The car radio system has the processing power to pick up FM and satellite. It's a digital display with context, so there's no extra hardware and only a little extra software. How much extra can it possibly cost to continue including AM reception, which is already well-developed and well-understood and mature? The default behavior would be to continue including it; someone must be ACTIVELY pushing to remove it. And why? AM works over longer distances (albeit with attenuation). AM is cheaper to transmit, meaning that small local stations can exist. This isn't about consumer interest any more than changing the size of supermarket cans is in consumer interest.

Friend used to religiously buy Ford. One car started having transmission problems within the first year; went in, covered under warranty, service manager tells him "It's a little plastic impeller piece, eventually they all deform under heat and pressure. The replacement is exactly the same. BTW I hear that you can get a metal replacement - I can't, but you can." So my friend finds the metal replacement, brings the car in for the service appointment with the replacement on the seat. Gets the car back with a boxed untouched plastic part on the seat instead. Metal part lasted until the car was nearly scrap.

"only a few flights" - and today a processor is 10x or 50x as fast and the entire working data set is in RAM (or should be). Scale can be worked around with money.

And today with a processor 10x or 20x as fast, and RAM cheap enough that the entire working set is RAM and most of the backing files are cached, they've been getting by just fine most of the time. The single biggest issue was probably the lack of connection between plane and crew scheduling; if that's a manual step then huge time is lost. (Similarly for other comments re: crew having to call in rather than just text or being online.)

Unfortunately, thanks to the overwhelming popularity of C and Unix, and because C is pretty much an "Algol-like language" with the restrictions abandoned, C engulfed and devoured the Algol / PL1 / Fortran / Pascal level of languages. Instead of using one of the stricter languages with special-case exceptions (like for creating pointers to direct hardware register addresses), we all use the looser language and then have to enforce extra code standards and static analysis. And everyone new starts out saying "Why are you being so picky?", gets burned, and realizes that being picky is part of "engineering" and "making things work right every time".

No. "Languages that guarantee the precise size of a primitive type" *started* by exactly representing the hardware in use by most manufacturers at the time, except for DEC which decided that 36 bits of precision was better than the power-of-two 32 bits. There was no extra stuff, quite the reverse. And I did my master's thesis on a system communicating betwen PDP-10 and IBM360/67 so the difference in sizes was slightly critical. Other languages then specified that "the typical that you expect is indeed the normal that you will get", and gave you the opportunity to select other sizes for other architectures. C, on the other hand, decided that "there is no typical, you should know what hardware you're running on." But even assembler, which knows EXACTLY what hardware it's running on, defines full and half and double "word" register size; C doesn't even tell you for sure which size is being used as the "normal" integer. That's why MISRA and other coding standards have to tell people to NOT USE the intrinsic definitions, and instead cobble together alternatives. I've done embedded systems for 40+ years from Z80s to ARM, using lots of different languages and assemblers, and only C gets confused about this crap.

The very fact that multiple coding standards say "DO NOT RELY on the intrinsic definitions of the language, YOU MUST use enhanced definitions" indicate that the language is suboptimally defined. Rather than saying "The language definition of variable sizes can change depending on the hardware", the language should enforce consistent definitions and the onus should be on the application to use different typedefs when compiling for different hardware. That's what conditional compilation is for.

Yes, it has been wildly successful for all of these years, and I have used it myself for decades. But the indeterminacy of a few key items is still a problem, and None of the coding rules or the Misra insistence on alternate definitions or the static analysis checking can really guarantee that things are what you expect the first time.

"what even IS a long anyway?" In 1977 or 78, we grad students at an IBM370-centric computer science program read about the forthcoming C language and said, "How is this supposed to work consistently if you don't know for sure what the variables are?" And sure enough, this is still the most basic issue. It could have been Fortran or PL/1 or Algol, except for that indeterminacy.

The number of typos in your message is a disturbing example of *exactly* the original point. And if you want to ignore people with a number in their name, why is your name field being used for processing rather than being raw character data whose value is semantically insignificant?

Remember when telephone equipment could only be provided by Western Electric? Nah, that was a long time ago. It took a Supreme Court decision to force the Bell System to allow 3rd party hardware to connect to its POTS lines directly. When mobile telephony started, it was kept controlled by the phone companies for the security, reliability, and safety of the system. (after all, you want to trust that the phone call actually came from the place it claims to have come from and gets to the place you wanted it to get to, right?) Now that wireless is admitted to be a data network that happens to carry voice calls, it's STILL controlled under those telephony expectations because all of the endpoints might be computers but they're still considered PHONES. That's the stranglehold.

My condolences on your loss. It is never the right time for such news, no matter how much one expects that the day will come. It is wonderful that we live in an age in which you could even consider traveling so far around the world at a moment's notice; yet it is exactly that ease of travel and interconnectedness which makes us all vulnerable to things happening "over there" "far away". We face the same debate - scheduled to visit my wife's father for an upcoming holiday, and wondering if we should cancel to avoid exposing him to the germs from our bigger city and all of the travel exposure.

We never really know the full statistics of any disease, because we never really test everybody. It is entirely possible that the virus is already more widely spread among people who thought they had a "normal" cold or flu case. It is also possible - NOT MINIMIZING RISK - that the statistics on serious damage (organ failure to death) are among people who already show major impact in the first place and are therefore being tested for the specific virus, so it appears to be a higher proportion among a smaller population. It has been clear for years that SOME disease is going to escape containment and cause widespread infection and death, like the so-called Spanish Flu in 1918; it is surprising that this one has triggered such panic, almost more than the ebola scare in 2014. One can only hope that this wakes more people up to the interconnectedness of the world, the interdependency of our economies and more immediately of our supply chains, and the need for ongoing vigilance. But considering American xenophobia, it will probably be blamed on "durn furriners".

Yes, facial recognition is abused, and not always correct, and all the other bad things. But that's not the core problem here. Sir Robert Peel said in 1829, ".The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police existence, actions, behavior and the ability of the police to secure and maintain public respect." That includes trust. If the RCMP had said something along the lines of "We use all tools available, confirming and cross-checking to ensure the quality and validity of information," then one could have an intelligent debate about the degree of accuracy of this particular tool; but since they said "No we don't" and then essentially had to admit "Well, yes, we do, and therefore we lied to you before, and therefore you cannot trust what we say", they have broken the trust that is absolutely essential to public support.

Only lunatics rode bikes in midtown or below; then Citibike appeared and over a few years gained critical mass. Now LOTS of people ride bikes. Of course the odds of incidents is higher. Asshat drivers are also a problem.