yeah, but that way lies a long list of which food, clothing and medical expenses are worthy of being tax exempt and which, being "obviously" luxuries, need not be.

Wouldn't it be easier to tax everything and rebate minimum cost of living expenses?

Hmmm. That implies that you're using 15.9 bit characters, or pretty much all of unicode. How do you manage that?

hmmm. Well, I was going to say I did, but on reflection they do tend more to be 6 words instead.

7776^7 possibilities (in a seven word phrase) is a "small surface"? That's 15 million years to brute force, on average; what duration are you looking for?

Go for it. that's 1.7 * 10^27 possibilities for the 7 word set. At 1 trillion (aka 10^12) tries per second it'll only take a quadrillion seconds, or 30 million years.

yep. Which is why hashes are long and getting longer - more inputs to try in order to find the output needed.

Math issue: 6 words from a list of 1000 is 1000^6 possibilities, not 1000^4, so you're looking at a million seconds rather than 1, or 11 and a half days. Not a whole lot better, but one more word makes it a billion seconds, or 31+ years. (I think you got the 4 from the number of letters per word, which as you point out is not really a relevant factor.)

For cases where the only difference is who was making the decisions, I'd say liability should be with the manufacturer. Other cases are similar to existing with-driver cases: parts failure (manufacturer), skipped maintenance (owner), poorly performed maintenance (shop that did the work).

In the end, like with FAA investigations, everything boils down to pilot error and equipment failure, and in many cases "not dealing with equipment failure properly" is considered pilot error. The only question is who's the pilot.

So, falling back to first principles... the following car should be prepared for the lead car to do pretty much anything, including drop a bumper (which will come to a stop far faster than either car can brake). If you're not leaving enough room to avoid hitting a fallen bumper, you're too close. Follower at fault, next case.

This. They've discovered that stringbuffers are faster than repeated string concatenation, is all.

yeah. Looks like they're comparing concatenation (with all the attendant object creation and obsoletion) with the equivalent of using a stringbuffer (that happens to be held by the kernel). Shock, amazement.

I'd say a cellphone being a computer depends on the phone. My first cellphone probably had a cpu, but was not feature-rich enough to consider as anything but "appliance". However, your point is a good one; at this point they're all commonplace enough to be considered commodities to some degree, which is not a characteristic of things associated with "only the rich".

I suspect there's still envy and social stratification around (lack of) ownership of these, but "only the rich" isn't as well-supported as it might be for other stuff.

Looked at from a global perspective (which is necessary, since so many of our cars, TVs, and computers come from overseas), how is this not true?

It can certainly feel hungrier after eating 200kcal of doritos than 200kcal of chicken, making it more likely that at the end of the day you've consumed 3000kcal instead of 2000. I speak from personal experience on this one (though admittedly my most recent "experiment" used cheetos).

and a dorito is (heavily) processed grains. If you're willing to consider "processed" a boundary, then it may work for you. If not, you'll have to find some other rule of thumb.