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.

So there are two schools of thought on a premium product. One takes the mid-market product and cobbles-on a bunch of bells and whistles. The other designs the basic product itself to be of better quality even without bells and whistles.

I much prefer the latter. We bought a SubZero because the 40 year old SubZero that was installed when the house was built finally had enough rust developing in the housing itself that it was time to replace it when it had a cooling loop issue. If the new SubZero manages to go even twenty years I'll be quite happy with it. It's just a fridge. The only 'port' is an 8P8C tech/management port for troubleshooting, it doesn't do Ethernet, it doesn't do Wifi, it doesn't connect to anything in order to work, it just functions and lets a service tech get extended diagnostics while on site.

The trouble with the mid-market product that is turned into a premium product by cobbling on a bunch of crap is that it's ultimately still just a mid-market product underneath it all. When the stuff that was designed to the price-point for that middle-market position wears out due to those design decisions, it doesn't matter if all of the ancillary bolt-on crap is still working or not. It may well be due for the scrap heap because it's not worth the costs to repair it at that point.

So my advice would be to skip on the fridge with the screen and Internet connection. There's no point in buying durable goods loaded with commodity hardware and software.

So... Brazil ?

I guess that'd be more 1984 than Brave New World though.

I dunno. China is a "market socialist" system -- which is a contradiction in terms. If China is socialist, then for practical purposes Norway and Sweden have to be even *more* socialist because they have a comprehensive public welfare system which China lacks. And those Nordic countries are rated quite high on global measures of political and personal freedom, and very low on corruption. In general they outperform the US on most of those measures, although the US is better on measures of business deregulation.

It makes no sense to claim Chinese courts have a lot of power, although it may seem that way â" itâ(TM)s supposed to seem that way. One of the foundational principles of Chinese jurisprudence is party supremacy. Every judge is supervised by a PLC â" party legal committee â" which oversees budgets, discipline and assignments in the judiciary. They consult with the judges in sensitive trials to ensure a politically acceptable outcome.

So it would be more accurate to characterize the courts as an instrument of party power rather than an independent power center.

From time to time Chinese court decisions become politically inconvenient, either through the supervisors in the PLC missing something or through changing circumstances. In those cases there is no formal process for the party to make the courts revisit the decision. Instead the normal procedure is for the inconvenient decision to quietly disappear from the legal databases, as if it never happened. When there is party supremacy, the party can simply rewrite judicial history to its current needs.

An independent judiciary seems like such a minor point; and frankly it is often an impediment to common sense. But without an independent judiciary you canâ(TM)t have rule of law, just rule by law.

Hereâ(TM)s the problem with that scenario: court rulings donâ(TM)t mean much in a state ruled by one party. China has plenty of progressive looking laws that donâ(TM)t get enforced if it is inconvenient to the party. There are emission standards for trucks and cars that should help with their pollution problems, but there are no enforcement mechanisms and officials have no interest in creating any if it would interfere with their economic targets or their private interests.

China is a country of strict rules and lax enforcement, which suits authoritarian rulers very well. It means laws are flouted routinely by virtually everyone, which gives the party leverage. Displease the party, and they have plenty of material to punish you, under color of enforcing laws. It sounds so benign, at least theyâ(TM)re enforcing the law part of the time, right? Wrong. Laws selectively enforced donâ(TM)t serve any public purpose; theyâ(TM)re just instruments of personal power.

Americans often donâ(TM)t seem to understand the difference between rule of law and rule *by* law. Itâ(TM)s ironic because the American Revolution and constitution were historically important in establishing the practicality of rule of law, in which political leaders were not only expected to obey the laws themselves, but had a duty to enforce the law impartially regardless of their personal opinions or interests.

Rule *by* law isnâ(TM)t a Chinese innovation, it was the operating principle for every government before 1789. A government that rules *by* law is only as good as the men wielding power, and since power corrupts, itâ(TM)s never very good for long.

The golden age of TV ended when the scripted age of TV gave way to low-effort 'reality' TV.

Yeh, the UK government will pay $50 billion to use that $15 billion (which was inflated to justify the $50 billion expenditure) technology.

The UK got a great deal. The US always pays more.

If China wants to invest In space and constructive things instead of using their military as a way of employing a huge part of their country, they should.

The US doesn't need constructive things. That's socialism which is bad. Instead, the US can hire a few million children to swing around guns and pick fights. China just teaches their kids how to mass produce drone swarms so they don't have to give their babies guns.

Hopefully for the US China will play nice and try to look scary so the US can hire more children and teach them to swing around guns.

I've been buying Huawei SSD and hard disk. I buy tape in tens of petabytes, disk in petabytes and SSD in hundreds of terabytes. Huawei is shipping cheap 64TB SSDs, but they need Huawei backplanes. So $120k gets you started with 100TB across 3 controllers and dual hundred gig switches. Growth is much cheaper. It looks like about $260k per petabyte. I'm paying about $100K per PB for hard disk but on 18TB drives. I expect $80K for 30TB drives when we switch. But that will put 3PB in a single chassis which at 20GB/s is somewhat impractical for evacuating or migrating.

IBM tape by comparison is closer to $18K per PB when adding a new drive per PB. But it really doesn't make sense until 10PB

Yes, they could try to locate everyone that manages to use banned technology like this, but as commodity-level technology designed to be used by even unskilled individuals, they're not going to be able to stop people from using technology. All they'll be able to do is to punish them after finding them.

Don't misunderstand me, my wife has a bachelor's in mechanical engineering from MIT and has worked in the aerospace and defense industries for her whole career, and through her alumni club I've been friends with a bunch of other engineers and materials scientists. They have just about all done very well.

On the other hand I know two people with masters' degrees that are basically doing white-collar clerical work. I have no college degree, most of the people on my team don't have degrees, and I'm on the same team and at a roughly comparable role with those that do have college degrees. And I have a technical job too.

My point is that having a degree can be lucrative, but it can also provide nothing of additional value. If it provides nothing of additional value then it's an expense that isn't providing a return, so it's actually a detriment, not an advantage, and the degree of detriment is based on how much it's saddling the individual with debt.