C is ubiquitous.

Except on platforms that ban third-party native applications.

Even if the walled gardens don't permit software implemented in C, it is extremely likely that some part of the walled garden's own software stack is still written in C—because C is ubiquitous.

Name one other language that is as well supported and as broadly implemented as JavaScript?

C is ubiquitous.

Many fighting games feature reaction windows no more than 5 ms wide, and some have windows ~1 ms wide. And players can hit them.

I've heard of fighting games (e.g. Street Fighter) with 1 frame windows, but the games were 60 fps ~ 16.67ms. That is more in line with your figures from John Carmack's experimentation. Your 1ms figure does not sound credible, can you provide a reference?

He made the case [why one should never use Python] very convincingly.

How so? It sounds like you and the AC are just looking for an excuse to whine. Let me explain again: I maintain a non-Python codebase with horrendous whitespace, and a Python codebase with consistent whitespace. The non-Python codebase is full of maintenance developers shitting on each other's indentation, and it makes future maintenance more expensive.

[whitespace] can't be discerned thoroughly via ordinary tools used in the ordinary way like cat,

How frequently do you look at code with cat, that invisible whitespace errors are a problem? It doesn't even paginate, ferchrissakes.

... less,

I have no solution on this one, but as a quick hack I would start by searching for tab characters, or more-than-one space characters. The terminal highlight should help.

... vi,

This works just fine in vim (not sure about vanilla vi):

:set list listchars=tab:\\_

That makes all hard tabs look like \___. Replace with prettier unicode line-art as you wish. I maintain a non-python codebase with some rather... creative... variations of whitespace, and it is trivial to match local whitespace conventions with listchars enabled.

... emacs

I'm not an emacs guy, but if vim has a solution then I'd put money on the existence of an emacs solution.

I never got a straight answer to how python deals with a mixture of tabs and space characters in the indenting.

I do work with python regularly, and I still can't answer this. The practical solution is "don't mix indentation styles." While it is more than zero effort to do this, it should be all up-front effort learning the capabilities of your tools, and trivial effort day-to-day.

In fact, it's very popular to pull over when rain/snow/fog is so thick.

It doesn't take much snow to cover lane markings, and pulling over is not a practical response to a fresh layer of snow. Snowfall is a different story, but snow on the ground is the problem at hand:

And now that white line is very reflective on almost all roads (speaking from the US at least), it seems that, if anything, we can tone down the headlights.

LEDs are hard in most places, but it is getting better.

I'm a fan of CREE can lights. High CRI, a good coating, and built-in trim makes them look better than the previous lights. I haven't had them very long, but so far they are handling brownouts better than anything with a ballast. The remaining CFLs tend to discolor (toward pink???) and dim significantly if they are not fed exactly the right voltage. The biggest downside is that the LEDs cost about 10s the cheapo "pink" CFLs, which adds up quickly. It will take years to see any cost savings even with 100% survival rate of the LEDs.

sampling at 50 times a second

Using quantum entanglement to achieve zero transmission delay, and then only looking at it once every 20 milliseconds? You may as well just use fiber, as half of the time you will still receive information ahead of a polling-based QE system. Now, the benefit for the QE system increases as the fiber distance increases, so your idea still makes sense for mutli-planetary HFT. Just... not between Chicago and New York.

There's no point ot a "high speed link", with all the insanity involved in [FPGAs]

Do that for a day, and then come back and tell us how you fared. Local silicon in New York doesn't do squat when the best information is coming from Chicago, London, or Tokyo.

or even a view from the space station

Holy shit, I would love to have a live feed from the ISS on a 120" TV! That could be good for showrooms, too, to show off fine detail of the Earth's geography from space.

2160 pees

Estimates from my wife place that at approximately one half of a pregnancy, which is not very difficult to achieve. You may want to set your pee-standards higher!

Now profits jump as production triples and the bonuses take his pay to 20 times that of the janitors.

The hot shot CEO will know to take enough to put him to the 12x limit, and then distribute the remainder evenly across the entire company. That is, give everyone a single percentage of his/her salary as a bonus, preserving the 12x ratio. He could conceivably only give the bonus to the lowest-paid employees to maximize his own bonus, but that would alienate the overwhelming majority of the company.

There's no need to raise salaries or wages in order to comply with a relative cap on total compensation. In fact, I think it's pretty irresponsible to raise anyone's salaries based on a windfall year for the company as a whole; precisely for the reasons you specified.

As long as you escape them properly

Friends don't let friends generate dynamic SQL. Please use prepared statements!

If the compiler decides it can delete a conditional because it's always true or always false, I most certainly do want a warning!

What if the conditional is based on a macro that is user-defined, to enable or disable functionality at compile-time? Or what if the conditional is based on template parameters, for C++? I see those use-cases on a regular basis, and the relevant code depends upon the compiler to properly optimize out the conditional and dead code for performance.