Cities will go completely bankrupt before they even think of reining in their police.

I seem to remember that plane literally leaking fuel when it was on the ground.

Probably not much, however, who wants to live someplace where they have to hear the boom of a massive lightning storm day in and day out? Thunderstorms are noisy, it's true, but for most people they're a fairly rare event.

Hahaha, that's like the opposite of that patent office guy circa 1900 who said that everything that could be invented had already been invented.

Some of the hysteria is probably because a very low-altitude plane flying supersonic can probably break windows, so people are worried about that. Of course, we're talking about higher-altitude planes here, so that isn't really justified.

The other worry is probably the frequency of the booms. One boom a month isn't a big deal, but what if they decide to make a frequent flight path over your house in the suburbs or in the country? Now you've got sonic booms every day, throughout the day. No one wants that.

They don't occur often over the continental USA because they're illegal (except for military planes), and these days because there's no supersonic passenger planes left. The Concorde was the only one, and it was limited to trans-Atlantic routes over water because of the restriction on sonic booms. I don't think it's unreasonable for people to be worried about something that isn't a problem now because of legality and current technological state; these things can and do change. Texting-and-driving 20 years ago wasn't a problem either, but now it is; it would have been helpful if someone had worried about it a little more. Drunken driving wasn't a problem 120 years ago, but again maybe someone should have worried about it and done something before it turned into a big societal problem.

Personally, I don't even see why supersonic travel should exist for passengers. It uses insane amounts of fuel, and even if that problem is fixed, it's unlikely it'll ever be as fuel-efficient as subsonic flight. No one really needs to get around that fast. If you don't like 14-hour flights over the Pacific, then don't do them; stay at home instead, or choose a closer vacation destination. Maybe eventually we'll avoid this problem altogether with some kind of sub-orbital vehicle which is both fast and fuel-efficient, but I'm not holding my breath.

It's probably muscle memory. I do something similar: many times when I try to type "ratio" I'll add an extra 'n' for "ration", which I of course then need to backspace over. And of course, auto spell checkers think it's just fine since it's still a valid word.

This is why I actually don't have a problem with Google's text ads. You do a search on some terms, and alongside your search results you also get some ads based on those terms. This can be really helpful if you're looking for a product to solve a problem you have, and the ad shows you something which is exactly what you're looking for. I guess this is called "targeted advertisement".

The mass-spam advertisement is the stuff that sucks, because I have to see it even when I'm not looking to buy something, and it can be for anything, not something that I specifically need.

No thanks to Adblock Plus. That thing is a giant resource hog.

I've switched to uBlock now; it's much better than ABP ever was.

You'll get lousy performance since the translated code isn't written specifically for the new CPU. The whole reason for writing in assembly is to optimize the code for the CPU hardware.

No, with assembly you have to rewrite everything for the new architecture, because it's so different. x86 assembly does not resemble ARM assembly at all.

When the OS is written in C, you don't have this problem. Just look at the Linux kernel. Only small bits of it are in assembly, which of course are CPU- and arch-specific, but the rest is fully portable. Obviously, this means not making any assumptions along the way, like that your CPU is only 32 bits, but this isn't that hard to do. Recompiling the Linux kernel for an all-new CPU is not hard, you just have to change the arch-specific low-level things and you're done; all the scheduler, device driver, etc. code stays the same.

there haven't been major advances in OS X or Windows for over a decade.

That's because the field has become mature, and there's little improvement to be made. For kernel-level and system-level stuff, all these concepts were mostly invented ages ago. Even the UI stuff was pretty stable by the early 2000s. So now some groups are trying to reinvent the wheel with all-new UI paradigms, as seen with Gnome3 and Windows' Metro UI, usually by trying to tie mobile and desktop UIs together, and the results have been horrifically bad.

Maturity is something we see in most technological fields: there's a whole lot of innovation early on, then people settle on one or two standard ways of doing things, then they stick with that for a long time, only making very small incremental improvements. Just look at aviation: they invented all kinds of weird-looking aircraft in the first few decades there, but what changes have there been to aircraft in the last 40 years or so? It's all been in the electronics, navigation, etc., not in the aerodynamics. Airplanes look almost exactly like they did 50 years ago, but with some relatively minor optimizations. Same goes for, say, laundry machines. A modern washing machine isn't much different from one 40 years ago, but now it has electronics which allow it to be more efficient with water and power and do a better job washing, but the overall design is pretty much the same, with two basic designs: a vertical-axis tub with an agitator, or a horizontal-axis tub (originally much more popular in Europe, but has gained popularity in the US in the past 15 years).

The problem with this is that smaller, cheaper, and less power-hungry hardware these days has an entirely different architecture, called "ARM". (I think MIPS is also alive and kicking, being used in many embedded applications as well as ARM.) This shows why writing stuff in assembly is generally a bad idea: you can't port it to another architecture.

Wrong. Obama was indeed pretty short on merit, as was Reagan (a former B-list actor of all things). Just being a governor doesn't mean you'll be a good president; there's lots of shitty governors, and Bush II was one of those. Chris Christy is another great modern-day example of a shitty governor.

Unfortunately, the voters (in both parties) are lousy at picking candidates in the Primaries.

1. Just because meritocracy is real doesn't mean changes happen instantly.

Yeah, that's called inertia. In a real meritocracy, there'd be no inertia: people would dump the underperformer as soon as something better is available. But that's not what happened with the American car companies: they hung on for a very long time because of inertia, and as a result they're still here now. In a true meritocracy, they would have mostly disappeared in the early 80s, when Japanese cars had eclipsed them in every way, except probably for the full-size truck market (where Japanese makers didn't actually compete until later). In a mostly-meritocratic-system, with some inertia, the American carmakers would have died out by the early 90s. It wasn't until the late 2000s when the Americans really finally caught up.

2. Maybe their meritocratic skill is in navigating politics and unions, not car making.

Well the Japanese had far better cars on the market for decades, and didn't seem to have problems with unions or politics. Again, inertia, not meritocracy. If (as you might contend) unions were dragging down the American automakers, then in a true meritocracy they should have gone out of business in the 80s because of this. Instead, inertia kept them afloat, despite their problems with unions. Remember, this is a business: they make cars, and sell them to the general public. In a meritocratic market, the business with the superior product and customer service is the one which is the most profitable, and others go out of business. That's obviously not what happened with the American automakers; their cars in the 70s-90s were utter shit. And not only were they shit, but there were far superior alternatives on the market, at competitive prices. In a meritocracy, they should have gone under. It's that simple. Ergo, there's no meritocracy, just a huge amount of inertia (plus a big bailout in the late 2000s).