In writing software, there are two alternatives: be able to represent reality, and be unable to represent reality. This primarily comes into play with data design. This also comes into play with time keeping. TAI's reality is uniform time. UTC's reality is tracking the rotation of the planet and civil time. And now we're screwing up one because a bunch of nitwits got the two confused, and it's easier in the short term to enable the nitwits than to educate them. This approach always works out well.

New 4 TB enterprise drive $50.05 at Newegg, S&H included, about 5 minutes ago. I'm not sure I could find a vendor charging as much as $150 for a measly 4 TB hard drive. Storage is dirt cheap these days.

No, Amazon does not manipulate reviews. They let the vendor manipulate reviews: deleting reviews pointing out the product is fraudulent, or giving test results showing the product is fraudulent. And when you complain of the vendor manipulating reviews to the "Amazon community" email address (try finding that address), the vendor answers the complaint: "No manipulation here! Your reviews were removed because our investigation showed you were shipped an actual one of our products!" ("2 TB USB stick" with 32 GB actual capacity, and yes I knew it was fake, I was testing review legitimacy.)

I believe that's part of the definition of a weapon of mass destruction, not a firearm. Interestingly, both 4th of July fireworks and the mortars that loft them into the air fit the definition of a weapon of mass destruction.

Or perhaps have been members of organizations under active, persistent attack by nation states. Isolating from the Internet, and having only low-bandwidth, passive data connections (like Kermit or CD sneakernet -- nothing USB, think about it) is inconvenient for sure, but certainly doable

Which you can do if you have an enterprise grade router in your home. Abusive and invasive crap like this depends on the lack of capability of available home routers: this is a really good argument for a small system under your control in between the home router and the modem, or replacing the home router with a small system under your control. A Raspberry Pi could do it with just its native hardware, or run a series of red network access points with a USB Ethernet adapter. Not too many people know how to do this now, but that will change -- just like everyone now knows to pocket their car keys, not just leave them in the ignition.

Oh my word, no. Coding is a skill, but software development is a vocation; just like hammering a nail is a skill, but house construction is a vocation. We do not need hammerers, and we do not need coders.

I've had reviews removed by the vendor, even when the review is just the output of test tools showing the product description is fraudulent. Complaining to Amazon (and just _try_ to find where to complain about a vendor removing reviews!) got me more responses from the vendor. I no longer buy through Amazon; and have found anything I want through Amazon can typically be had cheaper elsewhere (such as the manufacturer's web site).

Also because CPU systems are cheaper in production, not just development. An 8-bit CPU where all it does is waggle a single GPIO pin up and down is cheaper and needs less board than a 555 and the three discretes it needs. If you need something a little more complicated like debouncing a push button, shoving a CPU in there is a complete no-brainer. As a bonus, you get to do three switches at once with an 8-pin device at no additional cost.

Math has no content, and I say this as someone with graduate mathematical training. Math is assume rules and see where they go. The rules that are useful in the day to day world are the ones we use day to day, not because they are some fundamental truth but because they are useful in the day to day world. It is true, there are other approaches, and they are perfectly valid math. Multiplication in the quaternions is not commutative, and multiplication in the octonions isn't even associative; non-Aristotlean logics uniformly lack the law of the excluded middle, and some lack the law of noncontradiction; and so on. For the programmers out there, think of SQL and its three-valued logic, and of how NaNs behave with relational operators. Different environments produce different mathematics.

In other day to day worlds, other mathematics would be appropriate; in this sense Western math is in fact culturist, because we have developed the day to day Western world and the day to day Western math together. Just because Aristotle said anything else was "repugnant" doesn't make it divine truth. We divide our thoughts into "hard" and "soft:" a mathematics that allowed contradictory statements to be simultaneously true would be useless in macroscopic physics and house building but very useful in human relationships and particle physics. One of these applications is not more "real" than the other, they are just different, and our preference for one regime rather than the other is cultural.

The question is actually, then, whether this is appropriate to teach K-12 rather than in graduate school. And that is _way_ above by pay grade.

This is incredible. Disks going from longitudinal magnetic fields to vertical magnetic fields enabled the development of tens of gigabyte drives; we're up to tens of terabytes now. If this can be turned into actual technology instead of a lab curiosity like Bose-Einstein condensates, exabyte limits on file sizes will seem as quaint as 32MB limits on MS-DOS 2 volumes seems now...

Yes, there is a simple tell: you, personally, are of interest to a three letter agency or a very large company. All the TLS, X.509 certificates, TOR, and other technology in the world protects against script kiddies and dragnets. If breaking _your_ security is a line item on someone's budget, your security is broken.

"Wear was apparent on the boxes' corners etc. Mr. White and I agreed." Is that one sentence or two? Depends: did Mr. White and I jointly inspect the boxes, or separately?

Verdana was in fact designed for displays. It also is sans-serif, but a full width font unlike Helvetica which is semi-condensed. Some people misuse the term Helvetica (or Arial, which is a very similar font) for any sans-serif font.

Are you serious? We wouldn't take it. Well, maybe Wales.