To me, this misses the point of the Justice System. The function of the Justice System is to allow people to live together by administering, fairly, a set of rules that all know and have, by remaining in the country when they know the laws, agreed to abide by. Prosecution and punishment are a means to that end, not an end in themselves. If we have rules, we need to punish rule breakers. But if we have punishments, we need to reassure people that the law abiding will not be punished: and the mechanism for doing that open trial with guild established beyond reasonable doubt.

So it is more important that justice is seen to be done than it is done. The "beyond reasonable doubt" rule establishes this. Of course, the easiest way for justice to be seen do be done is for it to be done, where it can be seen. And secret trials break this paradigm. It will not deter other plotters from future plots, because they don't know about it. It might take two dangerous men off the streets - but can that not be done other ways, with a simpler and mor publishable level of proof?

The law against parking in front of hydrants is, presumably, to allow easy access for the fire service in case of fire. The fine is only a means to enforcing this, and making the city safer. Not, for example, raising revenue not an act of hydrant-worship by city officials. So by getting the city to make it clearer where the hydrants are, and thus keep them open for use, he has made the city a safer place. That is actually more important than saving fines. Maybe, one day, someone will not be burned to death because the fire service ran out of water as a result of this,

But the purpose of the law is to keep the hydrant clear for use by the fire services. The fine is only a means to this end. If you think it is a money earner, either the hydrant is unnecessary, or you think the city is happy to make money by burning buildings (and possibly people).

A friend wrote a Basic-like interpreter for our embedded product to occupy his mind while waiting for his first children to be born. We did uses it a little.

As well as the market information given by others, which can effectively double income, Africa has developed mobile and small scale banking. So it could bring them financial services: money transfers from family working in the city, the ability to save safely or to borrow to fund new businesses.The relatively small amount of energy used by communications technology can pay off very fast. And they have a lot of sun there for solar power rather than a genny,

Very unlikely to be in geosynchronous orbit, which is a long way away - about 20, 000 miles compared to Low Earth Orbit at 120 miles or so. Inverse square law means that both ends would need much more power. Handing from one station to another on the fly is a solved problem.

It is more a question of having a home/office base where you plug in exactly 1 cable to your portable device to get power, desktop quality keyboard mouse and display, faster then WiFi network connectivity. Portable devices are, of course, ubiquitous, and we all have them - and we are always worried about the battery. Desktop installations have their advantages, and plenty of people make their portable devices into temporary desktop devices by plugging in enough cables. It seems a good idea to reduce that number of cables to the lowest possible number if possible. The USB Power Delivery standard does this. It can actually be delivered over current connectors, but it looks as if manufacturers are waiting for the new USB connector to implement it.

The OS has many discontinous buffers for many different overlapped commands. If you allow peripherals to buffer many commands and execute in their preferred order, performance can greatly increase - more than double for disks IME. Bu that would mean the controller having many different base/limit registers. Which, of course, it does (even if via software) in USB. Allowing the peripheral to switch buffers as needed cuts a lot of duplicated effort - by handing trust over to the peripheral completely.

This guy has an incredible blinkered view of "embedded devices". Most embedded devises are not connected to the Interned. Should my wristwatch, washing machine, car ignition controller, garage door opener, swimming pool pump, dumb TV, bank vault, disk drive, mouse, keyboard, etc all die prematurely because somebody else makes a router that can be prejudiced. There are literally billions of embedded devices in the world,. of which probably less than one a thousand is connected to the internet. Yet this seems to be suggesting that we should kill a thousand devices because one /might/ be prejudiced.

While the number of civilisations may be infinite, they are scattered through infinite space. Their density may be low even when their number is infinite, If there is only one civilisation per billion galaxies at any one time, they will be hard to spot.

Why does inflation making space expand faster than the speed of light change the constants? No particle or energy travelled faster than light. Just space expanded smoothly such that, over a sufficient distance, the rate of change of that distance exceeded C. Nothing to trouble relativity in that fact: geometry changed, but nothing moved to fast. In fact, it is still the case: if the Hubble expansion is uniform, as it appears to be, at some distance the rate of recession must exceed C; there are objects which we will never see, because light cannot cross the ever-expanding gulf between us.

It is imaginable that a fibre such as you describe could be one of the products which could be made with graphene. But the nanoparticles being described in the articles are dangerous at the cellular level, not at the size of an arm. They are much more like incredibly fine, incredibly hard grit.

It is hardly surprising that graphene can, in some circumstances, be dangerous. Exhaust particulates, which he have known for years are dangerous, contain (now we know what we are looking for) large numbers of graphene nanoparticles, which may well contribute to their damaging effects. Just about every chemical ever tested has bad effects at some scale. What I didn't get from either article was any sense of the scale of the danger. Obviously, it is early days in the research, and one would only expect an order of magnitude estimate. But is is such a danger that we should not allow graphene products into the home lest they spill, or merely one which demands normal safety precautions in the factories for future graphene products? A warning of danger without some idea of the scale of the problem is just sensationalist: it induces fear without giving any idea as to what should be done, if anything,

Wirth's own compiler obviously implemented his language. But that was a university Comp Sci compiler: it had to be good enough for students to hand in assignments. But otherwise, every compiler needed extensions. Which were fairly easy to add, and the language was generally good. I did many years of embedded development, with two RTOSes optimised to Pascal idioms. And I really wanted to follow the Pascal line of development to Ada, but was not able to. I entirely agree that Pascal is a much more elegant language than C and its descendants. But it was written as a teaching language, and C was written as a systems implementation language. And since systems are a much bigger commercial market than teaching. So people wrote and supported C compilers. So we are where we are.

I think C/C++ is twenty years past it best before date. Not that it is a bad language, for its time, but its time should not be now. We should have replaced it, and haven't. And a replacement descended from Pascal would be nicer than one descended from C, though many devotees will damn me for saying so.

It was not bad, it was incomplete. It was a much nicer language than C, which is why I chose it for the projects I was developing, and was the point made several posts up . But, as I recall, it had no features allowing multiple compilations to be linked together - no equivalent of the C header file.Turbo Pascal added this, to make a very usable system. As did several others - incompatibly. This militated against it becoming a widely used systems language, because it was fragmented into different dialects, all incompatible. C, ugly though it was, stayed on the K&R standard, then added the Ansi standard, which was nearly completely upwards compatible, then mutated into C++ which made great efforts to keep compatibility with C. I can switch code between GCC and VisualC with very little effort: I could not switch code between the various Pascal environments in the same way.