It is possible for Microsoft to do both, you know.

• OEM version: Requires a higher minimum level of hardware support for a premium experience
• Retail version (more expensive): Supports a wider range of hardware to the extent that it can

Then they just have to make sure the price difference is high enough to destroy any profit benefit from cutting corners on the hardware.

Yeah, as if we needed any more reason to consider this bloated "security" software to be malware. I really don't understand why anyone in their right minds would install it or allow it to be installed on their systems. Giving some third-party company complete control over what software can run on your machines basically screams "I don't understand anything about security" better any almost anything else you could possibly do as a system administrator, IMO, short of posting the shared-across-all-machines root password on USENET.

Ish.

I would not trust C++ for safety-critical work as MISRA can only limit features, it can't add support for contracts.

There have been other dialects of C++ - Aspect-Oriented C++ and Feature-Oriented C++ being the two that I monitored closely. You can't really do either by using subsetting, regardless of mechanism.

IMHO, it might be easier to reverse the problem. Instead of having specific subsets for specific tasks, where you drill down to the subset you want, have specific subsets for specific mechanisms where you build up to the feature set you need.

Oh, absolutely. These days, I spend so much time checking the output from computers, it would normally have been quicker to do searches by hand. This is... not useful.

I can fully understand that.

Government: So I see that your H-1B jobs are all for "Computer Programmer (I)" and your U.S. hires are all for "Software Engineer (III)" or "(IV)".
Company: Yes. We haven't had much luck in hiring level one programmers here in the U.S. We put the jobs out there, but nobody is applying.

Prevailing wage for the job doesn't mean what you think it does. A bunch of sleazy outsourcing firms made sure of that.

Surprisingly little money. As soon as the extra cost exceeds the cost of hiring one person to maintain workarounds, it is cheaper to do the workarounds. Tricks like that might ostensibly work for individuals, but they fail badly every time when you're talking about big corporations.

Ten tiny companies, ten meters.

I've said this before. That won't work. Business, unlike homeowners, have the ability to create shell companies. The effort required to avoid rules like that is negligible for businesses. All that does is massively increase the billing hassle for the power companies.

In California, they have messed with the cost structure enough that solar without storage is usually not worth doing beyond your peak usage, because your excess power production won't net you nearly as much as you pay to buy that power back later in the afternoon.

Part of the problem is that trains are really, really heavy. A double-decker passenger train car might weigh 180,000 pounds and carry only 100 people, for a total weight of 1,800 pounds per car plus the person. So you're carrying half the weight of that Prius. The trains are still vastly more efficient because you have one powertrain accelerating all of those people in Priuses (Prii?) instead of hundreds, they accelerate and decelerate slowly (and rarely), they have low rolling resistance, etc.

Imagine how much more efficient they would be if train cars were improved with modern technology to bring the weight down.

Wow. Their refrigerators reportedly have among the worst reliability stats out of all the major brands, but ads are the reason you're rejecting them? I'm kind of assuming the ads are to recover the unexpectedly high cost of warranty repairs and food loss claims. :-)

Having used a lot of their Blu-Ray players and TVs over the years, Samsung reached peak ensh*ttification a long time ago, IMO. What remains is the long-tail death spiral.

Depends on whether the test pilots were in them at the time. ;-)

Until the tools get better, yes. Slavery would likely have ended by now even without the Civil War because of the cotton picker. The same thing is happening to the remaining agricultural jobs now, thanks to AI.

Strawberry picking robots are already good enough to do the job, just with a ridiculously high up-front cost (like $300k each, which is probably well over a hundred years worth of labor costs, and possibly several hundred). The next generation are going to be more like $12k, which is more like 20 years of labor costs, assuming $4 per hour sub-minimum wage, 40 hours a week, and 4 weeks of picking in a year, and more like 5 years at U.S. minimum wage.

But that's not the whole story. The latest generation are also faster than people, and can work 24x7, so you can use less than a third as many. So now you're at more like a year or two for break-even.

Heck, it wouldn't surprise me if all the screaming from California about lack of farm labor isn't just a cover story, all while quietly letting the Trump administration reduce the immigrant farm labor because they won't be needed in the future. It makes the left look good to their base by paying lip service to defending them while making the right look good to their base by terrorizing them and scaring them out of the country. And it wouldn't surprise me if some of the farm tech companies building these picking machines aren't actively lobbying for it. I mean, maybe that's happening a few years too soon, but we're not talking about decades before that labor no longer provides any real benefit; we're getting very close to that point.