If you go old enough, you have to take into account that memory bandwidth was terrible.

On a Pentium 1, I believe RAM can do somewhere around 100MB/s. And sure, it gets better later, but still. If you consider that a serious RAID-5 for instance, you're reading at a minimum 3 drives, and computing parity, then yes, you can easily take most of your memory's bandwidth just on that. It makes a lot of sense then to offload stuff to a RAID card.

These days hard disks are laughably slow compared to the rest of the computer, but it didn't use to be quite like that. A high end SCSI drive of the era might do maybe 20 MB/s, which is a good fraction of the system RAM's capability. Put just 3 there and it's starting to get tricky.

Also, we have the benefit that some slowness stopped to matter. If you're RAID5-ing 3 x 8GB/s NVMes and not getting the ideal performance out of it there's lots of cases where that doesn't matter because you don't have a workload capable of doing anything with what even a single drive is capable of providing anyway.

Who is paying Flock to put up and operate the cameras? Who is searching the databases they create? I'm fine with saying that Flock isn't violating the constitution, so long as you say that a government entity (town, county, state, federal, whatever) paying Flock or using their database IS a violation. If there are zero government contracts for Flock to up their cameras, what do you think happens to the company?

But the purpose of the stop was not enforcement of the vehicle code.

"When there is not probable cause to believe that a driver is violating any one of the multitude of applicable traffic and equipment regulations 24 -- or other articulable basis amounting to reasonable suspicion that the driver is unlicensed or his vehicle unregistered -- we cannot conceive of any legitimate basis upon which a patrolman could decide that stopping a particular driver for a spot check would be more productive than stopping any other driver." Delaware v. Prouse, 440 U.S. 648, 661, 99 S. Ct. 1391, 1400 (1979)

In California, as I suspect in most states, the driver is required to produce a license and registration when being pulled over for a traffic stop.

California Vehicle Code 12951(b) states: "The driver of a motor vehicle shall present his or her license for examination upon demand of a peace officer enforcing the provisions of this code."

Since the vehicle was not involved, the stop would not require a license to of produced. Of course, the cop would lie and make up a reason.

You are conflating a consensual encounter with a detention.

No, when they decide not to show up or release someone that they should have detained.

Read Terry v. Ohio | 392 U.S. 1 (1968) and Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada (2004) 542 U.S. 177

I have reported crimes, but LAPD refused to make arrests.
I had a cop argue with me and tell me that I was not authorized to have an arrest made because I was a building manager. I had to explain real property law to him.

In many states, there is no requirement to show ID unless arrested. In other cases, there still has to be reasonable suspicion (the Terry standard).

Detaining someone for 1 second without reasonable suspicion violates the 4th amendment. Pulling someone over is not a consentual encounter, but the officer is probably trained to turn it into one. Extending the stop is unconstitutional. See Rodriguez v. United States, 575 U.S. 348, 135 S. Ct. 1609, 191 L. Ed. 2d 492 (2015),. I suspect that even a diminimus extension would be unconstitutional. So, a false report could be argued a civil wrong, even when causing a deminimus delay.

The "might be armed?" might not be a crime. The defense would argue that there is a possibility and argue that it might not meet the standard of reasonable doubt. But in a civil case, it could meet the preponderance of the evidence.

How much would you like to bet that Flock's lawyers told them what exactly to say when calling the police?

They don't need to be.

The thousand-men armies scanning books get the books by buying them by the pallet load. It's stuff that nobody really wants, like old technical books that are out of date, self-published books, etc.

If the book was actually valuable you wouldn't expect the seller to sell it for dirt cheap.

There have been 535 brainless clones in Washington, D.C. for a long time.

More like the total opposite, I'd say.

I can't imagine what's the business value of having ChatGPT doing a BloodNinja impression. It's not good for PR, it'd risk exclusion in serious environments, school and the like, it'd risk legal trouble, the list goes on. The potential for trouble far outweighs any possibly benefit, which is what? There's only downsides because it'd go wrong in some way sooner rather than later.

No, doubling down on serious, well paying uses and removing controversial ideas of little worth is exactly what looks like a clear, decent strategy here.

A friend told me that pay-per-play is where the money is, as opposed to buying.

Software has been moving towards subscription-based models because they generate more profit. Just like PC Lint (after Jim Gimbel retired and sold it to Vector Informatik -- I'm still using version 9.0), which has turned into a subscription service. People who do C/C++ programming on a non-regular basis and do not need the newest version, why upgrade? The same thing for Boundchecker or Timeslips. Timeslips is fully SaaS, as opposed to just a subscription that presumably dials home to check whether it has been paid for.

But with full SaaS, where your information is on someone else's servers, you run into security and privacy issues. Which are not the same as the security and IT issues when running on your own servers. Full Saas does offer convenience, but at a price.

TIOBE's methodology is to plug "$LANG programming" into a bunch of search engines (including oddly enough Amazon and ebay), apparently take the "1.2 million results" stats in the corner at face value, apply some magical fudge factors and call that good.

I'm constantly mystified why this nonsense gets this amount of prominence when there's better data sources. Look at employment offers, Github or something at least.