And what about managers who steer the development effort in a direction highly likely to produce buggy code, those won't get measured?

Because small software fell out of favor some time ago. And it doesn't do HTML5 yet. :-) (It may not be actually easy, but compared to the man-years needed to create the 100MLOC behemoths of today, it doesn't seem such a far-fetched prospect to me! Especially if we're talking about specialized secure computing systems, where one might be expected to be willing to do a few sacrifices...)

No, it's because BT doesn't like this.

Except for Oberon... (And other similar designs in the spirit of "obviously no deficiencies")

What has that to do with the things I was writing about? FYI, we *did* have bread queues in the 1980s.

Well, I've never disputed that. Nor does it contradict anything I said on that. ;) Personally, all this seems alien to me, though (and I've been there, and haven't done that).

I'm pretty sure that if Hamas knew about Israelis posting vertical videos on the Internet, they'd get even more enraged and motivated to wipe out the abomination!

You're talking about radar-guided counter-battery fire. Well, Israel could most certainly do that, but prepare for the shit hitting the fan it they ever do that.

Except the ANC "won", and they were still labeled as terrorists afterwards. That doesn't sound like "winners writing history" to me. That sounds much more like "the truth will prevail".

Hey, that looks conspicuously like my room! Damned Hamas. I knew there was something wrong when no amount of tidying up could make any marked difference in neatness.

The wall was only in Berlin, though (and perhaps similar things in a few other places where the border crossed an urban settlement). The rest of the border was mostly fences with anti-personnel mines and other juicy stuff like that.

That is not the point. The point is that 1) communism, in its design, has nothing to do with what was happening in East Germany, and 2) even if it had, in the end stage, it wouldn't matter if communist-bred people cheated for money more than others because the communist society would be a post-scarcity one, so this is an artificial "problem" since there would be nothing to cheat for.

I'm pretty sure there are ways to constrain the range of possibilities. One obvious thing is that no life forms will most likely be based on xenon or gold because these elements don't really form the same kind of a wide range of interesting compounds that carbon does. The laws of physics (and chemistry) are the same pretty much everywhere, and just because our brains (and computers) are incapable of reaching more significant conclusions on this issue at this very moment doesn't mean that it's going to stay like that forever.

But is that even important? Caches themselves introduce execution trace non-determinism (certainly in the presence of interrupts and multitasking) because you don't know in advance if the memory reference is going to hit or miss. The program can't rely on timings in those cases (it's my understanding that this is why Cortex-M for real-time control doesn't have any caches at all - if you really have to care about worst-case behavior, trying to improve the average case may be pointless for many applications).