gnode

> it isn't an absolutest point or mantra.

"Safety first" literally is an absolutist mantra; no part of its wording is conditional. Of course people read into it a less absolute figurative meaning that may be useful for thinking about safety. However it can be politically and legally useful to speak using absolutes.

Using the example of viruses and the economy, it has been politically expedient for politicians to state that nothing should be done which puts life in danger, while making actions which balance safety and economics.

The decision is usually guided by practical limitations, such as grip, or the tolerance of parts. Limiting torque to improve acceleration, prevent skidding off the road, or not burn out the motor is a reasonable motivation in-line with the interests of the driver. Limiting torque to make your car feel like a less capable one is not.

That said, I can imagine some people may want a familiar driving experience, although it would make sense to make that a configurable option, e.g. 'sport mode' vs 'comfort mode'.

It's trivial to do. Here: https://js.do/code/383036

I wonder whether a more effective alternative would be to station troops in space. The Outer Space Treaty prohibits the deployment of weapons of mass destruction in space, but not conventional weapons or combatants. An invasion from space could be made with virtually no warning. I'm not sure stealth would be possible due to the plasma created on entry, but decoys / countermeasures are possible.

With the potential for spacelaunch to become drastically less expensive due to reusable launch vehicles, a constellation of manned hypersonic glide vehicles may become economically practical.

It wouldn't need to land. Parachuting out of the vehicle is an alternative, as was done by Yuri Gagarin in the Vostok I flight.

> a mobile-platform-launched ICBM that you can climb into.

The Titan II GLV was a human-rated adaption of an ICBM. Conceivably you could even put people in a truck launch ICBM.

I'm not sure what you're making that assertion on the basis of. The note has redundant electrical connectors. You could melt the bulk of the note down and still claim the Etherium from the secure element. Hypothetically you could have redundant SEs.

That physical cash can become damaged is nothing new. Maybe this implementation could be easily damaged in some way, I don't think this threatens the concept of silicon cash generally.

Toll roads charge you for travelling over them. They don't charge the business you're travelling to based on how much value you have to them as a customer.

This is not the net neutrality argument. It should be a cost saving for both the CDN and ISP to connect directly, because this saves both parties needing to pay for IP transit. That the ISP may charge the CDN for this is because in a vacuous regulatory environment they have been allowed to ransom their customers.

The behaviour of discriminating based on application or financial potential is not tolerated (legally or socially) in other common carriers like mail.

As was mentioned in the article, monitoring isn't the only concern. Personal data stored on your work computer may still be problematic if your employer is involved in a lawsuit for instance.

I'll try to sum it up: Kong notes are electronic devices which allow whoever has access to them to use a smart contract which after a given date can retrieve a given amount of cryptocurrency. They hold a key which allows them to operate on this smart contract, but don't reveal it, and are designed to be physically impractical to tamper with (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_cryptoprocessor).

There's a distinction that Kong is not payable on demand, until after expiry, but I'm not sure it's a useful distinction. Unlike a conventional bond, there isn't a question of default by the issuer; the Etherium is locked up in a smart contract, rather than relying on the issuer honouring the bond at maturation.

Rarely do users of cash care about the property of it being payable on demand by the issuer (conventionally a central bank), only the property that it be practical for physical commerce.

I don't see how this is any more against network neutrality than regional mirrors / CDNs.

This is an optimisation which can be made by the game developer / host, where the alternative would be prioritisation by the ISP, which would go against net neutrality.

It may well vary depending on which C standard you're talking about. ISO C defines both a byte and a char as at least long enough to contain characters "of the basic character set of the execution environment". They must be uniquely addressable. Although it seems their definitions don't preclude them from being different, or from sub-bytes being uniquely addressable by pointers.

> it looks like its memory addressing scheme still assigns addresses to bytes, and has special operations that allow you to further specify a bit offset within that memory address.

There are also instructions which use an addressing scheme which takes an 8-bit bit address, with the 0x00 - 0x7f corresponding to lower memory, and 0x80 - 0xff corresponding to 16 specific registers in the Special Function Register set.

The original usage of the term "byte" was to refer to fields of variable length consecutive bits on a bit-addressable machine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#History

Nowadays a byte is conventionally eight bits, especially for measures like "megabyte", but the term octet is often used to avoid ambiguity. Commonly they're used for pointers, yet often only words are addressable by machine instructions (e.g. many ARM instructions take a byte address yet raise a hardware exception on use of unaligned addresses).

A problem I see with this is that government has control over the economy. A winning actor can tip the balance of wealth further in their favour.

Then again, this is just analogous to tyranny of the majority in conventional democracy. Elected governments can (and do) fortify their majority through voter disenfranchisement, or even genocide.

Pointers, as a language concept, don't have to correspond to the addressing schemes of the hardware or ISA. On some architectures instructions may only be able to address aligned whole words. Some microcontrollers (e.g. Intel MCS-51) feature bit-addressable memory. Apparently, there's a special __bit type supported by the Small Device C Compiler for using bit addressable memory on such devices, although I don't know if it has support for taking pointers to these.

Bits are addressable, just not with a normal pointer. It would have been possible to have a special fat pointer for bits, similar to how C++ sometimes has fat pointers for member functions (depending on compiler implementation).

The restriction in C can only be explained as a limitation of the language itself -- although probably motivated by the implementation complexity it would require, for a niche use case.

> a real banana and duck tape sold for $120,000, 3 times.

There's also the urinal that sold for $1.7M in 1999 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)#Art_market

I don't think it's about imports / foreign production, but about the requirement of labour of high income workers generally. Domestic agriculture and manufacturing have experienced less inflation than medicine and education because they have reduced their dependence on labour with greater mechanisation and efficiency.

I think there's also an effect that people are increasingly able to tolerate working very low economic value jobs, because productivity increases in basic necessities of survival, like food and transportation, make this possible. These people are then priced out of healthcare, education, and quality housing. The decreased consumption of expensive labour-based services then decreases their weighting in measures of inflation, allowing them to further inflate, yet overall inflation stay low.

The technology is fundamentally simple, but not practical on a small scale. There are plenty of large, yet simple projects which nobody cares to invest in because there are better (including more expedient, or proven) alternatives.

CSP requires a large investment compared to PV solar, as it needs to be done at scale to make coolant systems, towers, turbines and generators cost effective. It needs its own large allocation of land, rather than be distributed. It also, like PV solar, has poor temporal availability, so compares badly to fossil fuels, nuclear and hydro.

It has potential to be cheaper than PV, and integrate well with thermal energy storage. It could also be more efficient, if the temperature can be increased (due to Carnot efficiency). However, the convenience and falling prices of PV panels may prevent CSP becoming popular.

> Ketones being an alternative fuel for the brain

My understanding is that the brain / neurons require glucose to operate, they don't directly metabolise ketones to a great degree. When in ketosis, blood sugar drops very low and the brain's glucose has to be sourced from gluconeogenesis: an inefficient and minimal conversion of ketones to glucose. This low blood sugar has metabolic effects on neurons (as well as many other types of cell).

The USP of a ketogenic diet is that it allows persistent sustainable low blood sugar, which is otherwise only seen in inherently unsustainable fasting.

> We don't need this "drama"

Speak for yourself. I don't mind when reviewers use emphasis.

> limited by the data on existing human players that has been provided to them.

Except it isn't. In various games, new strategies have been found by playing AI vs AI. It's also possible to create AI players by self-play with no knowledge of human matches.

Both Russia and Ukraine claim the territory of Crimea, and it is therefore disputed.

> but military conquest of a territory doesn't convert it to a "disputed" status.

Many territories are disputed without conflict. If military conquest, occupation and de facto control of a territory doesn't reify a dispute, then nothing does.

For examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_territorial_disputes

Braking is also a question of traction. Pretty much all brakes can apply a much greater force than the traction at the wheels, hence the motivation for anti-lock breaking systems. Having the truck be more massive relative to the trailer improves the breaking performance.

A more relatively massive truck also helps reduce the propensity for jackknifing.

Indeed, this doesn't show which truck is more powerful / greater torque. It shows which truck is better at towing, which is arguably more relevant for a truck. Greater mass also means greater control while towing.

I think a language being highly compatible with C is what would have the greatest potential to replace it. In some ways it's similar to Microsoft's "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy.