It's because of people like you that once in a while a horrible, slow, unresponsive desktop app is foisted upon users. Because java or c#.

I write c++. I know which part of my code will be touched by less experienced programmers, and I code these parts without the most esoteric bits of the language. I know which parts need speed and low-level optimisations. And I know which part will require extensibility. C++ allows both the genericity and the low-level optimisation. No language has quite the range of possibilities c++ has. Great power, great responsibility and all that.

Mem leaks are easily fixed if you a) don't create them, and b) run you code through valgrind once in a while. Large programmes are typically sensitive to runtime performance, and the performance of the whole thing might well evaporate from a thousand small overheads from "safe languages".

But at the end of the day, no amount of language design will save you from programmer errors...

By "young" he means 8-year-old. Not quite what you may have been thinking.

Don't delude yourself. In all likelyhood, you would have not made nitroglycerine but burnt or killed yourself. Safe production of nitroglycerine requires a well-equipped lab.

It's not that the recipe is wrong -- I dont know how you would have done it -- but if the recipe was correct, the 19th century way is dangerous.

You are an idiot. Whenever I travel to the US or even Canada, I am remined of how horrible the passing of borders can be (the Canadians are nice and polite about it, but the concept of some guy asking me where I am going without having any cause tu suspect me is highly disagreeable).

Also, you misunderstand History: the Treaty of Rome in 1957 is the treaty that started it all. The ECSC became the EU, eventually. and the EU is nmot the end point. It is a unique experiment in the History of the world to create a nation from countries with thousands of years of war behind them. It makes sense economically: 30 sets of norms are a clear hindrance to commerce, and a common market without this makes no sense. Nor does it make sense without union-wide supervision.

More importantly, it ensures my freedom to go wherever I please in Europe and work there. It ensures that no citizen is SOL when their government goes bonkers: higher norms must be obeyed. To me, the guarentee of fundamental freedoms is more important that the guarentee that my government can be arbitrarily dickish to me without external interference. People moaning about "sovereingty" really mean "I don't like them foreigners" and "why can't we be horrible to people we don't like?".

it's a digital thermometer! it is typically correct to 0.1 C. Display it!

Again, the finer numbering system argument is, to me, just absurd. For me, it is much more important to have a scale that makes sense.

I am going to guess that you are American, and that it never occurer to you that Fahrenheit makes no sense at all if you were not raised with it. I have no problem dealing with miles: the conversion is not so straightforward to km, but it's ok: just a linear factor. Pounds and kg, sure, fine, same thing. Hell, inches and feet are alright, as long as you don't start using fractions to compare them (seriously, what is larger: 5/16 or 3/8 -- of course you can figure it out, but 0.31 and 0.19 are so much easier to compare) .

Fahrenheit? you are talking noise to me. And I know the scale and what it means: it is just too painful to try and figure it out. It may well be that you are pointing the finger on something which had not made sense to me until now: there is a phobia of decimal places in America. Why? Mystery.

This is silly: units are not "better" because they are smaller (otherwise, one has to conclude that centimeters are better than inches and pounds better than kilos and seconds are better than hours).

A unit is better if the scale makes sense. for a unit used commonly, degrees Celsius makes sense: from water freezes to water boils. Fahrenheit goes from "saturated brine solution freezes" to "temperature of a human wil a slight fever". This is seriously indefensible shit right there :)

So your argument in favour of Fahrenheit is that americans don't understand decimals? That's weak...

I am not angry at you. I am sorry it came out this way. Too many people say dumb things like "I don't like effects because they use up resources", or "I don't like the idea of running a full-fledged RDB".

These ideas are toxic, because they assume that the performance of a system can be asserted based on tangentially related properties of said system. This is not true. If an interface is not snappy, it's not. But nothing about the fact that it is accelerated tells you it is not snappy :)

The point is that themes with 6 pixel high title bars don't scale. KDE does scale precisely because of all the attention on fancy effects. Although one may or may not care for them, they are not a waste: they force well-optimised, well thought-out architectures to support them.

One should cheer for people pushing for more usage of the gfx cards, and not complain that they eat precious resources, which, unless you are in the tiny minority which uses their cards for its CUDA powers, is just not true. And if you are, seriously dude, WTF are you doing running a graphical interface on your computing node?!

Not really: GTK desktops like, say XFCE don't do that. Also traditional WM weren't designed for that, and the themes were typically made by l33t hackers who were somehow convinced that minimising the number of pixels in the bitmaps they used to draw their windows was cool.

This is not how intergenerational transfers work. This is no ponzi scheme, unless the people in the US collectively decide to produce no more children and forbid all immigration. In which case I guess you'll have other, more urgent, problems. Ponzi schemes break down because eventually, you cannot grow the base fast enough. Intergenerational transfers work as long as there are new generations, which there will be for as long as there is a US of A. There are transitions between demographic structures, but these are temporary problems and require no long-term fixes : you can smooth out problems through borrowing.

Basically, the US is broke exactly when people stop wanting T-bills, and not a moment before. The moment that happens is when people stop believing that the US will produce stuff in the next 3-10 years. And the rest of the planet offers significantly better prospects with very little risk.

This will not happen. At least, not in the forseeable future.

It doesn't matter that there is no money in the fund. In fact, it is a good thing: it is a terrible and wasteful thing to have large sums doing nothing in a bank account, and at the kind of scales we are talking about, this is nothing short of criminal. Because the ability to keep paying SS depends on the promise that the US is a place where riches are created (by which I mean goods and services, not bullion) it is an excellent strategy to invest the money in the fund to pay for whatever stuff makes Americans happy and productive.

You want to know what happens when people start thinking like accountants? Look at Europe! Or think about outsourcing of IT departments, to give an example dear to the slashdot crowd. A country is not a household.

Yup, all the icons are in svg, and all the UI elements scale. So you'll get all the beauty at a very high resolution -- and those icons are little works of art.

Do you also complain that the IP addresses go x.x.x.1 .2 ... .9 .10 .11 ??

Different conventions for different purposes. tau is commonly used for characteristic times and for shear stresses. Deal with it.

This is because you are not thinking about it in the right way: We do not know the number of versions, subversions, subsubversion there will be. Therefore, we cannot choose a nice base. If we knew there would never be more than 16 of them, Hex would work: 1.0, 1.2, ...1.A, 1.B, ..., 1.F.

But we can interpret the digits between dots as a single symbol -- which it is, it is the number of releases at that level. Thus, x.y.z makes sense for any integers x, y, and z.

It is in fact completely rigourous: we are counting, and picked the dot as a symbol separator between counters. Like IP adresses, or classes in many programming languages. If you think of releases as reals and not integers, you think wrong. Sorry.