That's such bullshit. We didn't understand the atom until a little over a century ago. Quantum mechanics even later. Just because it's been thousands of years and we haven't figured something out doesn't mean that it's unknowable.

GNUStep is very interesting, but every time I've tackled it, I've bounced. Sometimes I literally couldn't figure out how to do things, other times it's just that it was too difficult to bother.

They *REALLY* need better documentation. Probably the toolkit is fine. Every time I worked at it long enough I was able to make it do what I wanted, but the documentation is truely terrible. And it needs to be written by someone who already understands the system.

If the GNUStep documentation had been better, I'd probably be programming in Objective C today. (Well, maybe not, I tend to switch between languages a lot. But I would have used it significantly.)

Well, I haven't tried it in a few years, but the last time I found it intensely horrible, to the extent that it was unusable. OTOH, for most of what I do I prefer Inkscape over the GIMP.

The is only possible if the hardware layer is separated from the rest of the business. The hardware layer is a natural monopoly, in the same way that water pipes are. The ISPs have created monopolies by packaging the hardware layer together with the communication services. They MUST be separated. Even wireless has it's limits, though cellular can get to pretty small cells in dense populations. But that's a part of the hardware layer, as are cable and fiber (and for that matter flocks of pidgeons).

One of my hypotheses about how anesthesia works is that it prevents the fixation of memories. Certainly they have that effect while you are coming out from under them.

If you combine no permament memories with paralysis you get all the signs that I see WRT anethesia. OTOH, I do understand that there are other tests (brain waves, cortisol, etc.) which indicate that more than that is going on.

Because governmental employees get to decide when to enforce the law.

I"m not sure I'd say TUTOR was an ok language for the day. It didn't even have local variables. Local variables were so controversial that I had to leave the University of Illinois and get a job as a system programmer with CDC to add local variables to TUTOR.

Reports so far seem to be that cameras help, even if they can be turned off. But allowing them to be turned off at a whim is clearly a major weakness.

Also, the videos don't need to be watched and evaluated. They need to be cached in a write-once append only memory. And stored in a place untouchable by the police...and perhaps by the courts, only copies are accessible. Thus copies would be available under subpoena.

The question is, should reporters be allowed access? And reporter doesn't mean someone employed by a media company, it includes stringers, muckrakers, and people with an axe to grind. The question is, should they be allowed to post copies of the records. Many of the records shouldn't be available to people without records being kept of who saw them. As has been pointed out that would be valuable information to, e.g., burglars. But there needs to be a way to make the significant information public that has less cost and paperwork than a legal subpoena.

Clearly NONE of the current methods of dealing with this are even approaching what is required, and there are lots of corner cases. But its also clear that while setting up a good system is a big design problem, it not major....except for getting everyone to agree.

You mean everyone hasn't learned how to do that to some extent?

I do it a bit.

I get a sensation of presence of something nearby when there IS something close and I am making sounds I know I'm making (mouth clicks, footsteps, etc.) in an otherwise reasonably quiet environment, or when well-locatable sounds with bursty high-frequency components are present in the environment to provide a sonic "light source" of suitable form and predictability.

It's usually enough to keep from bumping into things. (Even soft, sound-absorbing things like plush furniture, are "visible" as a "quiet lump" - especially if there are hard things around to create acoustic contrast.)

It's not usually consciously apparent that sound is involved, rather than some "extra sense", unless there are really loud echos, like one's footsteps while walking in a concrete or tiled tunnel. (Haven't you had a sense of ambiance in such situations?)

The sensations are so well tuned as an input for moving, dodging, grabbing, and the like, that I've been assuming it's an evolved mechanism (that might have needed exercise in youth to develop properly), like vision, rather than something purely learned.

Your later comments about ignoring RAID controller warnings for a *year* strike me as callous. But we all have our standards, and standards vary greatly from place to place as the needs the drive the standards also vary greatly. (financial institutions care much more about transactional correctness than reddit)

After months of testing, our organization has wholeheartedly adopted ZFS and have been finding that not only is it technically far superior to other storage technologies, it's significantly faster in many contexts, it's actually more stable than even EXT4 under continuous heavy read/write loads, and brings capabilities to the table that even expensive, hardware RAID controllers have a tough time matching. Best of all, since it actually runs off JBOD, the cost is somewhere between insignificant and irrelevant.

I was wondering if you had investigated ZFS at all, and if so, why you aren't using it?

Large scale internal combustion engines are extremely efficient and can run on just about anything burnable: vegetable oil, powdered coal, agricultural dust, wood gas from trees, dried leaves, etc. Yes, you can literally run an engine on banana peels. The trick is to get the carburetor to get the balance right.

From the perspective of a generator for a hospital, it would be relatively straightforward to design a generator running an engine like this with whatever renewable fuel is most convenient and readily available locally. Large scale wood gas installations typically work with fuel pre-processed into pellets.

The difference being that you could have coded it from scratch - and you don't learn how to do that just by copy/pasting code.

Because nobody is making that many batteries yet and they're quite expensive? The whole Tesla "gigafactory" is so they can produce 500,000 cars per year. That's a drop in the bucket for supplying homes with batteries.

Why do you think we don't want that? It's just that in the case of the police, there's a chance that we could get it. As for the officer's "bathroom duties", so what. They don't care much about our privacy, so why should we care about theirs. Still, ok, have the camera be able to be put into a "marking time" mode...but there still needs to be continuous sound recording. It should be a firing offense to disable the camera while acting as a police officer.

Yeah, Angela Merkel was upset the NSA was spying on her (and she's actually a legitimate target as a head of state and has her own security forces who are supposed to be securing her communications) but wants to return the favor to the rest of the world. They're all the same.