Absolutely. The situation is not sustainable.

Even worse, because every SOC is a haphazard pile of random and arbitrarily buggy peripherals, there is no deterministic way (at run time) to enumerate all of the peripherals, and thus which various driver variants (and even worse, binary blobs) are required to make them work.

So by definition, none of this can EVER go into the mainline. Every kernel fork is its own disconnected universe, dedicated to a single snapshot of a single SOC and its particular collection of peripherals.

But if you try to explain this to a PHB (or, say TI), you'll get nothing but blank stares. There is nobody home.

The reason embedded device kernels never get updated is because the source code for them is on some SOC vendor's way out there fork of some ancient kernel that nobody with a clue actively develops for anymore.

And the vendor (say, TI) had hired a bunch of clueless interns to write the "BSP"s (old acronym from the binary blob obsessed asshats at vxworks et al) for their SOCs and the cluster of shoddily designed peripherals crowbarred into the SOC.

And those interns wrote code so toxic and broken that no sane kernel developer would ever have accept any of their garbage into any mainline kernel tree.

So there are all these embedded devices out there with kernels from the 90s, and it would take time (and expertise) that none of the vendors have (including the SOC suppliers, like TI) to merge the changes into something even remotely contemporary.

All of this because the requirements for these embedded projects (dictated by clueless PHBs) is only "linux support" not "mainline kernel support", so SOC vendors (like TI) just don't have the incentive to develop SOC peripheral driver code suitable for mainline inclusion.

You don't have to be intelligent/reasonable to control intelligent/reasonable people, you just have to convince them that you are. You can go on being a clueless dipshit in all other respects.

Because if you aren't incompetent, you won't get yelled at.

Unlike a corporate structure, where you don't get yelled if you play the game right.

If you are incompetent, please don't develop linux kernel code. Go work for a corporation.You'll find you're a better fit, and if you play your cards right, you won't get yelled at no matter how bad you are at your job.

Exactly. Especially since you can get a "real" cert from one of many, many, free cert signing services. What is the point?

FEC algorithms do not treat (an unknown number) of lost bits as a stream of 0 bits, since it can't know how many bits are lost.

FEC generally does not seek to recover lost data, only the proper state of flipped bits.

You mean Iain Banks.

If it was a bit more advanced I'd sign up in a heartbeat

Daniel Sterling received (and still receives) death threats. Does that mean he's right, and all of his critics are crazy?

So clearly the whole ideal of "the general public shouldn't have guns, only cops" doesn't make sense either.

Step 1) Have a constitutional convention to repeal the 2nd
Step 2) Let me keep my firearms for sporting purposes.
Step 3) ???
Step 4) PROFIT

I'm not Arker, and his analysis hides all kinds of issues, especially considering not every gun out there is a .22lr pistol.

Bottom line, Armatix doesn't want you carrying their firearms for self defense for a reason. Somehow I don't think cops would take kindly to you telling them they have to replace all of their carry weapons with .22lr

Yes. If they are outliers, and the numbers of lives saved dwarfs the statistical relevance of your outliers.

"If we can save just one life" is not a good basis for sound public policy making when it disregards broader consequences.

"Disabling shots" are not used intentionally, and for a reason. Stating that they are "used frequently" is an outright fabrication.

You watch too many movies and/or play too many video games.