In the english language itself, "or" doesn't necessarily imply "xor". Usually some other mechanism is used to imply exclusivity, either from situational awareness or from context in the surrounding text.

For example, I worked for a decade in the linux kernel and low-level userspace. Assembly definitely needed. I tracked down and fixed a bug in the glibc locking code, and you'd better believe assembly was required for that one. During that time I dealt with assembly for ARM, MIPS, powerpc, and x86, with both 32 and 64-bit flavours of most of those. But even there most of the time you're working in C, with as little as possible in assembly.

If you're working in the kernel or in really high-performance code then assembly can be useful. If you're working with experimental languages/compilers where the compilers might be flaky, then assembly can be useful. If you're working in Java/PHP/Python/Ruby/C# etc. then assembly is probably not all that useful.

From what I understand, torture can make most people talk, but can't make them tell the truth. So if you're looking for easily-verified information it might be effective. If you're looking for information that is hard to verify, then it might not work as well.

And even if torture does make people talk, there may be other less brutal (and possibly more effective) ways of getting the same information.

"Hi-res" only makes sense when recording/mixing audio. For a final product that is intended just for listening it makes no sense at all.

*That particular" machine would charge less because they wanted to promote that beverage.

However, Coke was also looking at machines that would charge more when it was hot out. See http://www.nytimes.com/1999/10... for one example.

A "real and present threat" on a specific mall is a very different thing from a random threat.

There are 5300 movie theaters in the USA. If half of them show the movie, that's 2650 showings. If the terrorists attack *ten* showings (likely an overestimate), that's still less than half a percent chance of being impacted.

I'd take those odds.

The alternative is that random groups start making threats against everything they don't like while carrying through on just enough of them to keep people scared, and the population lives in fear.

Taking your "2 weeks" literally, currently according to Google you could fly American leaving Dec 31 and returning Jan 7 for $250.

If you drive, its 1140 miles each way. At roughly 60 cents/mile operating costs, that's $1370 in fuel and wear-and-tear on a typical vehicle, plus about 36hrs of driving time.

Around here we have mostly no-fault for the purposes of insurance payout (so you don't have to sue to get reimbursed) , but if you're considered to be at fault then your insurance costs go up. So stupid drivers do end up paying a penalty for their behaviour. And if you have too many incidents you can get your license pulled.

If we really wanted to, I bet you and I could live on a quarter of our incomes.

The reason why people come from other countries to work in places like England/Canada/USA for not-great wages are that they *don't plan on staying here forever*. So they can come, work for ten years while saving every penny they can, then go back home and retire.

I lived in Africa for a few years. The average annual income where I lived was $200 USD. Take a typical first-world retirement savings and you could live reasonably well in a third-world country. But you'd have to be prepared to give up a lot of what you're used to.

This isn't quite accurate. We can gain/lose traits randomly and if they don't impede our ability to reproduce they could get passed on. Also, some traits are genetically linked to more desirable traits, so they get dragged along by the other traits even if they're not necessarily desirable in and of themselves.

I take it you've never seen people arguing about what exactly the C standard means about how "volatile" should behave, or whether the defined memory model is sufficient to reason formally about visibility of variables given specific types of assembly operations, or what optimizations a compiler can legally make (as opposed to what optimizations it would actually make *sense* for it to make).

Even a reasonably-well-defined language like C can still end up in the weeds once you start looking at edge cases...

This would have been the perfect story to get covered there....

Maybe a professional organization, like the Engineers have here in Canada.

I had friends working for a union building pipelines. It was all about seniority, not skill. My mom worked as part of a union, and they didn't represent her interests. My friend worked for a union and they made here go on strike due to issues that some other people in a totally different job had on the other side of the country.

Meanwhile I've worked for three different companies over the past decade and a half, I've gotten along with every manager I've ever had, I've been reasonably happy with my work, I've gotten more money than I ever expected. I don't see how being part of a union would have helped.

I respect that unions can do good things, but they have issues as well.

Drives intended to go in RAID arrays have different firmware and handle errors differently.

They may also get different testing. I worked for a telecom equipment vendor and there were specific drives that had been tested for behaviour under high/low temperatures, high/low humidity, vibration, etc.

If you're a big enough company then drive manufacturers will actually work with you to resolve drive firmware issues and/or answer questions about specific behaviours on their enterprise drives.

Lastly, at least in the SSD space at least some of the "Enterprise" drives have much better handling of power outages, with sufficient capacitors to handle writing out data.

It's not always worth buying "enterprise", but sometimes it makes sense.

Just randomly connecting to the grid and backfeeding power causes real problems (i.e. your generator electronics get fried, you can electrocute the guy trying to fix a power outage, etc.). You need special equipment to make sure there are no phase mismatches, it needs to detach itself from the grid if the grid-side drops in a power outage, and you need a new meter.