Erm, no, we're not. There are George Washingtons, for example.

That trope is a nice way of not having to make choices, and also of course excusing one's own transgressions, though.

Because ... because ... er, we don't have enough disk space or something? Yeah, that's it ...

What do you want? It's not like these are computers and you can configure them or anything!

Whoops, wrong article.

Same snarky question re DC though ...

So you are saying that California is a racist police state?

The US always pays its debts when they are due. I think perhaps the problem is you don't understand how US debt works, and why it is a bit special:

So the most important thing to understand is the US doesn't go and beg people to give it money, rather it auctions debt. People come and purchase the debt. You can do it yourself on their Treasury Direct site. The US sells debt instruments to interested buyers. They are bid on, and whoever bids the lowest interest rate wins. The upshot is the US sets the terms of the debt instruments sold. They have a variety, some are as short as 4 weeks, some as long as 30 years. When you buy something, the terms of repayment are stated up front: What it'll pay, and when. There is no provision to cash out early, and you don't get to dictate any terms, you just choose what note you want to buy (if they are available).

This is how public debt works in a lot of countries, but it isn't how things go when you are getting loans from the IMF.

The other important thing is that all US debt is denominated in US dollars. A US debt instrument specifies how many dollars it'll pay out and that number is NOT inflation adjusted, except in a few very special cases. Well the US government also controls the US mint, which makes US dollars. So the US government can literally print money, and inflate its way in to payments. There are negatives to that, of course, but it is perfectly doable. The US controls its fiscal and monetary policy regarding its debt. Since all its debts are in US dollars, and since US dollars are the world's reserve currency, the US cannot face a crisis where it can't pay, unless such a crisis is internally generated (via the debt limit).

Not the case with Greek debt, it is in Euros and Greece doesn't control the Euro.

Finally, there's the fact that the US has great credit. Doesn't matter if you disagree that it should, fact is it does. Investors are willing to loan the US money for extremely low interest rates because they see it as a very safe investment. 4 week T-Bills have been going for between 0%-0.015%. 30-year bonds have been going for 2.5%-3.75%. Investors bid the interest rates very low because they desire it as a safe investment.

Have you ever visited a coal mining town that doesn't mine coal anymore? The end result is almost always a severely depressed area, rampant poverty, high unemployment and underemployment, high drug use and abuse, prostitution, etc. A lot (millions) of people live in oil towns and oil cities in the US. For the good of the world, maybe we need to cut back on oil and gas. But the politicians would not be doing their job if they didn't represent the people who elected them.

I see a lot of people calling for an end to oil and gas but nobody ever makes a plan, or offers to fund a plan, on how to retrain all the workers, repurpose the assets, align interconnected industries, etc. It hasn't been done because the problem is a lot more difficult than environmentalists ever imagine.

India does things on the cheap. This is what happens when your engineers have degrees from the school of Kerbal Space Program.

Income inequality if the largest driver of murders. Homicide has a r=0.8 correlation with income inequality.. 10% of whites are in poverty in the USA, but 27% of blacks are in poverty. Poverty (income inequality), crime, and race are all related in the USA. That's not good, but it does open options because there are a lot more levers available to pull. Reduce minority poverty, and minority crime will probably drop too. There are lots of ways to do that, but it takes a huge effort to do so.

Though there was a good reason for the original compact Macs to discourage users from opening them up -- there were exposed high voltage monitor electronics in there which could give you a hell of a zap of not properly discharged.

The later all in one Macs of the 90s were better in that regard. Their user suitable parts (motherboard, drives) all were easy to get at, but the monitors and power supplies were fully enclosed.

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.

That seems inherently unsafe. Not dangerously unsafe, but unsafe nonetheless. Having the ground be the first contact made is standard practice for a reason.

I think it will be way more likely that exoskeleton type systems using the same control mechanism will be developed. They could have adaptive algorithms which gradually decrease the power output over time, forcing the patient to develop muscle mass in a safe and 100% controlled manner. It could prevent people with broken or weak bones from making damaging movements, while at the same time allowing rehabilitative movements. It would revolutionize the rehabilitation industry.

The same technology could be used, it has all the advantages of bionic limb replacement, plus you get to keep your limbs.