I hope your "sore spot" friends die of horrible diseases that are easily prevented, then, and that you and yours are kept safe from their ignorant incompetence.
NEXT pandemic? The current one is still in action. The fact that people have stopped testing for it doesn't mean it's gone. It just means governments and corporations can pretend it's gone.
And hey, while we're at it, let's bring back the classics! Every old disease that has been almost completely wiped out will be back with a vengeance now.
Having lived through the "Eternal September" beginnings, I'm sorry but you've got very strongly rose-tinted glasses on.
(Ref)USENET was a cesspool on the order of any modern *chan board or their ilk both before and after the Eternal September. Having a high technical bar to entry just meant most participants were obsessive lunatics with poor socialization (instead of merely half).
You went to a taxpayer-funded school. You live in a society built from the benefits of having a largely educated populace. And now you want to stop funding those benefits for the next generation.
That is practically the definition of entitled twit.
If you want to stop funding schools, fine. Stop using anything made by anybody educated in the past five generations, say. No roads, for example. Civil engineers were taxpayer-funded through their initial education after all. No medicine. Doctors and nurses again were funded by taxpayers in their initial educations. No housing. No water. No electricity. No telephony. AND FOR GOD'S SAKE GET OFF THAT COMPUTER!
You're a very, very, very limited thinker. I'd say at the very least the taxes paid for your education should be refunded since it apparently didn't take.
BYD and XPeng, however, are especially relevant because the former is kicking Tesla's ass in EV space and the latter is about to. (And BYD makes some kick-ass public buses too. Glorious vehicles!)
Yes. The OP specifically should not be permitted to benefit from anything that's paid for by taxes. Fire service? My house isn't burning. Deal with your own problems using your own money!
I have always understood that C generally compiles almost directly to assembly with little to no abstraction overhead, and it would not require platform-specific ASM code.
You have always understood incorrectly then. I'd recommend a trip over to Godbolt and take a look at the assembler output from C code. Play around with compiler options and see the (often MASSIVE!) changes. That alone should tell you that it doesn't compile "almost directly to assembly".
But then note something different. Count the different instructions used by the C compiler. Then look at the number of instructions available in an average CISC processor. Huge swaths of the instruction set, especially the more esoteric, but performance-oriented instructions for very specific use cases, are typically not touched by the compiler.
In the very, very, very ancient days of C the C compiler compiled almost directly to assembly. Specifically PDP-11 assembly. And any processor that was similar to the PDP-11 had similar mappings available. This hasn't been the case, however, likely longer than you've been alive.
[citation needed]
As opposed to the oh-so-friendly rhetoric getting slung from the USA and Canada right now.
A bunch of churlish hypocrites, the lot of them.