Speaking from a place of long-term frustration with Java, some compiler authors just absolutely hate exposing the ability to hint/force optimizations. Never mind that it might improve performance for N-5 and N+5 major releases, it might be meaningless or unhelpful or difficult to maintain in a release ten years from now, so it must not be exposed today.

Just 20 watts, the same amount of electricity that powers 2 LED lightbulbs for 24 hours, one nanosecond, or twelve-thousand years.

Huge oversight by Google. Now they're going to have to invent some other way to indicate that you want to show hidden search results and inodes.

No disagreement here, but where the literal rubber hits the road, you still have to decide how to act when the ambient semi-aggressive driving population continues to behave in the way that they do. Will you blamelessly be road raged at 50-100% more often than a more moderate driver (who drives at the most popular speed, though it may be over the limit) just because if an accident does happen it will be the road rager's fault?

It's a very frustrating social problem. Obviously we can't let ourselves be held collectively hostage by bad actors in all situations. But I would still predict that there are some situations where the bad actor population is so large and "mildly-bad" that indefinitely giving in to their implicit demands is the right game theoretic choice.

Assigning blame doesn't do anything for safety, even if you're right. Where I live, by far the safest thing to do is to drive ~4 mph over the limit on all non-residential roads. If you drive below or even right at the limit, you will be tailgated or passed with far greater frequency. That behavior is out of your control, at least on the road. You can push for more consistent enforcement while you're not driving (I'm inclined to do so myself), but while you're behind the wheel, the only behavior you can change is your own.

There is no year zero according to first-order pedants. Second-order pedants know that there is a year zero in both the astronomical year numbering system and in ISO 8601, so whether or not there is a year zero depends on context.

It's ultimately up to us to decide how to project our relatively young calendar system way back into the past before it was invented. Year zero makes everything nice. Be like astronomers and be like ISO. Choose year zero.

"Eat cells, not substances" is a somewhat similar rule to "limit processed food intake", but the former would seem to encourage both pasta and rice while the latter would discourage pasta if you're being strict about it and rice if you're being extremely strict.

"Reeks" (stinks) not "wreaks" (inflicts). And for any linguistic archaeologists of the future, yes, this is evidence that those two words are audibly indistinguishable in American English in this time period.

> Interesting opportunity to potentially improve things.

...you mean by changing commercial software to collect telemetry more like FOSS tools do, i.e. usually not at all, right?

> Solitary confinement is used in quarantine...

This is just abuse of the phrase "solitary confinement". Yes, people in quarantine may be confined in solitude, but "solitary confinement" as a phrase has a particular connotation that is not applicable to quarantine.

> ...and penal settings without being "commonly" accepted as being torture.

It is recognized as a form of torture, commonly. The fact that you keep saying otherwise doesn't make it not so[0].

> The purpose isn't to cause harm...

That's an interesting interpretation! Valid, I suppose, but certainly not something you can just assert in passing. The purpose of torturing enemy spies is to get information that might stop a war, which on net reduces harm. Really, is the purpose of anything to cause harm?

In my view, the treatment of the child is purposefully portrayed as unthinkably cruel. It stops short of being graphic; they don't flay the child or stick bamboo shoots under its fingernails. But they do actively confine it; it's strongly implied that they will not permit it to simply leave, or even die. They don't make any effort to clean its living space! They kick it for no reason!

Go re-read the passage that describes the child's living conditions again. I don't know how the author could make it more clear that the arrangement is cruel. It's not like the people were given some absurd set of requirements for prosperity involving a confined child, and then did everything in their power to at least make it easy on the kid. Or, perhaps they have done everything in their power to that effect, but the requirements include cruelty itself. Either way, I'm not seeing how you think it is so incorrect to describe it as torture that you felt the need to directly contradict my use of that word.

If I described the conditions on the transatlantic slave ships as "torture", would you go out of your way to reject my use of that word because of the lack of intent to cause harm? Or would you accept the combination of the abject human misery, the sores, the starvation, the wallowing-in-excrement, the confinement, along with the fact that these conditions were inflicted by fellow humans, as sufficient basis for that descriptor? Because all of those things are true of both the Omelas child and the slave ships, and in neither case is it clear that the sole intent was to harm.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitary_confinement#Torture

So there are people out there, not in this thread, who are wrong when they say things that are incorrect?

If it happens to you:

1. Remain calm

2. Tweet at your 66k followers

3. Briefly wait while the dozens of those that work at GitHub trip over each other getting your account reactivated

Solitary confinement is commonly accepted to be a form of torture, and that usually involves rudimentary sanitation and nourishment. A confined, solitary, starving child living in its own excrement is being tortured, and I defy anybody to argue otherwise.

Also, confinement is not an "act of omission" any more than punching somebody in the face and then leaving them alone forever after is an act of omission.

In terms of hours invested, I don't think going to the movies ever got close to the 50's rate of television consumption. I can find stats as high as 90 million tickets/week, which (if we assume 100% double features) may have been as much as 400 million hours per week. With a US population of 130 million, that's roughly three hours per week per capita. Compare that to television in the 1950s, which nearly reached 5 hours per capita per day. That's over 10x the time investment.

Radio, on the other hand, seems like it may have done similar numbers to those of TV. But I'd be interested how different those modes of consumption were in practice. Certainly some people watch TV in the background, and some people listen to the radio while doing nothing else, but I would bet the rate of watching TV while doing nothing else was far higher than that of radio.

In the original the kid was subjected to brutal, unending torture. Is your complaint just that this one is unnecessarily graphic?