I picked up a 2011 FJ Cruiser base package, manual transmission, a full set of dealers repair manuals, and a lap top adapter along with a copy of Techstream.

It does what I want it to do, when I want it to do it, and how I want it to do it. (Thanks Techstream) If I am going to make the payments then I actually expect the vehicle to be mine.

The only vehicle I would have liked to pick up from Ford was one of their international Ford Rangers, (Turbo diesel, quad cab, small pickups.), but unfortunately between all the gov't regulations and the very thin profit margin on bare bones vehicles, they don't want to sell them in the States.

I don't need the fucking car to update facebook, check to see if I shaved, adjust all the settings, make sure I'm not drunk, or ask the real owner whether or not I can drive it, and then not work if there isn't a WiFi or cell signal present. (I'm sorry but you do not have permission to operate this vehicle as zombies are trying to break in.).

I want my car to be a car, I don't need an ever bigger fucking cell phone to complicate up my life, and not to mention charge me yet another monthly service fee, along with spying on me to send the info to the gov't and marketers.

Eat a bag of dicks Ford.

.....is that really a bad thing?

Great Choice Georgee it fits with the theme.

You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy

Poor Han he still won't be able to shoot first there either. Maybe you should have picked Florida instead, we have more reasonable gun laws down here.

It's turtles all the way down...

resort to the long long long type?

Your statement is perfectly true.

Unfortunately, faulty compilers are more than just hypothetical. But besides that...

Even with a perfect compiler, the knowledge it takes to avoid these 'equal semantics' traps is beyond most experienced programmers (no matter how much our egos say otherwise.) But otherwise, I totally agree that most 'optimizer bugs' I've seen are just lack of understanding by the programmer. The compiler rightfully saw its solution as equivalent to what the source code stated.

I think there should be a rule of thumb: "Every year of programming experience gets you halfway closer to knowing all the gotchas"

So we can blame the programmer, but that isn't going to produce better code in the real world. The tools and languages need to meet with common expectations. If that means taking a more "secure by default" approach then so be it. The experts can choose to take off the training wheels with pragmas or additional compiler options.

I don't think any language is portable at that level, so you may as well use asm (my preference is linked instead of inline to ensure a clean and simple abstraction.) Every processor has different math status registers and different math instruction capabilities. I'm not sure how C can express these things.

We could buy every working person a new fuel efficient car every year and repave all the interstates and still have money left over.

Life is hardly based on facts - that information just isn't always available. Humans generally create good outcomes based on limited information. When school administrator have wildly bad judgement they usually get booted out by parents and/or school board.

It would only take a few motivated parents to vote in new school board members to remedy that.

Does gun control save lives in Mexico, Russia, or dozens of other places it is on the law books? Statistics do lie if you cherry pick the results you prefer. I'd promote gun control if I thought it had a strong correlation to reducing violence. But it doesn't, the results are lost in the statistical noise. I'd prefer to look at the issues of poverty, inequality, education, abuse, mental health, addiction, etc.

The USA is not and analogue to Canada, UK, or Australia. We have massive social problems more like a 3rd world country. We also like to make laws and then not follow them.

There may be innovative approaches to gun control, but simple bans, license, or registration are constantly ignored on the black market by criminals.

I have to agree that the CC company makes a difference, Capital One has always been the one to tell me when something bad has happened. Slight inconvenience to me. Somebody besides me ate the cost (probably Capital One.) So obviously their business model is profitable enough to not really worry too much.

That being said, it is about F'ing time that retailers and CC companies make the investment into chip and pin systems. Not perfect, but would basically shut down most causal card skimmers. The one-time card numbers for online transactions are a good compromise, especially considering it might be difficult to get the card reading devices at the home-user level.

I agree that many schools bend the rules for athletics, music, theater, chess club, whatever... But I've never seen how tenure stopped that injustice.

Hard teachers should be unpopular... good, effective teachers that help kids pass Regents, SAT, and AP tests are popular. If you live in a place that doesn't care about those things, then feel free to ignore this post.

Exactly. A university professor may have some argument for tenure when doing controversial research. But even then, maybe that professor should shop around for a university that is more sympathetic. But in primary and high schools, the curriculum is usually predefined. The school should absolutely have the tools to retain and reward the most effective teachers.

Employers (school boards) are not specifically all a bunch of fat cat a-holes walking around looking for people to fire. They will absolutely retain people who do their jobs well. What is the specific conflict of interest inherent to the teaching industry that requires tenure as compared to other industries?