdot is promoting his click-bait nonsense just because a tech company is mentioned.
Sorry, Amazon has been good for Seattle. Jobs are a good thing. Taxes get paid. Rent gets paid. People can eat. They buy things from other local businesses, and the cycle continues. You know... all that sort of stuff. People used to celebrate when they saw that an area was vibrant and growing. 75 cranes in the area? I'd say that bodes well for Seattle's economic future. The Seattle Times calling the area with a massive construction boom "soulless" is pretty sad, and speaks more about their own prejudices than anything else. The article is a pure nostalgia-based puff piece.
Are Amazon, Microsoft, or other northwest tech giants saints? Hell no. Neither are the people who work for them, native Seattlites or not. They can't help that they're largely straight and white, and damn, that shouldn't exactly be held against them. But most of them are probably decent people. We just had a pride celebration after the Supreme Court decision, and an annual pride parade before that, and I didn't hear about Amazon employees lining up and throwing beer bottles at the marchers. Pretty sure I saw a group representing Microsoft in that parade as well. Wouldn't be surprised if there were Amazon participants as well.
Seattle is a pretty laid-back and tolerant area in general. Tolerance means trying to get along with people you don't necessarily like or agree with, not just other people like you. Honestly, it's sounding more and more like reifman is the intolerant and hateful one here. He needs to learn to relax, or he's never going to learn to fit in like a native.
I don't understand why you equate digital logic to non-volatile memory arrays.
You're simply underestimating the propensity of some people to proudly display their ignorance to the world.
Ideally, yes, but... do they actually know the level of practical danger? That depends on knowing how many organizations are using a specific version of the library, or a feature within the library. I think they probably have a vague idea about these things, but I'm not sure it's a good idea to be trying to scale the level of urgency based on their own interpretation of what may be very incomplete data.
It's going to be difficult for a library developer to know precisely how many people are using a particular feature, even if they have a general sense of feature or version popularity. Moreover, to the relatively few people affected by this, this absolutely WAS a critical bug. Unless you are clear and candid about the seriousness of the bug, those people that need to patch may not hear about it. It's probably best for them not to make wild guesses about who they think are affected. Stick to the facts, and let others determine the ramifications.
I don't really care about "unnecessary panic". Better more awareness of issues than less. The real danger, of course, is that if you overblow the *practical* danger, then people may stop paying attention. It's likely the media jumped on this only because of the recent memory of Heartbleed. Once that gets old, they'll stop with the insta-panic over each new security issue, and we'll be back to normal (which is probably *not enough* panic over serious issues).
Just for the record, I live out in the outer suburbs (the "Eastside" in Seattle parlance, meaning east of Lake Washington that separates us from Seattle) and I work there as well. My jobs have ranged from zero freeway travel to half an hour of freeway travel, but I've *never* actually worked in the city itself. You can't always live right next to where you work. When I did, I really enjoyed biking to work.
Seattle doesn't need 12 lane freeways. But we need better than two or three lane freeways. There's a balance to be struck, but we've neither invested enough in mass transit OR enough lanes. I'm not asking for mega-highways here, but nothing has been done in terms of adding capacity for a very long time. An efficient mass transit system would be fantastic, but we don't have that either. A friend of mine tried taking the bus to work, and it tripled his commute time. That's a hell of a price to pay.
People always get caught up in this "rail vs roads" issue. I'm fine with adding rail/subway over time, but it's never going to replace roads in all cases. I don't think some moderate expansion of the most congested areas of traffic is being unreasonable.
I used to ride my bike when I lived close enough to work, which was fantastic. But when you change jobs and you now have a 20 mile commute, it's not quite as practical. Besides which, Seattle doesn't exactly have wonderful year-round biking weather. Do you ride in the winter as well? If so, bravo, but that's not really practical for everyone either.
The pollution issue wouldn't be as much of a factor if we make the switch to electric commuter vehicles. WA is the perfect state to do this, since most of our power is from green hydro. I'm pretty sure my next car is going to be electric, as I almost never have to drive more than 200 miles at a stretch.
The bridges... yep, I'd agree we could probably use a third one. Going to be a tough sell nowadays though, as there are no obvious corridors to use, at least to my knowledge.
Washington State could use a few more roads... Or rather, we really need some more lanes on our jammed inner corridors, particularly around the I-5 and I-405 corridors in the greater Seattle area. Our WS-DOT is infatuated with massive projects that cost billions but won't substantially reduce congestion. They're putting an expensive new tolling system on 405's commuter lane that will dynamically increase tolls in response to increases traffic so that it stays clear for busses, and 3/4 of the revenue is going to a private company in another state. Of course, that's actually going to make the normal 405 traffic *worse*, because they're simply pushing the traffic into the normal lanes. And of course, the Seattle Convention Center was built over the main freeway (I-5), limiting future lane expansion. Hey, why would we ever need more than two lanes on the only freeway running through a major metropolis, right?
The article mentions Washington State without pointing out the current traffic problems. The traffic in the greater Seattle region is pretty horrible, and there are few practical options other than using a car to get from point to point for most people. The common refrain as to why we didn't build those lanes before is that "they'll just fill up as more people move in, so why bother?", or "You can't build your way out of congestion", with the apparent solution being that we're all supposed to live in downtown high-rises in some urban planning utopia. Well what do we say now? As it turns out, traffic apparently has a peak, because our population is peaking. Who'd have figured?
Do I sound bitter? I try not to be, because I love this area, but the leadership at DOT tends to grate on me at times when I'm stuck in a freeway-shaped parking lot, and I think about the years in Washington State when we actually had a budget surplus and didn't invest in our infrastructure at that time.
They could sell the 120GBs for a dollar, it would just be money losing and stupid. But, it would smash the "barrier".
The "barrier" isn't really about sale price. It's about production cost per GB, which I'd imagine ends up being the most significant factor in consumer pricing of SSDs. No one would consider the "barrier" smashed if drives were sold at a loss, because obviously that wouldn't be sustainable.
..."this over there is my browser cache. In a pinch, you may throw out all of this...
The OS has no need to know about wear-leveling. It's fine as a black box. Write data, store it, read it back. That's it. Do it fast and do it reliably. Wear-leveling is NOT about occasionally throwing out valid data. It's about shuffling physical writes around to different sectors, even if the same few files are being written to all the time. The idea is that they all wear out evenly, which extends the life of the entire SSD.
Make the OS/user determine which files are "important" or not? Good lord... you're going to add a huge amount of additional complexity onto an already complex system. It's not worth it. Unless you're in some pathological case (in which case just use a spinning rust disk), it's going to be many, many years before your drive wears out. When it wears out in a decade or two, SMART monitoring will warn you, and you can go buy a new drive that's five times bigger at half the cost.
For a moment there I thought you were channeling Captain Haddock.
People tend to define "bloat" as "all the stuff I don't use". Everything they do use is a "critical feature". Of course, the problem is there's about a few million to a few billion other people (depending on which software you're talking about) that also use that software.
Let's see... where to start? How about all that accessibility code that you never use, because you're not handicapped? Maybe all the Unicode support, because you don't need to read or type Chinese, German, or Russian? Let's also get rid of the GUI altogether, since we're comfortable with a CLI. Grandma will just have to deal with it. And let's strip out all that old hardware support, since my system is shiny and new. Poor people don't need computers, right?
I'm not going to disagree with your point that all that code creates a massive attack surface. But it's completely impractical to suggest that we need to start slashing all that "unused" code. I assure you that somewhere out there, someone other than you IS actually using that "bloat". Unfortunately, I don't think there are any easy answers here.
Since when is a government office using Twitter "merging" with it? When government computers run Microsoft Windows, are they also "merging" with Microsoft? When they use a Selectric typewriter, are they "merging" with IBM?
Governments and private industry always have and always will work together. The government doesn't actually *produce* anything, and as such, relies on the private industry for many products and services, just like other businesses do. That's how things work. I'm a little mystified by the knee-jerk auto-outrage.
Mayor José Antonio Rodríguez Salas (@JoseantonioJun) has encouraged all Jun residents to get a Twitter account to communicate easily with the town government. That way they can report issues about public services and infrastructure, send suggestions, participate in the town decisions and “talk” to the mayor and council members directly.
Hmm, I'd tend to call this the exact opposite of fascism.
Who needs a name? Statistical probability indicates that person is almost certainly a male.
"Folks said that Pocket should have been a bundled add-on..."
To which I would reply "Yeah, no shit." The integration of Pocket was a pretty obvious blunder, and not just in hindsight. What's concerning to me is that "folks" actually need to tell this to the Mozilla leadership, demonstrating that either they're horribly out of touch with their users or desperate enough for revenue that they're willing to ignore what's best for their users.
I'm a Firefox user, and don't have any intention of switching browsers, but it's pretty astounding and worrisome to see how they've managed to anger so many of their users in such a short time.
You do live in a democracy right? Why do you elect governments that perpetuate this nonsense?
When a majority of citizens are receiving benefits from the state, why would they vote to curtail those payments the government can't really afford? It's much easier to instead tax the *producers* of society.
Stopped reading when I saw Linus Tovalds on that list. Yes, Linux can and will survive without him, but "doesn't matter"? He's still the curator of the kernel. It's not like he has some sort of ceremonial role now.
The interest is in the physical mechanism used for retaining both flexibility and resistance to crushing, not in the fact that it's a tail. You could design robotic arms that are both flexible and have a protective outer shell, for instance.
Shark bites get attention because sharks are rather terrifying to most people (especially if they've seen Jaws). Yes, you can die from bee or wasp stings, but that doesn't induce raw, primal fear like a shark. The thought of plunging to your death in an airline accident is terrifying to most people, even though you're far more likely to die in a car accident. The notion of a child being abducted by a stranger is a parent's worst nightmare, yet it's more likely to happen by a close friend or relative.
You can't easily quantify, measure, and rationalize human fears. Even logical, otherwise reasonable people can have completely irrational fears. It has nothing to do intelligence... primal fears do a pretty good job of attempting to override intelligent responses. That's why we call it "primal". Yet most people still fly, even if it frightens them to some degree. Most people swim in the ocean, knowing that sharks lurk somewhere beneath the surface. We still send our children off outside of our immediate protection. That doesn't mean those fears went away - just that we need to suppress some of them on a daily basis in order to live our lives.
Oh, and ten thousand people are not dying per day from inadequate health insurance in North Carolina. Way to toss some "hysteria overdrive" of your own into your argument. And many people are very much concerned and saddened when large disasters strike, like in Nepal, as one recent example. That made worldwide news, in case you missed it.