Why do you want alcohol in a movie theater? So that your bladder interrupts your movie experience every 50 minutes or so? I have been to one of those. I don't know how we have arrived to a point where people can't enjoy a movie, car race, or other social event without chugging alcohol.

Why fetish? Would you rather hold Mexican peso, Turkish lira or something else? People obsess about US dollar as a reserve currency because they know that they, or someone else, could go into US and spend the money to buy real stuff. They also expect low and manageable rate of inflation, as it was observed for more than one hundred years in the US.

The US economy may be prone to inflation, but the inflation has been mild since the 80s. I am also curious about the "deficit" you're mentioning. Being a market economy, there can't be a deficit in the US. If there is an excess demand for any good at a given price, the price will rise until the quality demanded equals the quantity supplied. The deficit happens when the price of a good is set artificially below its market price, like it happens in communist economy or in places where a totalitarian government attempts to fix a price.

So why else people prefer the dollar? The exchange rate does not fluctuate as wildly as that of other, lesser economies. A run out of the mill hedge fund can probably collapse the exchange rage of Ukraine hrivna or Turkish lira, if they feel like it, but attacking a US dollar on exchange markets is something no one can afford.

What else is there? It's a huge economy, one of the biggest in the world, and just like most of the first world economies, the US government has no problems collecting the income and sales tax. This means that the debt of the US government is always guaranteed by the affluence of the economy and the taxes collected.

Yes, this should not be implemented because poor people never drive drunk, never break laws, never drive with suspended license, or without a license or without a valid insurance. So we suspend all tickets and fines because they only hurt the innocent poor drivers without leaving a dent in rich people's pockets.

PS: And please don't compare it to Borat. Borat was a well-made, innovative iconic film comedy and it still has a cult-like following. Without the Sony hack debacle, no one would remember The Interview six months from now.

Typical Seth Rogen movie, made by stoners, for other stoners. The best way to watch a Rogen movie is after smoking a joint. Then all the childish jokes you hear will make complete sense. This movie is about on the level with Pineapple Express, or slightly below. My favorite Rogen movie was "This is The End". That one was extremely well done comedy, and funny to most people, even without smoking a joint.

The funniest thing about The Interview is that people all around the world, after learning of the Sony hack debacle, initially think about the movie as the flag bearer of the western values for its resolve to stand up to the brutal dictatorships Then they get shocked by the sophomoric jokes thrown around the movie, often involving words like dick and vaginas. It's unfortunate that The Interview wasn't anywhere as good as "This is The End"

It's strange that China is afraid of having a Western style democracy and a market economy right at its border considering that within China's own borders and territory one can witness a wild west style of capitalist economy and a sharp division between the haves and havenots.

Bowling is a legitimate sport and should be represented in the Olympic games.

Having passed away, since Mr Stewart can no longer update the textbook every year or so, does this mean that this Calculus text will finally stabilize, stop being updated, and the prices would drop?

That's why most application developers will not touch C with a ten foot pole. C remains extremely fast and simple programming language, but it has little built in support for "safe programming".

To be honest, some of that is not the failure of the language but the libraries. For example, string handling is a big source of programming mistakes in C. So why isn't there a _standard_ library for safe string handling? (I know there may be several third party libraries) A library could abstract away the management of pointers to chars, things like growing and shrinking storage of the strings, creating string objects, destroying them, etc. without programmer ever touching a raw pointer to memory containing the string data.

My thoughts exactly. One week in Paris, and then another in Singapore. What a horrible life. Where is it going to take Durov the following week, perhaps Buenos Aires, Tokyo, or Morocco? Hard to say... such crazy world.

A rather pointless and misguided post and a list.

Trotsky was Stalin's own arch-enemy. It's very hard to think of who could possibly play such role to Putin's regime today. Berezovski was the last one, and he was a non-player since the end of 20th century. The other guy, Khodorkovky, the CEO of now dead Yukos, has already served a decade in prison and has been pardoned.

Litvinenko's killing in London was clearly a very public execution to send a message to major politically involved oligarchs in exile, such as Berezovski, who used to think he owns and runs the Kremlin in the 90s. Durov is a very small fry, and one out of hundreds. I can't imagine that FSB is possibly losing sleep over him.

Why exactly was the MH17 flying over a well known war zone, where many aircraft were shot down just days ago? Answer: the Ukrainian air traffic controllers apparently allowed civilian airliners to fly over this war zone, as long as they flew high enough. Stupid. Stupid decisions. Ukrainian air traffic authorities should share the blame here.

I have worked for nearly a decade as a sysadmin in a science environment, and I hardly witnessed people demanding to switch from Linux to OS X. For the most part, MOST science software actually happens to work best under Linux distributions. Your Mathematica example is only one piece of evidence. However, the Linux distributions track much better packages like R, Octave, or Latex, which are bread and butter packages in a lot of scientific fields. While I never used Mathematica, I never had any issues with commercial software packages like Matlab or SAS under Linux.

In my opinion, other things being equal, the businesses hiring from the top schools are right. My background is in a bit of math and cs from one of the schools on the list above, and let me tell you I have been surprised by the mediocrity of the training people from "lesser" schools had. A guy with a math degree from a prestigious Southern university didn't know what a "proof by induction" is. I was shocked. I don't think we need to discuss the importance of understanding the concept of induction for either math or coding.

EE deals with hardware. Math deals with abstractions, structures, and all that. CS is a lot more than these two IMO. You don't learn CS theory, algorithms, the coding paradigms, or software engineering principles in either Math or EE fields. I used to work as a sysadmin in a leading math department and I saw no indication that the mathematicians are specially more adept at coding or even using computers. The ones who were experts in computing and coding actually chose to do so.