> cared for the environment

It wasn't "more CO2" grade, it was "more NOx" grade. This in urban settings will actually kill more people with respiratory problems.

VW's "clever hack" probably, statistically, killed people.

> Europeans from 5am-2pm PST

Well, the EU is putting the kibosh on that PDQ. The precious stays at home.

Read. Guy knows what he's doing.

You mean his AI wrote something you like... which is factually incorrect, so it's basically fanfic.

Do you have anything on those TRW floating point chips that used to titillate junior engineers in trade mag advertisements before that?

For example, an adder's total delay depends on a carry chain. If you have N 4-bit slices, the last slice has to wait for the carry to propagate through all N-1 previous slices.

But if you duplicate all your slices, you can have the results for both carry = 0 and carry = 1 inputs. Then just switch which one is correct - total time 1 add plus N-1 switches.

Just for double (and change) the hardware. Cheap.

> pedestrian cars.

That's an interesting turn of phrase ...

Thanks. As the owner of a 14-year-old Honda that is equipped in the most lavish of trim options, I found great pleasure in selecting that particular subperlative.

Now you've made me think of the Mac Portable, aka Boat Anchor.

("Am I chopped liver?!" yells the shade of the Osborne 1)

> "Human dignity does not depend on a person's abilities"

That should be a hard line no one is allowed to cross. If you do, no logic will keep you from ending up in a very bad place.

For instance, I'm a big fan of Terry Pratchett's Discworld stories, where his humorous and compassionate tales comment on much of human experience. It's a fantasy world with wizards, trolls, dwarfs, vampires, etc.

In one book he goes into ghouls - obscure, despised and persecuted almost to extinction, but in the story it is found they secretly make beautiful ethereal music. So a concert is arranged to present the music, and all is well, the end. Except for my doubts - I mean, if they didn't make nice music, then it would be alright to dispose of them?

Benthamite utility has a particularly ugly underside to it, and it is easily converted into "disposal of negative value" of the nastiest kind. Which can only be stopped by a moral hard line, as stated.

> superpower

That's an anachronism, from the 19th to mid-20th century there were just "great powers", not perfectly matched but considered to be in the same class. The Ottoman empire falling off the league ("sick old man") was a bit of a shocker.

> bringing refuse facilities into the home

Well spotted. India is apparently going through that, and they have a joke - older people complain that new generations are lost: "They dine outside and shit inside!"