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The interesting thing about what "US citizens have drummed into them" is not drummed into them. That is move of what we refer to as the "vocal minority". There are just a few Knee'd Jerks out there that make large amounts of noise that people start to think that there are more of them than there really are.
The real problem here is the "mainstream media". In addition to giving a too much attention and credibility to the "vocal minority", most of the media in the U.S. are highly skewed on the political scale, and will twist the news to paint political figures that oppose their views in the worst light they possibly can. This is the same for American corporations that do not fall in line with the media's political leanings. Unfortunately, these are the same "authoritative news sources" that foreign news services rely on to report on. So, even if foreign news sources are unbiased in their reporting, their sources are still skewed, and therefore, so is the news. Yes, this also applies to reporting on "a certain-colored person who lives in a certain-colored house".
That being said, I cannot blame people outside the U.S. for having the opinions of our corporations and government leaders. We only have the information we have to go on. Even the internet, which gives us access to such an abundance of otherwise unavailable information, doesn't help as much as we think it should. It is difficult to determine true information vs. twisted/manipulated/truncated/manufactured information. Not to mention that the same media, and the same "vocal minorities" have considerable presence on the internet as well.
Contrary to the popular image of corporations as giant businesses with deap pockets, the vast majority are small companies, some as small as just a husband and wife running a home business. I, personally, sit on the board of two corporations. Both are, in reality, relatively small companies with only a handful of employees each. Both were just at the point of breaking even, but were on a path of growth before the COVID-19 shutdowns happened. Both companies are effectively shut down, and it is uncertain what kind of recovery path lies before us. One was in negotiations to do business in China. All of us, on both boards, carry the same morals and standards while we act on the company's behalf as we do in our private lives: only our priorities are different based on the role we are filling. Every corporate board member I have met, from various corporations of varying sizes, conducts themselves the same. When you sit on the board of a corporation, you have the legal, moral, and ethical responsibility to act in accordance to the corporation's interests and good. This is no different than a parent's responsibility to act in accordance to their family's interests and good, but acting morally and ethically to their employer's interests and good while at work.
In the case of both boards I sit on, every member unanimously voted to forgo our own personal paychecks and benefits to be left in the company general funds. This was to ensure that, first and foremost, all of our vendors and service providers were paid, to ensure that we were not the cause of additional financial burden to their businesses or employees, as well as to maintain credibility should we reopen for business later. Secondly, any remaining funds were distributed to our employee's (albeit few) paychecks for as long as the money held. Since we would not be able to conduct business, our employees would not otherwise have any income during the shutdowns. My family's finances come from my wife's and my day-to-day jobs. We are fortunate to work in "essential services" jobs, and still have our regular living incomes. I'll work on rebuilding our retirement income again once the COVID-19 situation is over.
No disparagement intended here. Just hoping that this provides a small window into the perspective of at least one American, and the corporations he has visibility into.
Money makes the world go round ... but documentation moves the money.
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There might be hope for you yet. 
Social Media - A platform that makes it easier for the crazies to find each other.
Everyone is born right handed. Only the strongest overcome it.
Fight for left-handed rights and hand equality.
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Superhot alone is very good game, a simple shooter with reversed bullet time. I spend few minutes just shooting in endless mode when I am tired of programming. Play prototype - SUPERHOT[^]
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That's another on I've bought, some time within the last few years, but have never played.
This work malarkey keeps getting in the way of my gaming!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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There are certainly some good titles in there to easily make it worth the $30 price tag. Guess I'll be expanding my Steam library.
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@OriginalGriff will be pleased to know that VS2019 has another update to install now - 16.5.2 was just released.
Visual Studio 2019 version 16.5 Release Notes | Microsoft Docs[^]
It only seems to be a 486MB download this time - that's roughly half the size of the regular update to my graphics driver. 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Great! I just succumbed to the nag last week and already there's another one! (at least this one is smaller) I also see one pending for VS 2017. 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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kmoorevs wrote: Great! I just succumbed to the nag last week
I run vs in a VM with the windows firewall blocking all outgoing traffic except a few selected port rules.
No nags; I'll only let the kids out to play when I've got time to watch and know it safe.
... and to be fair vs ain't the only daily 'whaddaboutme' package.
reminds me of the old saying: Children Aussies (whinge way more, and that accent!) should be seen, not heard.
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Downloading at the moment ... 
Make that "Installing at the moment"
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Only 486 MB?  They probably just fixed a typo... 
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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Stefan_Lang wrote: Only 486 MB? They probably just fixed a typo...
No, it is a subtle change in shade of one of the icons
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Invariably I have to reboot my cable modem.
It is more rare than at the last place I lived -- we get much higher speeds here and it is more consistent.
However, I still have to reboot sometimes.
Will the Real Engineer, Please Standup? Please Standup!
Can someone tell me why this helps?
Do the bits get stuck in there and clog things up?
1. What are the real reasons that cycling power helps?
2. If that helps, why don't they have a button that lets just the specific firmware be rebooted? (kind of ridiculous question, but it'd be nice.)
Ok, now I'll just sit back and wait for the answers to start pouring in. 
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The wires get too hot. 
I have considered putting mine on a timer so it is powered off from midnight to dawn or so.
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: The wires get too hot.
Hey, seriously. I wondered about that myself.
But, my modem sure does make great toast!
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Great suggestion, I may try that to save a bit of power. Even though my modem runs for months without a reboot.
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maybe memory leak in the firmware ?
I'd rather be phishing!
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Maximilien wrote: maybe memory leak in the firmware ?
Yeah, I bet that is a good a guess as any.
Well, someone should create a modem that never needs to be rebooted!
Ok, I've given this Billion-dollar idea away, now someone please build it and sell it for $50.
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but can you also supply the codes?
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My first thought as well.
Then: It is my honest opinion that firmware should not use dynamic allocation of memory at all. It has a well defined job to do; the memory requirements for all tasks should be possible to calculate in advance. That is, the code and data should be structured so that it is possible to calculate all memory needs in advance, and to set off that memory at compile time.
There are reasons why Fortran (with no dynamic memory allocation, and for many versions without a stack - no recursion possible) held up for so long. One of the reasons was that is was reliable wrt. memory allocation: It would never crash due to a failing new() or a too deep recursion.
Ada, made for military robustness, did allow recursion, but only if a static code analysis could calculate the deepest nesting level and stack requirement.
CHILL, created for embedded code in telephone switches, required that you marked functions that are to be called recursively. I don't think it made any difference in generated machine code; it was just a way for the compiler to raise a red flag: Here you make a recursion to a function that is not marked as RECURSIVE. Look out - maybe you will run into stack issues.
Embedded code is executed in an environment where you don't have the same facilities as for desktop applications. Often, less resources are available; you can't just let the stack grow to fill those 16 GBytes of RAM. So, the programmer cannot be allowed the same freedom as a standard application developer. Far more restrictive use of dynamic memory and stack are among the limitations an embedded developer should accept.
I know well that this is certainly always reality in embedded code.
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Great post. Those are some great points.
and I guess the thing is that I have this piece of nifty hardware that feels like an FM radio receiver or something that just works all the time.
You know what I mean...you never had to reboot your FM radio receiver. There were no chips that got full. It "just worked"!
Anyways, I have this hardware that feels like hardware but it is actually software inside a brittle plastic box and it is, of course, the software that is broken.
It's always software down at the bottom ruining everything.
Also, I know the FM radio receiver was analog and wasn't a computer and that's why it "just worked". Which makes me wonder...Instead of Quantum Computing maybe we should switch back to Analog Computers so they'll be dependable. 
We don't need no stinking software!
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I'm glad I'm not the only analog electronic fan (in some areas)
For example I'm fed up with digital switches that keep draining batteries even when you switch off (Hey Sony A7 or Thinkpad8, can you hear me?) or refuse to power on when you switch on and you have to hold the switch down for 1 minute 😡
And then do you want to compare the pleasure and comfort to feel with your fingers a phisical switch you can operate even in the dark vs a touch one?
How about the pleasure to fine tune FM radio with an analog tuning wheel vs a beeping digital RDS scanner deciding instead of you which tunes are ok to play and which ones are to bypass?
An analog volume amp vs a digital one?
The 1st analog walkman and its headphones vs the new digital players with earbuds?
The 80s analog HiFi systems vs the current digital micro HiFi?
Am i the only analog nostalgic?
Please bring back some old school analog devices 🙏 even at premium price I'd buy some
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I'm with you on about all of that except volume controls on things. It would usually be nice if there were more bits used in the digital signal that was converted to a voltage before being used to control the amplification rate, I will admit that. But potentiometer volume dials on portable audio devices without exception for me, always developed regions of high-resistance (low volume) [+]/[-] buttons never had this problem.
However, actually - after getting a 1/2 decent car-stereo, I wouldn't buy an analog unit if they were free. The DSP and the included impulse responses can make poorly positioned speakers magically sound like they've moved from calf-height to shoulder height. I could never wrap my head around that before looking at convolution, fast fourier transform and a bunch of other software tricks. Tricks unavailable without a cpu.
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enhzflep wrote: The DSP and the included impulse responses can make poorly positioned speakers magically sound like they've moved from calf-height to shoulder height.
Not only speaker placement and such...
In 2016, the last year before Norway closed down FM transmissions in favor of DAB, I spent weekends and summer vacation driving up and down the country to compare signal and sound quality. I upgraded my car radio to a quite expensive one, but also tested with a cheap, battery portable radio, with no fancy circuitry. In locations where the signal was so weak that you could hardly make anything out of the "slightly modulated noise" in the portable, the sound from the expensive, heavily DSP-equipped car radio was … well, certainly not without distortion, but it was certainly well within the acceptable for car listening.
The only "problem" if you are in a hurry  is that the DSP takes time! Don't synchronize chronometers, one by a primitive, straight through radio, and the other one by a radio with heavy DSP. The latter may be at least a second or two behind.
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I partially agree, but maybe for more "abstract" / conceptual reasons. When a value is measured as opposed to counted, it the value is analogous to the real world phenomenon, you have an analog value. I hate digital speedometer, where I must continuously interpret a numeric value and compare it mathematically to the speed limit … It does not require any major mental effort, but it is so indirect! My speed is a natural phenomenon, completely independent on Arabic numerals in a base 10 number system. The speed limit is a point on a continuous scale, and the needle should not move past that point. Simple and direct.
Watches are similar: Twice as long time is twice as large movement. Direct and logical.
Then comes these who make everything into curves and bars and whathaveyou. I've seen recipes showing that you need five apples as a bar of length 5, rather than as 5 countable apple icons. Please leave countable values in the countable domain! (Or as we computer guys say: As integers.)
AReady wrote: How about the pleasure to fine tune FM radio with an analog tuning wheel vs a beeping digital RDS scanner
This is where I am beginning to disagree somewhat ... Sound is, in its nature, analog. The selection of one radio channel among a countable set of channels is not an analog operation. Conceptually, it belongs in the digital domain.
Furthermore: We have had all digital DAB radio for three years in Norway. Three years completely free of hiss due to poor signal. Free of electrically induced nose - car ignition and such. Free of interference from neighboring channels.
From a technical viewpoint it has some great advantages as well: It is extremely modest in frequency and bandwidth requirements: A 2 MHz frequency band covers the entire country; you never need to allocate another transmission channel (frequency) for that set of program channels. A transmitter draws a fraction of the electrical power of an FM transmitter covering the same area, carrying 12-20 program channels rather than a single one. If the signal from the transmitter to the north is too weak, and so is the signal from the one to the south, maybe the sum of those two signals is good enough. If it is not, there is no need to set up a huge full power transmitter between them: A small, cheap transmitter that adds to the two (or more, or one) existing signal to raise it up to the required level.
There are several countable, non-continuous aspects in the radio: The selection of a multiplex, of a program channel within that mux, the set of transmitters, the mux ID and program ID, the supplementary text (like RDS text), ... Really, the only continuous, analog component is the sound itself. And that has improved greatly when going from FM to DAB; I'd say extremely so in you car radio when driving around in the Norwegian valleys with mountain sides for the FM waves to bounce back and forth between, and hills to shade the signal down to a minimum value (and below).
The radio system seen as a whole: I am certainly not nostalgic, longing back to the FM days. The switch to DAB has been a great step forward in all significant aspects. The only thing that was made wrong is that it took 20+ years from it was standardized until it took over (and in several European countries it is still secondary, while we wait for the FM transmitters to break down from old age). If DAB had been pushed through ten to fifteen years earlier, it would have hit the (end of) the great radio years. It is a pity that we introduce a truly great radio technology at a time when ever fewer people listen to the radio.
(This is in particular if you distinguish between "hearing" and "listening": Listening is wanting to hear. Not just hearing some background music, which can come from any jukebox-type source, but listening to a great radio play, in depth news reports, causeries, reports from festivals all over, debates, ... all the non-jukebox stuff. People of today seem to value that stuff down; they don't need the radio to hear some background music. Without listening.)
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