I've heard of traffic 'accidents' where a diabetic went hypoglycemic, passed out, and drove into other cars, pedestrians, etc. For some reason the news always reports it as a 'medical event', but the point is, people are killed by diabetics due to their diabetes way too often. It is an apt analogy. An idiot decides to drink and drive an puts people at risk. An idiot with diabetes fails to control their blood sugar and decides to drive, putting people at risk.

Yeah, it's easy to add more code to fix stuff that should be deleted. Just have the launcher code call your new code which bypasses all the old code. The old code can happily remain, it'll just never be called. No special skills required. If you look at the windows codebase, you'll see this technique everywhere.

And she's probably still a threat to national security!

Agreed, I had a 486DX2-50 from Dell. At best, I got it to boot into windows 3.1 on Dos 6.22 in about 25 seconds. That was with the HDD in DMA mode, and a heavily optimized config.sys and autoexec.bat. Unfortunately just the POST ate up 10 seconds.

The OP's claim of 3 seconds is ludicrous. Maybe on a modern VM emulating a 486?

What's really scary is that we've reached a point where I can't tell if this is a legit suggestion or sarcasm... and that says a lot.

You had me until you said you live in the UK. As a Canadian, it pains me to say, but the UK is even stricter than Canada on this surveillance and violence prevention crap. Even if Ebay didn't demand you prove your age for wanting a pair of scissors with less than an inch long blade, the UK Post would likely demand ID before delivering the 'dangerous goods', to track the movement of 'nefarious instruments'... lol

In case my sarcasm wasn't evident. I feel your plight, and share in it. This nonsense needs to end.

Oh dear... you seem to think that the human eye takes a picture like a camera. That's not at all how our eyes work. The number of rods and cones is not really that important, density of them matters more, but the focal length between the front and back of our eyes matter the most.

You see (pun intended) the human eye and brain work by scanning and filling in the blanks. Your eye is scanning (micromovements) constantly. Your brain is storing what it saw in an extremely narrow field of view and building up a mental image that makes you think you're seeing everything around you in one shot and in high detail. Nobody is. We're all seeing a very tiny sliver of high resolution dead center of our vision (well minus the tiny blind spot where the optic nerve leaves the back of the retina), and the rest is composited together from memory, and some of it is hallucinated (or inferred by experience and the brain being lazy).

So you are correct that it is unlikely the person can actually see such detail at that distance, but in theory, if his eyes are able to focus light just right at that distance onto the important part of his retina, he theoretically could make out the pixels, even if the pixel density is higher than the density of the cones and rods on the back of his eye.

My guess is he really believes he sees the individual pixels at that distance, but what he's seeing is artifacts from groups of pixels that his brain perceives. Not too dissimilar to how many people (myself included) can tell the difference between a CRT monitor refreshing at 60Hz, 75Hz, and even 85Hz. We're seeing secondary effects and claiming we see the flicker. Heck, anything below 400Hz for a fluorescent tube light and I absolutely see flicker, yet physiologically I should not. Clearly my eyes don't refresh at 400Hz. Just like the OP's eyes do not have the ability to resolve the pixels at that distance, but his brain is treating secondary artifacts as pixels, when they are very likely groups of pixels that appear to show banding in his vision (a common issue with human vision, and the reason why sub-pixel blending is used on fonts, to avoid that exact phenomenon).

So yeah, the OP is confusing his perception with what he is physically seeing. Lots of us think we see details we don't actually see. Our brains are fantastic at guessing and seeing patterns, then convincing us that we are indeed seeing them. That's the foundation of most optical illusions. And if he really did have a genetic abnormality where he could resolve the pixels at distance as he claims, then he'd be blind when looking at anything at any other distance as he'd be unable to focus the lens of his eye due to thickness.

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Garbage in, garbage out.

Funny thing is, the more AI consumes all of our CPU and RAM for their data centers, the more necessary it is to build performant and optimized code, both for CPU cycles and for memory constraints, since consumer devices are going to have worse compute resources available going forward due to cost.

The dinosaurs among the devs (of which I sadly count myself as one), know how to write code that squeezes every bit of useful work from every clock cycle, and how to use the least amount of memory necessary to achieve the task at hand. So the more layer after layer the AI slop generates, the more job security actual skilled developers will have.

I identify with your visualization. :)

The same sort of sentiment was expressed before Windows XP SP2 was created. When MS actually puts effort where it's needed, and let's engineers develop solid solutions, and not just listen to the marketing department and force unwanted changes on us, they are quite good at making a solid product.

I'm very hopeful this will be a repeat of the XP SP2 experience.

I will admit I'm not willing to bet on it though... but no harm in being optimistic. Cautiously optimistic... or is that just wishful given their track-record?

What about biodiesel? How did Europe tackle that taxing problem?

Though I do agree, the additives are critical and could easily be the source of tax, if this ever became cost effective enough to be widespread.