The funny thing is that he's recommending Automatic Reference Counting instead, which destroys cache much more than GC during regular processing.

What makes you think the republicans want to kill DHS? For some reason, "conservative" too often means desiring to blow everybody else up in the name of security/freedom/whatever, foreign or domestic. There are too many terrorized politicians and predatory opportunists on both sides of the entrenchments.

Obligatory: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFCuE5rHbPA.

I wouldn't necessarily credit the American education system, but American culture (which in turn does effect educational style). We're in theory the pioneers, the free people forging our own destinies from the unknown, etc. We are supposed to be new-problem solvers by cultural definition.

The only real options boil down to fragmentation or forced obsolescence. Android chose the former, Apple chose the latter. Both suck in their own ways.

Hex? No, it should use octal EBCDIC XML.

So is Linux off the table for some reason? I've had that on the desktop for years, and I'm no *nix guru.

Granting powers to someone at "his discretion" has nothing to do with limiting those powers to wartime.

Listening to the audio clip of the witness who originally said that (third video on the first-linked page), I believe he meant that the airplane began to roll left, not that it actually completed a tumble in any particular direction. The left wing hit the ground during that "beginning to cartwheel" event, then the wheels all touched down and it came to a stop.

Since Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, I wouldn't make any assumptions about what percentage "got over their fear" vs other means of no longer being counted in that group.

Technically, there are laws that are passed which allow violation of privacy rights, under some "secret interpretation" of those rights in combination with the effective martial law we have here in a perpetual state of non-declared war.

So these actions are in some sense "legal", but the laws that allow them to be so are themselves illegal.

Harm? What harm? This is /exactly/ what needs to happen in order to start to correct the systemic violations and illegal (unconstitional) laws. I believe international pushback is going to be more effective than the actions of the US citizens in these cases.

Anything that's going to last into unknown civilizations is by necessity going to have a low storage capacity, because it needs to be readable unassisted, and survive handling and environmental changes.

Yet when people find things like that and don't know what they are, they want to find out why it was built and what it holds.