Yes, but people don't want to dig up all their older programs and modify them just because the language has changed and is no longer backwards compatible. Inertia is a very powerful thing, and these language developers have really screwed up by forgetting this.

Wrong. Linux doesn't need a static ABI, because the device drivers are all distributed as part of the kernel. Only makers of proprietary modules, and sycophants and nay-sayers complain about the Linux kernel not having a static API and ABI for kernel modules.

If you're talking about application code, the kernel is static on that. You can take binaries from 15 years ago and run them on a modern Linux kernel. The problem you'll usually run into is that the libraries that binary links to are not fully backwards-compatible, including glibc. That's not a kernel issue. In practice, it's rarely an issue at all; even glibc is very stable. The other libraries, OTOH, are a different matter (things like gtk, Qt, and myriad other small libraries). Even here, though, there's a pretty good effort to maintain some backwards compatibility. Most distros have qt3 compatibility packages, for instance, if you need to run applications built with Qt3. But if you've wrote an application 15 years ago that only uses kernel system calls, it should work just fine now.

The problems with Perl6 and Python are real, though, and I think do hurt their adoption a lot. It's a real PITA if you can't run an older program because the newer versions of its interpreter aren't backwards-compatible.

That's certainly not the case. Look at all the horrible things the European nations did back during their colonial days. Most nations, when sufficiently powerful, do pretty awful things to other nations just because they can and because it benefits them (or certain members of their population).

>instead, he decides to lay a steaming coil on the democratic platform on which he was elected.

Seems to me that most of the rest of the Democrats are going right along with Obama and his policies. Somehow I got on the Democrat party's mailing list and I get bombarded with all these fearmongering hysterical ads about how they need more money or Republicans will take over, and how it's so important that we "support Obama's agenda!!!!" Obama's agenda is giveaways to big corporations like Comcast and the health insurance companies; why would I want to support that?

>It seemed odd that only posts I see on this subject ("Classic Obama", "Obama ... What is it with this guy", and "Why does Obama keep doing this") all seem to suggest this hypocrisy is somehow unique to the current president.

It is somewhat unique.

Bush wasn't hypocritical. He was blatant in his advocacy for non-progressive policies and for being corrupt. You think Bush would have ever pushed for patent reform? Or net neutrality? Not on your life. So when he did bad things, it was entirely expected. No hypocrisy there.

Obama is different, because he said all kinds of great-sounding, progressive things such as that he wouldn't appoint any lobbyists to policy-making positions. Then he promptly did exactly the opposite when in office. That makes him a hypocrite and a liar.

Have you been asleep in a cave since 2006?

It's not really that bad these days; a lot of the Obama fans have given up on him (remember the Reddit picture a while back where someone had a huge Obama "HOPE" poster and had put it in a dumpster, and someone took a photo of this and posted it?), however there's still a contingent of Obamabots who still push the "if you don't like Obama, you're a racist!!!" canard which got started during his first campaign.

>Canadian coastline will never be "tropical".

Wrong. The continental plates move around over time, and just as the land the US sits on used to straddle the equator, it's entirely conceivable that Canada could eventually move so that it's in the tropics.

It may take a while, though.

>Environmentalism is about saving humans not the earth.

No, it's not. Environmentalism is basically about preserving the status quo, environmentally. It's just like social conservatism, except that instead of trying to preserve society at a certain point in time, more or less (like the 50s for American conservatives), environmentalsts want to preserve the environmental status quo at some halcyon age (probably the 1700s or 1800s sometime). So there's multiple components here: they want the temperatures and sea levels to remain the same, because any big changes there will grossly affect human civilization, since we've built so many cities at sea level and because we need a mild climate for agriculture. Environmentalists also want to preserve plant and animal species, for various reasons, but of course only current ones; they don't usually talk that much about going back and trying to revive dinosaurs since they really wouldn't fit into today's world too well.

>Quick: name a country which doesn't think its ways are the obviously correct ways, and that the world wouldn't better if only everyone else would adopt their standards.

>Europeans are convinced that we should maintain a bit of aloof isolationism. The Middle East is convinced that a Muslim theocracy would benefit everyone. Much of Asia wishes we could get over the recent notion of individual rights instead of duties to country.

These aren't all the same. A worldwide Muslim theocracy would affect everyone, including people who don't want it. Whereas Europeans being isolationist doesn't affect anyone except Europeans. Similarly, Asians pushing duties to country really only affects Asians in the concerned countries.

Yes, everyone (nations and individuals alike) think that their ways are the correct ways, and everyone else should be more like them. However, if you're not actively pushing yourself and your ways on other people, there's no ethical problem. If a bunch of European nations say "we want to keep to ourselves except maybe for some trade", that isn't hurting anyone else. Other places are free to run their nations as they please; they can establish theocracies if they want, or not. However, nations that have foreign policies which emphasize interventionism and pushing their ways on others are in a different boat. Some Muslim nations do try to push their ways, but they don't really have much power to back up those desires (if they ever got that power, that would be rather scary). However the US and Russia (moreso the US these days) and also China not only have the power to be bullies, but they actively engage in bullying behavior on the international level.

Point #2 is kind of right. Jessup isn't a great place, but you don't have to live there...just work there. You can easily work at Jessup but live in, say, Takoma Park or Columbia or any of the other really nice neighborhoods that are within 30 minutes. Where you work != where you live.

Not really. You can only realistically commute so far; most people don't want to spend more than 1 hour in each direction, and that's kinda pushing it. So yeah, you don't have to live right in Jessup, but you're still stuck in Maryland or maybe northern Virginia (if you can stomach driving on the beltway every day--that's a pretty hellish thought). Not everyone is OK with living there; it's a totally different local culture than, say, NYC or Boston or the Bay Area or Seattle or San Diego. Someone who wants to be able to go surfing on the weekends, for instance, will not want to live there. Someone who likes West Coast city culture will not want to live there. Heck, someone who doesn't want to live in a place totally dominated by government workers won't want to live there.

This is one of the problems with some PhDs. It's probably not much of a problem with Bachelor's degree holders; with a BS, you learn enough to learn how to learn more later on, and you learn how little you really know, but you don't get so specialized that you think you're an expert.

What level of autodidactism are we talking about here anyway? High school dropouts, or people with slightly different degrees to what they're currently working in?

Remember, a university education is not a training course. It's supposed to give you the fundamentals so you have a broad education and a starting point to learn more on your own later. It doesn't replace specialized knowledge gained through experience, and never will. Ruby and JavaScript are not languages normally taught at the university level; those are things you're supposed to learn on your own, after learning more general concepts in a university program. Same goes for web apps; someone who earned a CS degree in 1992 is not going to have any formal training on such a thing, but they'll have learned all the general concepts behind how computers work and behind programming, algorithms, data structures, etc. which they need to learn how to program web apps on their own.

Relocation is helpful, but only to an extent. If the job is located in Bumfuck, Louisiana, how many tech people actually want to live in a place like that, even if the cost of living is cheaper and relo is compensated?

How do you propose to get power across the Strait of Gibraltar?

Morocco and Algeria aren't the most politically stable countries in the world either, and aren't far removed from the nations like Tunisia and Libya that just experienced violent uprisings. You want to make Europe's power and economy dependent on these nations? All it would take is a small terrorist attack against some transmission line towers to cause chaos and plunge parts of the continent into darkness. That seems like a rather stupid idea to me.