If they don't know what they are doing, then why are they the leaders?

Because they have access to the biggest club. They claim Earth's resources as their own, and can back that claim with (outsourced) violence, so everyone else either obeys or starves. Actual competence in using those resources is irrelevant.

Besides, it's not like they're actually in charge - market logic or the "Invisible Hand" is. They have some leeway in interpreting its will, and particularly competent ones can sometimes even suggest a course of action, but ultimately they are just pampered slaves.

An executive's job is a purely ritualistic one: they're posing for the public while interpreting orders from high. The only real difference between them and, say, an Aztec high priest is that the Invisible Hand wants its victims starved rather than TempleofDoomed, which is less messy. Well, currently they victims are mostly just made destitute rather than outright killed, but born-again InvisibleHanders are working hard to change that.

Of course, the real problem with this scenario is that the Invisible Hand is not self-aware and can't think ahead, so the end result is that no one is in charge. Explains a lot, eh?

No, I don't consider it worthy of note unless a lot of people give a shit.

I have a Titan running SOKP.

OK, either tell me how to block stories with fucking polls or I'm blocking Timothy.

You know what, fuck it. I'm blocking Timothy.

So, you call it an ivory tower when it's intellectual, what do you call it when it's just a tower made of stacked-up money? The reason why "global business leaders" don't know about technology is that they are completely divorced from the daily life that normal humans live. They don't have to know shit, so they don't know shit. Then they want to tell us all about how to be successful. We're always having to endure quotes from Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, who both were born with silver spoons in their mouths, about how we can supposedly be successful — but they actually have no idea how to become successful, because they were born into positions of privilege. We should not give one tenth of one very small shit about what they think about becoming successful, because they never did.

What you don't seem to realize is that this is the equivalent of that for connecting your smartphone to your car. If only you knew anything about the subject at hand, like about cars or automotive infotainment, you would know that these are technologies for interfacing to your phone while in your car — and that these are both major standards. That means that virtually all smartphone owners will be able to use the interface in the car, designed for automotive use, instead of the interface on their phone which isn't.

Hahahaha

What we did in Iraq was separate peacefully coexisting communities of the people you're talking about. We deliberately set social progress back a hundred years there. What you think we need to do is literally the opposite of our government's intent.

Obama has been consistent, at least since taking office. Before taking office, he spoke out against mass data collection. But ever since taking office, he has consistently stated that we require this data collection to be safe. We have met the enemy, and he is us. And that very much includes Obama.

Obama has been consistent in calling for more surveillance of Americans. Sometimes he says there's more need to be sure that we're doing it properly, but he doesn't ever say we need to do less of it.

How about it? Literally the only thing of note I can think of which requires it is Skype.

Hell, I just updated my Titan to a new SOKP based on 5.1, and I had to manually set my proxy settings... which are per-connection, so I will have to set them all over again if I roam.

And we're doing it in a way that brings us right back to the era of mainframes. Although far more advanced, the model is highly similar to that of the IBM mainframe systems whose semi-smart terminals understood form fields and submission.

*shudder* Are avionics really written in C++?

Yes, but only a subset of it. Things like exceptions aren't allowed.

Is memory deterministically pre-allocated in such systems? That would certainly make it safer, but less flexible.

Yes, that's the whole idea. They aren't meant to be flexible, they're meant to do exactly what they're designed to do and no more, in a completely deterministic fashion. These systems aren't all things with UIs, they include all kinds of systems on an aircraft, which frequently don't have any UI at all except maybe some switches. On a car, an ABS computer would be a good example of one of these systems. There's no display or UI or anything of the sort; you just plug it into the car, and it sits there monitoring wheelspeed and brake pressure and when it sees a wheel locking up it releases brake fluid pressure to that wheel (it's a bit more complex than that, esp. on cars with dynamic stability control and traction control where these are all tied into the ABS, but this is the general idea). A system like that doesn't need to free memory, it just needs to allocate what it needs when it powers up, and then run its program continuously, monitoring inputs and controlling outputs (implementing transfer functions etc). All the tasks it'll ever have to do are well-defined, and all start up when the system powers up, and all get a timeslice.

By spending half or more of their income on their mortgage, and by having a co-signer and a down payment. It's not rocket surgery, it's just dealing with the evil, evil banks. The banks are sitting on something like three houses for every homeless man, woman, and child in America, refusing to drop their prices to market level.