Why would scripts even be able to read / though? On some systems, such as Android, apps are not allowed to read the root filesystem, or in fact anything outside of their own directory without permission.

Since the code is complicated, people can make all kinds of outlandish claims, how many of them are you going to test? That gets expensive.

Perfect is the enemy of good, but that's no reason not to go for good.

Think of it like being in MDI mode all the time, in every application. Because that's how the MacOS GUI has worked since time immemorial. You can close all the documents without exiting the app. Back then, it was common for application menus to be provided as a numbered list of options in the middle of the screen, the menu bar is the same thing but now it's at the top of the screen and still available while documents are open. But hey, there are lots of apps which behave the way you seem to want them to behave, they pop up a window with some menu options when you close the last document.

What? I organize them hierarchically, like I've been doing since Netscape Navigator.

Does Firefox allocate the memory for tabs before you click on them? It doesn't seem like it.

Contracts cannot trump law. HTH.

The question at issue in any particular warranty claim is whether the changes that the user made caused damage. If the user were installing a su which didn't prompt them (some Android TV sticks come with an su like this, it just succeeds!) or if there were evidence that they permitted root access by a specific application which can cause whatever problem the user's device is actually suffering, then there's grounds for denying warranty coverage.

The reason why some manufacturers (in my case, Motorola) want to void your warranty if you root is that it takes some actual effort to determine the cause of a failure and Motorola doesn't want to do that. They will test a sampling of phones with a certain type of failure to attempt to identify defects, but they don't give a shit about why your phone failed. And they don't want to determine whether the phone just failed because it's a piece of shit or because you rooted it and overclocked the shit out of it for two reasons: one, it would cost a small amount of money to do that, and two, if they can get away with not doing that, then they can steal your money by giving you a defective device and then not having to replace it then all the better in their eyes, theft is wonderful if they can get away with it.

Since there are multiple technologies for determining whether a user has in fact done the two things which require rooting that might cause harm to their device which cannot be recovered by reflashing via JTAG or similar, which is to say overclocking or overvolting, there's really no valid argument for voiding the warranty simply for rooting one's device, unlocking the bootloader, or any other such similar activity. If the manufacturer wants to deny warranty status on the basis that the user damaged their device, they need to have to show that in court, and not simply wave their hands and claim that the user broke it.

Regardless, contracts don't supersede the law. The law says that you have certain rights. You can't sign away your rights.

There is a general dispute in taxonomy between "lumpers" and splitters" - people who say "this, this and this share these characteristics, and so I lump them together in one taxon" versus those who say "this, this and this differ in these characteristics, and so I split them into these taxa".

You're evidently a splitter. No disrespect about that - it's a defensible position (see above). But being a lumper is also a defensible position (see above).

The important things that you need for designing a taxonomy are to know what questions you want your taxonomy to address - if you're wanting answers to questions of surface gravity, then a taxonomy based on colour is unlikely to be helpful, for example.

Our current taxonomy for planets is based on the observational status of the planets in respect of their neighbours - the "cleared orbital region" criterion. In principle, that is an addressable question - observe the skies, plot the orbiting bodies down to a few percent of the size of the planets of interest, question answered.

Where things are getting confused is that many people project questions of the origin of the planets onto the orbital classification. Which may not be the most logical thing to do, when looked at in the context above. The two questions are not strictly related : Earth, Venus, Uranus and Pluto all appear to have suffered a giant impact in the late stage of their construction, but Pluto does not currently have a cleared orbit to make it a "planet" under the orbital classification. So our believed-to-be-correct models of origin processes do not (necessarily) align with current orbital status. But you can see from the length of my qualifications above that one taxonomy split is based on fairly long chains of cause and implication, and the other on simple Newtonian mechanics. So I can understand why the IAU decided to go with the relatively simple present-day orbital status criterion.

If I were to design a planet taxonomy, I'd use a criterion of sphericity (is the shape within X% of being a simple spheroid) to divide planets from "minor planets" (you can look at it as the interplay of material strength versus object mass, if you like), and at the upper boundary the presence of fusion (separating planets from stars, with a fudge area to deal with brown dwarfs). But that criterion shows my interest in body materials (I'm a geologist by trade), which differs from the interests of astronomers in general.

That's a cute idea, but it's hopelessly naive. You can never eliminate all potential oppressors until you're the only one left alive. You've got to sleep sometime, and any one of us can maim or kill any other one of us because humans are fragile. If that's the future you want, you're going to find yourself in very little company one way or another.

Freedom can't exist without vigilance, and again, you've got to sleep sometime. That's why you can't have a free market without laws which protect it and fair enforcement of those laws, and by the same token, it's why you can't live free unless someone protects that life. Can I say it again? You've got to sleep sometime. People who call for anarchism are daft and deluded. Power vacuums are real, and the natural consequence of anarchism is that someone highly motivated forms a social order to take advantage of the lack of order which would prevent it.

You are completely wrong. The Koch bros. in particular are massive landowners.

I think the genetic differences are overblown. Social differences are a much bigger factor, and either gender can easily learn the skills needed to be a good communicator and team player. Rather than being a gender issue, it sounds more like a training issue.

It's more than just empathy, it's knowing what other people know and how they think about things.

A classic example I remember from years ago was a salesman telling some people about a computer they were interested in. He told them it had 1GB of RAM and 250GB hard drive an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, without realizing that they had no idea what any of that meant. If he had understood that they didn't know that, and that they thought of RAM in terms of "it runs a few different apps and doesn't slow down" and the hard drive as "it can store a lot of photos and videos" he would have been following the Theory of Mind.

Engineers often do it as well. They explain things in the terms that they understand them, rather than in a way that accounts for the listener's knowledge and beliefs about how things are. In a group some people become ineffective and don't contribute anything meaningful because of gaps in their knowledge or because they have incorrect assumptions that others are not aware of, and no-one is a good enough communicator to recognize that and bring them up to speed.

Can you say more about how you did this "reset"? A quick google just brings up lots of bullshit.

Not all manufacturers build their cars that. Some have an OBD-II bridge between the port and the main bus that makes the port read only except for a few very specific commands like resetting error codes. That's why if you look at those videos of people hacking a Prius on YouTube they have dismantled the entire dashboard. They had to get to the segmented parts of the bus, the diagnostic port was not enough to screw with anything interesting.

If you "need" to deal with thousands of bookmarks you are Doing It Wrong. Help me out here because I honestly cannot even imagine a (sane) use case or work flow where I would actually need (much less want) to deal with that many bookmarks.

I really doubt that. What will happen is the scammers will get rich, much as they do now but on a much larger scale. It's already possible to sell a complete POS simply by advertising the hell out of it, and removing regulations on advertising would just make the situation worse.

Quality of life will plummet as people get screwed by dodgy healthcare contracts or people polluting their environment. They could sue of course, but who has the money for that? Prices will probably sky-rocket as well, since the moment you get rid of all the regulations and restrictions other countries will raise their tariffs to compensate. Free trade is only possible when the two sides have broadly similar costs. If US workers are cheap because they have no rights or protections, the EU will slap duty on US cars being exported to it so they don't undercut European manufacturers.

Most people don't want to become insurance experts or hope that their circle of friends is clued up enough to protect them. They would rather that their government, the people who work for them, regulate the insurers to ensure fairness. It's cheaper and easier for everyone.