Most of this stuff should be done with PLCs and/or microcontrollers. The reason they use PCs is just because "let's use a PC for everything". It was easier for THEM to use a PC and hire cheap fresh-out-of-college hackers than to engineer a competent, embedded system to a higher standard. And it worked, because we (industry) bought it.

I used to work for Papa Johns, back before I was into computers at all. They call their homegrown system the "Profit System" and based on what I remember and now know, it uses a Unix box in the office of every store. All the terminals out by the phones are honest-to-God dumb terminals running off serial connections. The user interfaces are TUI, blazingly responsive, and extremely fast to use once you memorize the zillions of shortcut combos...no keyboard of food icons...but all they need is cheap hardware, normal keyboards, and they can run a whole store (internet orders, inventory, everything) off of a slow modem with no problem.

When I say "lifetime" I meant "lifetime without being touched" (no defrags, no driver updates, no service packs; nothing). In my facility, incrementing a software revision, even if it changes nothing except for some trivial thing like enabling a faster serial port, can take 6 months to a year of testing before it will be approved to run production. "Conservative" is not even the correct word, because NOT upgrading is obviously a risk as well; "change averse" might be the correct term.

I work in a very large semiconductor fab that is full of dozens, probably hundreds, of DOS, Windows 2000, Windows 98, Windows ME, and Windows XP machines. They will never be upgraded or patched.

Is this stupid? Yes. Is there anything I can do about it? No.

I just got done negotiating the purchase of a 2-million-dollar piece of equipment that comes with Windows. We actually have a purchasing requirement that all software be provided with patches as necessary, including OS upgrades, and that all source code be held in escrow in case the company goes under. However, when we negotiate the purchase specs, those lines get crossed out, because the vendor refuses to comply and we have no leverage, so we buckle.

Personally I think that anyone who uses something like Windows (a desktop OS with known, SHORT service lifetime, suitable for desktop computing in non-critical applications) in an industrial tool with 10+ year lifetime, should be fired immediately, and this should have been the case from the very beginning, but I was not around back then, and it became acceptable. Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft, even when it's an idiotic thing to do.

Your driving philosophy is commendable, but the other people on the road don't know that you are a reasonable driver, so they treat you as an average human driver i.e. they are somewhat scared of you. They are not sure entirely what you will do next. They decide it's probably best to take turns at stop lights and leave reasonable distances and just honk their horn if you do something they didn't want.

On the other hand look how people interact with traffic lights. They know the yellow light lasts exactly 3 seconds so they take advantage of it completely. The traffic light can't bluff them. It's a machine. They only worry about the people stopped at the traffic light and what they might do, and they are reasonably sure nobody is going to enter the intersection until their light is green. There are layers and layers of subconscious understanding with merging, passing, pulling out into traffic, etc all based on the other driver being an average human.

Unless computer-driven cars are camouflaged, once people know they are computer-driven they will utterly take advantage of them in traffic. The car will have to be programmed to yield to asshole drivers and for a big change, the asshole drivers will KNOW that. If they are conservatively programmed to avoid collisions then I wouldn't be surprised to see them completely forced off the road and sitting on the berm in heavy traffic, and nobody giving them the nice, huge, safe space they need to merge back in.

It's not possible to talk about "interest" without talking about the currency that is being transacted. If you charge a rate of interest equal to the inflation rate of the currency, that is basically asking to be repaid what you loaned. This has reasonably been interpreted as "not usury".

There is no precedent to support an interpretation (usury=any interest) that basically means "if you loan money out, you must agree not to be paid back in full". That would basically be a ban on loaning money, making it equivalent to charity. Nobody is going to loan out $X in face value today and get paid back $X face value 10 years from now, in a currency that is inflating 10% per year.

In an economy that uses a precious-metal currency with no significant inflation (mining), it may be feasible to loan someone a sum of money without interest, knowing that when you get that money paid back in full, it's going to be worth the same or possibly more than when you loaned it out. In other words, loaning the money out did not hurt you any more than leaving it in your vault. Charging interest on top of a deflating currency would be "usury" and would result in money being increasingly concentrated in the hands of the money-lenders, which is why it was proscribed.

Not that Rome et. al. didn't attempt to debase their currency, but it doesn't compare to say, inflation of the USD (2 orders of magnitude inflation in ~100 years).

Self-driving cars won't work for a completely different reason than all this...they will never work because they can't bluff.

As soon as people figure out that a computer is driving a car, they will pull out in front of it knowing they won't be hit. They will change lanes into it, knowing that it will slow down and get out of the way. And they will loath it, because it will never flatter their feelings.

Self-driving cars will be bullied off the road, because there is a lot more to driving with people than being able to control the car. There is a lot of social/herd/mental/aggression dynamics that are instinctive for people but not for computers.

All welcome the real-world gargoyle. Bluetooth headsets weren't enough...

Following quotes from Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson:

Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider; these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society. They are a boon to Hiro because they embody the worst stereotype of the CIC stringer. They draw all the attention. The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time. ...

Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift
in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background
checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in visual light,
infrared, millimeter. wave radar, and ultrasound all at once. You think
they're talking to you, but they're actually poring over the credit record of
some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model
of airplanes flying overhead. For all he knows, Lagos is standing there
measuring the length of Hiro's cock through his trousers while they pretend to
make conversation. ...

"Where the hell are you, Hiro?"
"Walking down a street in L.A."
"How can you be goggled in if you're walking down a street?" Then the terrible
reality sinks in: "Oh, my God, you didn't turn into a gargoyle, did you?"
"Well," Hiro says. He is hesitant, embarrassed, like it hadn't occurred to him
yet that this was what he was doing. "It's not exactly like being a gargoyle.
Remember when you gave me shit about spending all my money on computer stuff?"
"Yeah."
"I decided I wasn't spending enough. So I got a beltpack machine. Smallest
ever made, I'm walking down the street with this thing strapped to my belly.
It's really cool."
"You're a gargoyle."
"Yeah, but it's not like having all this clunky shit strapped all over your
body. . .'
"You're a gargoyle. ..."

It's the bright screens that are disruptive in a theater, not just the ringers.

Also, can everyone quit pretending that vibrate is actually silent? I swear it's an elaborate distributed attempt at trolling me, how everyone pretends that placing their phone on vibrate is a magical cloak that I can't still hear from 6 rows away.

I work in a semiconductor clean-room. There are modern desktop systems, old 486 systems, and lots of industrial logic boards, cabinets chock full of arrays of huge computer fans...some of this stuff has been going since the early '90s and there isn't a spec of dust on them. It's pretty weird to see old computer equipment, including fans, that DOESN'T have even a trace of dust on it. Very strange.

No.

Larger pixels do not 'collect more light' in real camera systems. This is because in real camera systems, a certain field-of-view is used independent of sensor size (cinematographers do not frame differently with full-frame sensors...they use whatever focal length is needed to achieve the field-of-view they want). In practical terms, this means that the same amount of light is captured from the scene and funneled through the aperture, regardless of sensor size. If you make the sensor bigger, you just spread the same amount of light over a larger sensor. The pixels are bigger, but they are intercepting the same number of photons/second.

If, and only if, making the sensor larger allows a larger % of the sensor to be covered with active sensing area (that is, the 'fill factor' goes up as a result), then maybe the larger sensor is more sensitive. MAYBE. There are other issues working against you when you make the sensor bigger--areal current density is going to go down, which is a big deal if you have a noise floor (digital) and/or your sensitivity is a function of current density (film). You can increase the aperture (D) to maintain F-stop and therefore keep current density the same for the larger sensor, but you can increase the aperture with a smaller sensor too and still win. Practical DOF is a function of aperture (D) and magnification, and we were discussing equivalent camera systems.

There is a reason film formats steadily decreased from 11x14 to 8x10 to 4x5 to 6x7(cm) to 35mm as film became finer-grained. Making the film area smaller increases the areal current density (photons/mm^2) with no other practical difference in real camera systems. This is a big win with film because speed is a function of current. It's a big win with digital because larger sensors are expensive, and since there is NO practical effect on real camera systems, you might as well use a small sensor, since digital sensor pixel pitches are fine enough to support even smaller sensors than film.

I said that sensor size has NO effect on the image (or the speed) with equivalent camera systems; this is slightly complicated by the fact that camera manufacturers continued scaling down aperture (D) as they made smaller sensors, therefore currently-existing cameras with small sensors are not equivalent systems to currently-existing cameras with larger sensors, but this is because of bad engineering and marketing. DX-format cameras my all rights should have f/.7 lenses as standard, but they don't for cost reasons, and reasons related to the retention of the legacy SLR camera design. Camera manufacturers have spun this as 'larger sensors are better' which makes them more money.

Summary:The only way to get more photons to the sensor is to make the physical aperture (D) bigger, or to increase exposure time, or increase the scene lighting. But low-light photography is always a tradeoff between exposure time and depth-of-field. Sensor size is only a factor if a different size gets you a better fill factor AND that fill factor is enough of a boost to overcome the larger noise that is going to result from the lower current density.

Well, you don't need a basic income pension to do nothing, man. Take a look at my cousin: he's broke, don't do shit.

By our own admission, you are a benefit to the team when you are at work. If you stay home, sure YOU can focus better, but those 'people from different organizations' all have to go figure things out for themselves (in other words reinvent the wheel) instead of simply asking you. The impact to the organization as a whole may be a wash.

Unless you are more important than "these people" or make substantially more, that is.

I know that when I work from home, it seems like I get a lot more done. But then, what was the aggregate impact of my not being in the office, therefore not contributing in meetings, not helping out the new guys, not answering questions for people, and so on? How well would the whole organization work if everyone was an island and never distracted by anyone else? That would be the opposite of teamwork.

Dealing successfully with the ironically-named 'justice system' (where 'successfully' is defined as 'minimal loss of wealth/immediate freedom/future earning potential/continence' is based on two key factors:

1) Do not appear to have anything confiscatable
2) Flatter their ego

Stupid people care about the law. They think that if they obey the law, they will be ok. The fact is, the law really doesn't matter. Cops don't know the law, they just enforce it. The most important thing is to not get involved with the police, and if you do, to not get arrested. If you get arrested, you have already lost.

The law only matters after you are arrested. But even then, you will end up plea-bargaining to an unrelated charge anyway. The idea that you will stand up before a judge and he will see that you were in compliance with the law and you will achieve some kind of 'justice' is pure naivete. Even if the case is dismissed, you lost.

Which distro might that be?

The most popular magazine for the AR15 is the plastic PMAG made by Magpul. They are widely considered better than metal magazines because they are actually more durable, self-lubing, lighter, and more reliable because they cannot get bent feed lips.

Magazines have traditionally been made out of metal because it was cheaper, not because metal is better.