Technically
Sadly, there are many other reasons, too. I met a family of immigrants. I learned through their eight-year old son his parents lost their jobs, couldn't find legal employment, did not speak english. As they were at a shelter, I imagine they were decent candidates to be picked up by ICE.
Nonetheless, I agree with your post. This is a solvable problem but it is only solvable at the housing level.
9p is indeed a great technology—I would have also thrown in utf-8—but most of plan9's ideas remain quite fringe. I would pay a ton of money for an OS with both bind and browser support. Plumber is still leagues better than anything offered by macs/linux/windows.
That said, I don't see "fringe" as being mutually exclusive with "legitimate". TempleOS had some features that other OS's could use, too—its use of hyperlinking is actually really cool.
The semiconductor is pretty good, too, but not nearly as clever.
However, it's a private site & they don't need to justify their giving service or not.
Mobile platforms have invested in restricting apps by ability. There's no such way to exert this control over web apps with current browsers.
For instance, how to you stop a page from snooping your keystrokes? At best you can disable javascript entirely.
The browser really, really, really needs to adopt the sandbox model used by the rest of the operating system for this to make any sense, and right now the browser is more of a gaping hole in your wall than a sandbox.
> The user should be allowed to do what they want, right?
You'd need to do a hell of a lot of footwork to actually enable users to make decent decisions about random code found on the internet. I don't trust anyone technical I know to do this, much less people who don't understand what's going on.
I'd think linux/BSD drivers would be the concern here!
You haven't demonstrated that this is "hysteria" and your own blasé attitude is worth imitating.
I don't agree! There's a lot of behavior that's implicit and you essentially need to internalize the C standard/compiler behavior to follow. Weak typing, for instance; defaults for memory access/fencing, handling faults, runtime semantics with respect to initialization of the process, cleanup via atexit, and signal handling.
Memorable, sure, but hardly explicit.
Diffs would then be truly semantic, representing semantic refactorings (e.g. "extract method to function", "rename symbol") at the patch level. you could easily then query "when did this variable show up" even post-refactor where the variable moves modules. Sure this has its limits but it'd push the tooling to levels virtually impossible to automate with text-based code now.
A man can dream!
Sure, until people realize that politics have the capacity to impact their lives negatively, and then all of a sudden the rationality for discussing it is quite clear.
> One way of excusing yourself from such a conversation in a (hopefully) unoffensive way would be to make an honest statement like, "Gosh, my brain is so overworked right now that I can't even begin to delve into the nuance of that subject, but I hear where you're coming from."
I wouldn't characterize this as a polite excuse so much as an honest admittance—you clearly respect the other person enough to indicate an acknowledgement of the meaning of what they're saying and an incapacity to respond. That is, unless you're lying, which is clearly disrespectful. In that case a "I don't agree but I feel like it's unprofessional to engage in these conversations" would suffice.