And sadly, it was only an accident.

I used to work for a company that still maintains a VB3 system. We also used a licensed rich-text-format textbox control for reporting. We had to buy the company to get the source code for it when it went out of business, just in case it had a critical bug and we needed it fixed.

Proprietary platforms will, as you say, only stick around by dint of luck. Free software is the only software you're guaranteed to have stick around.

As for hardware, buy redundant units.

> there's even less you could do against a bomber or a tank.

This is presumably why the US are arming police forces all over the country with ex-military surplus.

They're preparing for the inevitable war against their populace. We should probably be infiltrating the police.

Why? Because those people are clearly of insufficient value to be considered viable, deemed so by the All Jerking Invisible Hand of the Holy Market?

Viewing the poverty line as if it were made of piano wire is a dangerous thing, especially since with the increasing levels of automation in the world, it will continue to sweep towards the right of the income curve.

Don't know about the Luton ones, but they are everywhere.

Leeds rail station has cameras placed for face reco all over the place, particularly on the stairs. I imagine most of the UK transport hubs now have this.

Electronic is a bad design for a voting system, because only a tiny priesthood of nerds can audit it. It's easy to get wrapped up in all the cool cryptographic technology, it's undeniably fun, but something as important as deciding the figurehead of the free world should be open to inspection. And a counting room composed ofa few square millimetres of impure silicon is not. Use a pencil, and hand count ballots.

Yeah. You could probably replace the thing with a raspberry pi .... at each location ... with a custom controller card.. and another one to control them all... for about $5,000

$2M ? Someone's pork barrel overfloweth.

Indeed. It's been shown by tracking eye movements, that while beginners laboriously pore over code to determine what it does, the eyes of the experienced coder mostly flick over the indent structure of the code, and only dip into the lines when they need to refer to detail.

This is why experienced coders feel so strongly about consistent indenting - not because they are all neat-freaks, but because it directly impacts their ability to comprehend the code. Bad indenting is like scratching the needle on a beautiful piece of music, or shouting random words, or *shudder* listening to sales people describe requirements.

Python forces you to indent consistently. If only Guido / PEP-8 hadn't chosen the wrong indent sequence as the preferred standard (4 spaces instead of a tab) ;-)

High pay for a STEM degree actually correlates with the notion of a STEM shortage - supply and demand determining wages.

At least for programming, I think it's true. Whenever I've had to hire, virtually all the candidates have been incompetent*. And since I was working for a government org, the wage scale wasn't enough to tempt the competent ones to hire on.

* We're not talking "slightly iffy programmer" here, we're talking "can't explain how they would implement a simple collection class"

> When people respond negatively

When they do, they don't usually respond with "This is a shit game!" and leave it at that.

They respond with a tirade directed against the minority they think has wronged them in some way.

They may well be right - the game might have been written to push an agenda rather than just be fun. But they also lack the mental maturity to realise that if they don't want this to happen, giving this game, that they feel opposes and threatens the stability of their world view, the oxygen of a thousand vile hate comments, the attention that doxxing and SWATting people attracts, well, that's the worst thing they could have done.

The appropriate thing to do for a game you dislike is to thumb down it and demand a refund.

Here's a thought - what if these works ARE #GamerGateBait placed there by "SJWs"? Aren't they being spectacularly successful? WHY are they being successful? Answer : because the attitudes they are exposing are not generally considered acceptable.

No, because it's separate software - GPL is only activated when you link (dynamically or statically) other GPL software.

Yup.

Generally Awesome Young Sexpots.

The flashbang is designed to release it quickly.

The phone isn't. You'd have to physically modify the battery, you can't just make them explode from software.

It's way too heavy. An RTG needs a lot of metal to work, encapsulation of the plutonium, radiators, and it needs size - there has to be a temperature differential for it to work, and for that you need a certain amount of distance to dissipate the heat across.

And it's way too inefficient. The RTG used on the Voyager Probes produced about 2400 Watts of thermal power, which was enough for 157W of electricity. The total weight of the device was 37.7 kg. This Parrot drone consumes 14.5 W when hovering, so even if RTGs scaled in a linear manner (which is optimistic), a large enough unit would be larger than the payload capacity.

The hydrogen tank in the structural members carries 120g of fuel. You could extend the longevity of the thing enormously by fitting a secondary fuel tank as part of that 1kg payload you're allowed.