Why unmarked? Because people slow down when they see a marked police car!!! Didn't God give you any common sense? Or do you just blithely fly by a cop car at 80 mph on a regular basis and never thought that maybe this was not a good idea? Unmarked cars means that cops can more easily spot people who do dangerous driving and give them expensive tickets which also ding their auto insurance and cause their rates to go up.

Truckers never obey that limit anyway. But my point was in most places, the 55 mph speed limit for trucks and vehicles with trailers is far too slow in most places and messes up the traffic pattern, thereby creating safety problems by causing other drivers to do unsafe things. Driving too fast for road conditions is always illegal regardless of the speed limit.

I think any mandate for some sort of GPS or other real-time tracking hardware would do two things. First, it would trigger a constitutional challenge that would probably succeed given a recent Supreme Court decision that says a warrant is required before a GPS tracker can be installed in a car. Second, it would create a market for businesses to disable and/or remove the GPS trackers. I certainly don't want the government tracking where I go. It's bad enough that my phone can do that but I can always turn off my phone when I travel.

I think the real solution to California's increasing road fatality problem is not putting speed limiters on vehicles but rather putting more unmarked CHP and local police and sheriff's cars on the roads pulling people over engaging in unsafe driving. I see it all the time, particularly when I drive down I-5 to the Los Angeles area but I see it in other places where there are multiple lanes. Too many people passing on the right in traffic trying to get just a little bit ahead of you, making unsafe lane changes, tailgating, etc. And then there are the slow trucks. The 55 mph speed limit for trucks and vehicles with trailers is far too slow. Most states don't have truck speed limits. It is these speed limits that actually increase the unsafe driving habits of people in cars and pickups, with one slow truck passing a slightly slower truck causing a long line of cars to pile up behind it in the left lane, begging impatient drivers to pass on the right and then find a way to cut into the left lane. I think a combination of the elimination of the truck speed limit and a rigorous enforcement of staying right except to pass (essentially German autobahn discipline) would to much to enhance safety.

For modern applications the premise of this story may be somewhat true, but for the world's banks, insurance companies, and governments, the mainframe will remain where it is at. Why? It's very simple. IBM mainframe operating systems are completely backwards compatible with the very first iteration of DOS/360, released in 1966 and IBM mainframes are completely hardware compatible with the first 1965-era IBM 360 mainframes. In short, you can run programs written in 1966 on the most modern IBM mainframes without recompiling the programs and they will work exactly as before with the one notable exception that they will run several orders of magnitude faster. The 64-bit Intel (and AMD) CPUs can execute anything from the DOS era but no modern operating system will support it. The same can be said about 16- and 32-bit Windows apps given that support for those has now been removed. MacOS? Nope. Linux? Nope!

Now, in theory, you could install the Herclues emulator in the could and run your mainframe apps in the could but I wouldn't recommend it. Hercules emulates the IBM instructions, meaning it's much, much slower than Big Iron. Keep in mind that modern IBM mainframe CPU's now run at 5 ghz. Also, you might have trouble getting access to an operating system to run on it. Older IBM mainframe operating systems are in the public domain and those can be used for many legacy tasks but if your newer apps require features present in a modern one, you're out of luck because IBM is not going to let you keep it in order to run it on a competitor's environment.

In short, if you are a company or an organization with a large software code base and you've been using mainframes for your computational needs, cloud computing does not offer much of an incentive to move to it.

It's no surprise that Sunrun is quickly making its way into bankruptcy. I have two sets of their solar panels on top of my house, installed by Vivint, a company Sunrun later acquired. The newer of the two sets of panels created two leaks in the roof that they don't seem to want to fix and have been trying to blame me for. Pigeons roost under the panels because they were installed too high off the roof. My neighbors don't have this problems because their panels were installed with less space underneath. There is a solution for this problem: guards. However, Vivint didn't install them. They did install guards on the front of the panels that are more cosmetic in nature to hide the wiring underneath them but those guards prevent the pigeon shit and nesting material from washing off the roof into the gutters and onto the ground when it rains. There is a legal term for what Vivint (and by extension Sunrun) did. It's called "negligence."

Sunrun's employees are also incompetent idiots who either don't know what they're doing or don't talk to each other. The newer set of panels are currently down because of an inverter problem. When I reported it to the company, they told me that they would do nothing until "the leak investigation was completed." Literally a half hour later someone called me from the company to arrange for a time for someone to come out and look at the problem. The problem has since been diagnosed but no one has called me to schedule a time for a tech to do the work. At this point, I am simply done with Sunrun as a company. I don't want to do business with them any longer.

The problem with rooftop solar is that roof tiles need to be removed and holes drilled into the tar paper and the boards underneath in order to install the feet that the panels are mounted upon. If those holes are not sealed up properly, water can get in and that's what's happening here. So, if you are thinking about getting roof top solar, DON'T! It's just not worth the aggravation given the demonstrated incompetence of Sunrun's employees.

Your "realize it later" is simply ignorant fanboys making up stories.

I beg to differ as I'm not a particular Steve Jobs fanboi. He was an arrogant and egotistical prick who somehow had a instinct for what a good, workable idea was. You have to know what a good idea is before you steal or build upon it. But I said it was "instinct", not "brains." But it's obvious that you hate Steve Jobs' guts which tells me that your opinions about him are heavily biased against him and perhaps not even worth being debated.

What would Steve Jobs know about "more sophisticated processors"?

Probably enough to know that the 68k was better than the 6502 or the 8086/8. Probably someone who knew more about it than he did told him it was better. Apple had plenty of very smart techies to give him that kind of information. You don't have to be an engineer and know every intimate detail about a piece of technology to know that it's better than others.

And yet what examples of bedrock applications trace their lineage to the Mac rather than Apple II or PC?

Oh, I can think of Microsoft Word and Excel for a start. Aldus (later Adobe) Pagemaker? The entire desktop revolution got started using Macs and their puny 9-inch screens. Even the primitive MacPaint that came with the original Macs was hand over fist better than anything available on a PC or an Apple II at that time. MIcrosoft Windows was light years away from being capable of doing what the Macs could do for well over 5 years, partially because early versions of Windows were shit and partially because the Intel CPU's were really not up to handling it until maybe the high-end 80286 chips. Windows 3.1 was the first decent Windows and even then it only really worked well on a 80386. Also, I don't recall PC's having high-resolution video until around 1990, something that you need if you're going to run a decent GUI.

So I stand by what I said.

The introduction of the Mac in 1984 was a piece of genius but I don't think anyone really realized it until later. I think it was Steve Jobs years later who noted in some interview I saw a long time ago that because the GUI of the original 128k Mac required a faster and more sophisticated processor in order to make it responsive enough (and certainly more responsive than the ill-fated Lisa, it gave programmers the opportunity to write more sophisticated programs designed to make use of it. Certainly it was the availability of the GUI that allowed programmers to conceive of programs that would have much more difficult to write in the Apple II or the PC-DOS world.

space is no longer a consideration for audio.

Really? Tell that to my phone. I have 10 GB of MP3's on my phone. If they were uncompressed PCM my phone would be overwhelmed. Also, I have 115 GB of MP3's on my iMac, mostly classical music. You think that's going to all fit on the SSD? Nope! 'Nuf said.

With all due respect to the Navajo, fuck them. The moon doesn't belong just to them. They can't claim it as their own. The moon isn't their Vatican! And someone needs to remind them that the Apollo missions left bags of shit and piss on the surface of the moon! I wonder what they think about that? Perhaps the Navajo nation can fund the mission to collect that!

It's been a long time but as I remember, a semicolon was not necessary on the statement just before the terminating "end" statement.

Pornography is evil in that it teaches people to objectify people, reducing them to mere objects for that person's sexual gratification. It dehumanizes and degrades the person in the picture. Pornography is also addictive despite what the psychiatric profession currently said on the issue. I am a porn addict and, for me, I react exactly like an alcoholic or a junkie would react to those respective poison when exposed to it. Like alcohol, it doesn't addict everyone but it sure addicted me and made a wreck of my life in the process.

Having said all this, I am the last person to advocate age verification or the banning of pornography as I am a big believer in the First Amendment. Age verification has a chilling effect on protected speech and, as that corrupt Clarence Thomas pointed out in the 1990's, the right to anonymous speech is protected. I suspect these state laws will not withstand constitutional scrutiny even a court as partisan, corrupt, and conservative as the current Supreme Court.

'Nuf said.

When it's boot code, that will be run by many millions of machines likely many millions of times per year, programming time is nearly irrelevant, and efficiency is paramount.

This is something that Steve Jobs recognized when he screamed and cajoled and implored the first Macintosh development team to speed up the boot-up process of the first 128k Mac. It took 30 seconds to boot off a floppy disk and it was too slow for him. He took the number of extra seconds wasted by the boot process, multiplied it by the number of potential Mac users, the number of times the Mac would be booted throughout its lifetime and computed the number of human lives that would be wasted by a slow boot process. Yes, it was extreme but it worked. The engineers dug back into the process and shaved off some more seconds.

It's interesting to note today that my current M1 iMac only boots in less than 30 seconds is because it has an SSD, not because of Steve Jobs' excoriations. Today's Mac operating systems is massive bloatware and sucks gigabytes just to sit and do nothing.

I have one of the recalled Philips CPAP machines. It's 10 years old and is not showing the signs of the internal foam degenerating, probably because I live in California where it's only hot, not humid, and even then it resides inside an air conditioned house. Nevertheless, I just got my HMO send me a new one. I have yet to open the box and set it up because I caught the flu and I feel like shit but this latest story about potential problems with Philips CPAP machines concerns me. If it is a Philips machine, am I going to potentially run into a different problem? I feel doomed because I need a CPAP machine to sleep properly.

Who needs to go skiing anyway? It's not exactly an activity that is absolutely necessary, although it does have some positive benefits, however. For example, it rid the world of that ass hat Sonny Bono. But seriously, would the apocalypse come that much sooner if wealthy people could no longer go skiing where or as often as they used to? In fact, that might actually be a net benefit to humanity. I thought the craziest thing I could do is ride a motorcycle, which is something I did for thirty-five years. Then I contemplated learning to ski. The thought of willingly hurtling myself down a steep, snowy slope seemed even more insane.