> I'm always baffled by the insistence of Rust, Java, or other modern programming languages

should be

> I'm always baffled by the insistence by opponents of Rust, Java, or other modern programming languages

This has been your reminder that Slashdot's refusal to allow people to edit their own comments just generates more heat than light.

"Our side" hasn't really shot anyone. Kirk's killer appears to either be apolitical or, less likely, a member of a MAGA faction that hated Kirk's faction. There isn't anything linking Kirk's killer to left wing politics at all, if there had been it'd be mentioned pretty much every day by the Trump administration. And both the attempts to murder Trump came from people whose friends said were conservatives.

Your side, OTOH, has killed or attempted to kill a fair number of the right's opponents, be it the murder of elected politicians such as Hortman or Hoffman, or even the crazed hammer attack on Pelosi's husband.

And we're still here. You're not going to win.

So Donald Trump isn't MAGA, he sneaked in? I could have sworn he was the one who popularized the initials.

(Or are you saying a lot of his supporters believed a rather obvious lie? Just curious, but why is this lie so important and not the others?)

Are the people rewriting everything in Rust with us in the room right now?

There are some projects to rewrite some tools in Rust, sometimes unnecessarily, but nobody's proposed rewriting everything or even everything in use. Even this article is about Rust being added to the kernel, not rewritten in it. Where are you getting it from that, say, anyone is proposing rewriting the Linux kernel in Rust?

In fairness, PHP simply replaces one type of lack-of-safety with another. C does not assume null, 0, "", "0", and false or all the same thing, something PHP does because... reasons. If PHP actually implemented mandatory type safety, PHP would be no worse than Python, and the rewritten code running under the new PHP would have most of the security issues fixed.

Rust's spec... do bear in mind there's at least one project out there that's implementing an independent version of Rust. You kind of need multiple implementations for a programming language to have one. If you look at most of the programming languages we deal with every day, relatively few have a formal spec that isn't "Whatever the only implementation of this does". I'm not arguing that's good, far from it, but it's apparently not a barrier.

If I had to criticize Rust these days, I'd say the fact its standard library is bare and you're forced to rely upon third party modules ("crates") that aren't audited or in any way curated for basic functionality is pretty fucking dumb. It completely undermines the entire point of the language, that it's supposed to be safe to use. We know from the XZ backdoor that you can't trust third party code that way, and it's only a matter of time before a malicious actor attacks one of the bigger crates - perhaps via a dependency - and does the same thing.

To me, Rust having a standard library comparable to, say, Java's is more important than it having a written specification.

I'm always baffled by the insistence of Rust, Java, or other modern programming languages that developers can only make a certain number of errors-per-project. That somehow if you write something in C it'll be perfect except for the buffer overflows and null pointers. That if you write it in Java or Rust or Go or whatever somehow those will go so you need to introduce logic errors instead.

Is this how you program?

As for "Developers should now be freed to make higher level, more difficult to find logic erors", are you implying that it's easier to find logic errors in C?

God forbid anyone ban bullying at a time when bullying was becoming increasingly common in tech communities.

I'm not sure how it qualifies as "toxic" to ban toxic behavior, but there we go. In the mean time at least one kernel programmer has been celebrated here for actively lying about the Rust project and demanding the Rust modules be banned from using his code because... no reasons given.

Literally the only reason for objecting to Rust's "real world politics" is if you wanted to call a fellow programmer who you had a disagreement with the N word, F word, or misgender them. None of that behavior has a place in an open source community, or indeed a work place or even a bar.

More than that, Germany is democratizing energy. A lot of people have balcony power plants and rooftop solar. There are micro grids even.

As an investment over decades, it has paid off with jobs and economic activity.

The nuclear plants were old and outdated, and would have been expensive to keep going, for a relatively small effect. Better to spend the money on transitioning away from non-renewable sources.

Remember that Germany used to be split in two, with half of it communist. The transition was a huge economic project that involved a lot of redevelopment in the east. The grid alone needed major upgrades.

That's not even vaguely what I said, so it's unclear if this is some kind of language issue or the result of a disability, but I'm just feeling worse and worse for you. You somehow believe the cold war was about communism?

I'd say Microsoft won that war, and everyone else lost.

They will probably use Elon's Grok as the benchmark. That thing is pretty far off the deep end.

No story about his fake robot demo being exposed? Slashdot used to love a failed tech demo.

If there was a remote kill switch and China ever got to the point of ordering manufacturers to flip it, you would probably be more concerned about the hypersonic missiles and nuclear warheads coming your way.

Plus they would probably start with the western brands using the backdoors they have been saving for just such an occasion.

Funny you should mention decolonizing STEM, because that's basically what has happened here. Even now many people are in denial about what the Chinese have accomplished. They seem to think that only white people can invent stuff or push the state of the art forward, and that everyone else just copies them, steals their ideas and technology.

Many Western countries put a lot of effort into maintaining existing hierarchies. They would rather some people just don't have access to a good education and opportunities, than be more competitive. Education gets defunded by people who can afford to pay for their own kids to get a good one, or who got theirs and just want a supply of disposable, low cost labour, and lower taxes. The risk that someone else might get something they didn't "earn" is too great to fund anything properly.

The EU had the same question when limiting credit card processing fees. They simply looked at what the costs were and how much profits those companies were reporting from that part of the business.

You can still make it much harder for them. Physically disabled the write pin on the UEFI flash memory chip, for example. Some vendors let you require a password to upgrade the firmware.

None of it is undefeatable, but you have to consider who you adversary is. If it's just the cops and their IT people, it probably won't take much to thwart them.

There are also more passive measures like making sure you have decent CCTV coverage, so they can't do easily sneak in.