Simple with a BSD license you can check the code yourself, build the code, and then deploy the code using a signed encoded DFU file with a custom boot loader.

I disagree that it is because java is easy to read. Java is easy to write. A good programer can write an app in Java and have it work really well. A bad programer can write an app in java it will work.
With C++ a good programer can write an app and it will work but you really have to watch for a lot of gotchas. A bad programer can not write a program that works in C++ because it will leak memory, stomp on memory, and have issues with pointers.
Java is better at stopping the little brain farts from blowing up in your face.
C++ is a lot more fun to write in IMHO.

It is easier with something simpler, not something smaller. When you start doing extreme optimization for size, as in this case, you are going to do it at the expense of many things, checks being one of them. If you want to have good security, particularly for something that can be hit with completely arbitrary and hostile input like something on the network, you want to do good data checking and sanitization. Well guess what? That takes code, takes memory, takes cycles. You start stripping everything down to basics, stuff like that may go away.

What's more, with really tiny code sizes, particularly for complex items like an OS, what you are often doing is using assembly, or at best C, which means that you'd better be really careful, but there is a lot of room to fuck up. You mess up one pointer and you can have a major vulnerability. Now you go and use a managed language or the like and the size goes up drastically... but of course that management framework can deal with a lot of issues.

And also other tradeoffs. It is fashionable for some geeks to cry about the amount of disk space that stuff takes, but it always seems devoid of context and consideration, as though you could have the exact same performance/setup in a tiny amount of space if only programmers "tried harder" or something. However you do some research, and it turns out to all be tradeoffs, and often times the tradeoff to use more system resources is a good one. Never mind just capabilities/features, but there can be reasons to have abstractions, managed environments, and so on.

You can walk on ice. Trust me; I've done it.

Back in the early 90s, I discovered the magic of seed based procedural generation to make a MMORPG world the size of an actual planet. The problem I had with a 2d based tile game is that its okay if you wrap around the edges east-west, but when if you go so far north. My solution which I never implemented was to translate you to the top of the map where you'd be translated to, but it had problems too because a player would be disoriented,"Why am I going down now?" So I was thinking you'd need to maybe flip the whole map upside down, but then that makes problems making sprites that would have to be flippable and such. This was not an easy problem to think of, but today I stick with KISS. I'd probably put them where they should be, 'maybe leave them where they're at', not flip the map, and say,"Congratulations, you just reached the top of the planet, now start going back down"

It is a clever trick to equivocate "insurance" and "access". It is possible to self-insure - a completely rational, actuarially-sound, choice for many young people.

QFT. There were a couple of time intervals in my 20s when I went without insurance, but that didn't stop me from hitting up the quick-care clinic and the pharmacy on the couple of occasions that a cold (or flu or whatever it was) wouldn't go away in a reasonable amount of time with OTC treatment.

Too bad 404care makes that illegal now. Perhaps some "Irish democracy" is warranted as a response.

Since when does Android run on iOS devices? It doesn't?

At risk of being pedantic, there was a project years ago that got Android kinda-sorta working on the iPhone 3G. It was sluggish and drained your battery at an alarming rate because it didn't have any hardware-acceleration or power-management support, and it didn't let you make calls IIRC, but it was Android on an iPhone. It even set itself up in a dual-boot environment, so you could switch between Android and iOS. AFAIK, it was never developed into something that was actually usable. It also never ran on anything newer than the iPhone 3G.

Yeah, no. Damage increases by the fourth power of axle weight. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

It doesn't really matter what the tyres are inflated to, unless they're so large as to distribute the weight across an enormous surface area. But if that were the case, you wouldn't be able to get past a large truck--its wheels would take up the whole road.

I can understand and even support ad blocking for two reasons, Avoiding wasting data (particularly on annoying video ads) and Protecting Privacy (not sure why every site that I visit seems to need to contact Facebook, particularly since I'm not a Facebook member and never will be. The HOSTS file seems to be a big help with this on my desktop, but I don't seem to have access to one on my non-rooted Android devices.

So, with one of the concerns being Privacy, why in hell does the Adblock site say: "Join the Adblock Browser Beta Google+ community here (make sure you’re looged into G+ first!)" before letting me download????? I have no use for Google+ or any other failed attempt by Google to play social media games, or any other social media product (see the thoughts on Facebook above). Why the hell does a software app that pretends to promote the individual's right to opt-out of things demand that I be part of Google+ before I can download it????? Not going to happen and I've lost all faith in them.

Consider this: They're paying you to spend a full day at each gas station doing firmware updates. If they care about the time it takes you should be able to get them to spring for a bunch of laptops so you can load all the pumps at once, properly, without resorting to VMs and trickery. Issuing you 16 laptops so you can do three or four stations in a day is a hell of a lot cheaper than hiring three or four more technicians as babysitters. Argue your case from that perspective and don't bother with the half-ass solution. If they don't go for it, then find a good book and keep doing it one pump at a time. They've decided that you're worth the expense.

This is pretty much the thing, at least here in Michigan. For the sake of argument I won't even accuse politicians of spending on pet projects -- schools are partly funded by gas taxes. Average fuel economy is going up, which means that average gas tax revenue is going down. We just had a big referendum to try to fix the problem. Trouble is, everything is interconnected. Change the law so more gas tax goes to roads and the schools suffer, so you raise the regular sales tax to restore funding to the schools, but the sales tax just goes into the general fund, so you need rules to assure that schools don't get stolen from by other general-fund needs, and so on. What we got was a huge clusterfuck of interconnected laws that nobody could make head or tail of. What was presented as a vote to fund road repair turned into a major shell game and nobody was sure where the money was actually going to end up. People didn't just vote "No", they voted "Hell, no!"

Anyway, I think the Oregon idea has merit. There is a privacy issue, but they're addressing that: "Drivers will be able to install an odometer device without GPS tracking." It might still track out-of-state miles, though. They could easily add a GPS that records nothing and is only used to trigger when the odometer should be running. The state would get the number of in-state taxable miles and no other information. They could also make a sliding rate based on vehicle weight, and even give a further discount for hybrids and electric vehicles if they wanted to provide environmental incentives. It could work without getting all Big Brothery.

It happens I could use remote USB port functionality.

(Right now I want to run, on my laptop, a device that requires a Windows driver and Windows-only software. I have remote access to a Windows platform with the software and driver installed. If I could export a laptop USB port to the Windows machine, it would solve my problem.)

So NetUSB is vulnerable. Is there an open source replacement for it? (Doesn't need to be interworking if there are both a Linux port server and a Windows client-pseudodriver available.)