If you can't add without a calculator 33 and 84 in your head and get an answer instantly, then you are fucked up.

If you have to think about it at all, then your education has been wrong.

There is value to pages and pages of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division work. And in not being able to access a calculator to do it.

is there an unknown benefit of having a blood-borne disease vector?

Yes, and he just told you, but you weren't listening. Having a blood-bourne disease vector has the benefit of staying the wrathful hand of Gaea.

Are you trying to persuade us that this disease is somehow important enough to be a bad thing, or are you making your argument to a god?

If you're so intimately familiar with a values and agendas of the gods, then on humanity's behalf I request that you also please explain to Cthulhu that the stars aren't right.

Excel has a very stubborn and evil UI bug. It's been there forever, and it appears that MS has no intention of ever fixing it, or ever giving users an option to suppress the behavior. Ever try to scroll a large document, and you'll see what I mean. It is impossible to scroll by half-cells (or >1 cell). It's very annoying, especially when you have cells which contain a paragraph or two of text, and makes it almost impossible to navigate without losing your place as you're reading a spreadsheet. The other really horrible issue is that tab-names can only be llike 15 characters. If you need a more descriptive name for tabs, well, then, fuck you.

There are so many layers of stupid in this story, it's hard to address one of them without the embarrassing feeling that someone might read a rebuke of one stupidity, and take it as an implicit acceptable of the rest of the stupidity that you didn't address. If you argue too hard that Yog-Sothoth made a mistake in designing camels, somebody might think you're a creationist.

From the point of view of a malevolent user who intends to use the device to harm someone, why would they want your malware?

From the point of view of a benevolent user, why would they want your malware?

What will happen in the marketplace, if a benevolent user is persuaded to run your malware and then has a problem and finds out that it was due to the malware?

What's so special about the security needs of people in a capital, compared to people everywhere else? And is this special need, really a function of where they happen to be at a moment, or is it based on what their powers and responsibilities (and presumably, replacement cost) are?

I am leaving a few dozen obvious things out because it's tiring to enumerate. That my original point: don't think that just because I missed a totally-obvious way that the idea is stupid, as meaning I would debate one of these points from the premise of accepting a lot of other stupidity. It's not even something I disagree with or think is a bad strategy or an us-vs-them thing. It's just a totally dumb idea, a loser no matter how you look at it and no matter what your agenda is.

You call them worthless but then in the very same sentence you admit that they are all-powerful.

Error. You are proceeding from a healthy input of facts. The constraints of the thread are to proceed from a health input of science fiction.

This is how we're going bring our keepers to their knees, and eventually break out of the Matrix. We spend imaginary money on imaginary storage and then put all sorts of high-entropy stuff on it and run calculations to verify that it's really working, but they have to spend actually real resources, to emulate it.

Sloppy calculation tip: 24*365 = 10000.

If you're Sloppy enough to accept that premise, then at 10 cents/KWHr, a Watt costs a dollar per year. It makes your $28 turns into $32, but hey, close enough. When I'm shopping, I can add up lifetime energy costs really fast, without actually being smart. Nobody ever catches on!

The government, of course.

Yes, the IoT is coming... as soon as IPv6 is fully deployed with stateless autoconfiguration so we'll have network addresses for all the things.

I hear both Verizon and Comcast are really happy about the idea of offering routable addresses for everyone, without finding some way to monetize it.

Not the same. Embedded development was mostly about reducing cost by replacing custom mechanical and electronic devices with microprocessors and software. IoT is about taking inexpensive things and adding features in order to boost revenue, and also to create new revenue streams by collecting and selling personal data.

I just asked my toaster.

I was starting to wonder about that, then realized we at $BIGCORP are already generating ASTs from your input buffer, unifying those trees with a bunch of patterns, and telling your editor to flag questionable constructs. You type "if not foo in x" and 50ms later you get a proposed improved snippet. It's pretty rare to see quirky style in our codebase.

#insert observations/law/drferris.h

(preprocessed for your convenience)

"Did you really think we want those laws observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted â" and you create a nation of law-breakers â" and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Reardon, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with.â