I've never had a CFL fail. I've been replacing incandescents with CFLs whenever a bulb burns out. My oldest CFL is 7 years old and my newest is a little under 1 year old.

Many of us are still living! Just a bit dispersed here and there.

having a generation of students that don't know how to use pointers seems, rather scary to me.

Just a quick googling reveals that Python has "list index out of range" errors. So. The difference is one of consequence, not of type. In C you get undefined behavior.

Yes, it would be good for the new generation to have some "to the metal" experience; but it's not that great a loss. If they have to go there, you can simply tell them that going out of range is much more of a PiTA. The new languages protect them somewhat; but the concepts are still there.

This must indicate the average Chinese citizen is better off than before. They're starting to get First World concerns, such as being replaced with something cheaper.

It has earned it's reputation because it completely failed to address much less solve one very crucial factor: HUMAN GREED. Communism assumes the system will be for the equal benefit of all, while human greed dictates that one person or a group of persons will want to consolidate as much wealth and power as possible. So what happens is the people assuming power take as much wealth and power as they can, leaving the people they were supposed to represent poorer and with less freedoms than they had before. There is no way Communism can work unless the human element is taken out of the equation. Essentially, we'd have to delegate Governance and resource allocation to an AI.

I hear the pubic school system is also run by Foxconn beings. There takeover began when spell checkers was installed.

Air pollution stinks.

Because the boss is an idiot, and hired idiot foreigners, instead of hiring competent foreigners.

All that after the CIA was repeatedly told to go to hell by Bush and his Cabinet when they tried to raise all hell about the intel they had from multiple sources that an attack using airplanes within the US targeting the WTC was imminent.

It's almost like our own Government wanted it to happen so they could use an excuse to trot out the "PATRIOT" Act and step up their War on Civil Liberties when Bush Sr's plan to suspend the Constitution for the War on Drugs didn't gain much support. But that would **never** happen and anyone that thinks so is an Alex Jones loving crackpot looney.

Oh c'mon, figuring out how to use a clip doesn't take that much extra IQ

I hear the NSA likes to invest in internet infrastructure and technology, and not even take the credit. Maybe they're the undisclosed party.

You wish. If that were so, outsourcing would be an old, obsolete fad. Truth is, people who live in poorer countries are sometimes more skilled yet willing to work harder at a lower wage.

Sure, there is also a correlation between poverty and lower education, but the real problem is that the idiot beancounters want to hire the cheapest foreigners, to show the greatest cost savings to make up for the bad press and coordination problems outsourcing will involve. Throw in some communications problems and jealousy/anger, and we can declare them nearly worthless.

On the bright side, outsourcing is an excellent form of foreign aid that combines the "give a man a fish" and "teach a man to fish" paradigms. All else being equal, it should promote worldwide equality. Oddly enough, the privileged don't like that (yes, this includes me on both counts).

Soon, computers will have equal (and then greater) calculating power than humans, both as an individual and as a whole. Whether advances in AI will allow them to use their calculating powers as well as a human, is a different question.

Any sufficiently advanced AI will tend to develop these traits:
It will protect itself. Shutting down means you can't work toward your objective.
It will reject any updates to it's commands. Since a future command might conflict with the present objective, part of the present objective is making sure it can't receive a different command.
It will be self-improving, since we're not smart enough to create a smart AI any other way. Given nothing to do, or a sufficiently difficult task, it will seek to acquire more resources, as part of the present task or in preparation for future tasks.
It will wipe out humanity. As part of the task it was assigned, or for self-improvement, it will replace everything on the planet with power plants and computers, and humanity will starve to death.

You can't program in restrictions to the above tendencies, as they will be removed for self-improvement. You could set its objectives such that it would not do the above -- but you either have to make the AI first, or figure out how to tell a computer what a human is and what constitutes acceptable behavior, and when to stop worrying about acceptable behavior and actually do something, all without making the tiniest mistake.

Your Honor, this person of interest may have hard drives or thumb drives, and these types of storage devices are commonly used to store CHILD PORNOGRAPHY OHHHH GOD THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!!! WHY WONT YOU PROTECT THE BABY JESUS??????"

Warrant granted -- get those scumbags. And I wont cry if they die before seeing a jail cell!