Actually, the telcos in Europa are preparing to roll out G.fast, which makes telcos again competive with Cable.

Not really. We hit the bandwidth limits of a single twisted pair a long time ago. For G.fast to be usable, the phone company has to replace your phone line with fiber to within just a few hundred feet of your home. For it to reach maximum speeds, you need fiber within just 230 feet. In effect, this means that if the phone company replaces all of their copper with fiber, G.fast lets them skip the cost of running the fiber from the pole outside your house into your house, for now. That's about it.

If your community has no fiber, G.fast won't even connect unless you're within BB gun range of your central office or DSL-capable remote terminal.

See this finger? Spin on it.

That just raises another issue - why are you services and utilities so unreliable in the US? Here in Iceland we get hurricane-force winds several times a year on average - I've had gusts over Cat 5 on my land. Winter isn't incredibly cold but is super wet (all precipitation forms), windy, and lasts a long time. Up at higher altitudes you get stuff like this (yes, those are guy wires... somewhere in that mass). I lived in the US for a long time and had an average of maybe two power outages a year from downed lines and such - sometimes lasting for long periods of time. I've never once had a power outage here that was anything more than a blown breaker in my place.

It's really amazing what you all put up with - your infrastructure standards are really low.

Yeah, here in freaking Iceland most people have 50 or 100 Mbps fiber for a lot cheaper than that. And not just in the capitol region, it even runs out to Vestfirðir now where the largest city is under 3k people.

It makes no sense whatsoever that a hunk of rock just under the arctic circle, 3 1/2 hours plane flight to the nearest land mass with any sort of half-decent manufacturing infrastructure, consisting often unstable ground constantly bombarded by intense winds, ice, landslides, avalanches, volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, etc, with the world's 2nd or 3rd lowest population density and heavy taxes on all imported goods, can do this while the US can't. What the heck, America? You've got half of the world's servers sitting right there, why the heck can't you manage to connect people to them?

Ha! That's an old one. After you find the golden rivet you can hop in your F-35 for a little snipe hunting.

Yes it does. Over WiFi. Which has far, far less range than a cellular network. Which means as soon as you leave town... *CARRIER LOST*

Every language is both over-rated and under-rated by their fans and detractors respectively.

The key thing a professional programmer learns is to use the right tool for the job at hand. That means being fluent in multiple languages, databases, frameworks, and toolkits. While I have been focused exclusively on Java for the past several years, that's because it buys me the cross platform portability that I want, not because it's "better" than C/C++, C#, or even Pascal.

I'd be quite content to do some more C++ work at some point in the future. C# was kind of fun, too.

But PHP I hate with a passion. I'd far rather write servlets with Java than dive into that unholy abortion of untyped interpretation.

"Strong like bull; Smart like tractor." -- old Ukrainian saying about dumb people

No wonder the world is in trouble when people of such high intelligence are allowed to vote and "have a voice." People voting in support of this are stupid enough that they should just shut the hell up, sit down, and watch their damned NFL and NBA.

It wasn't until i read more that i realised this was about DNA alone. I have no doubt that othes did the same but didn't bother going deeper into it.

Including the people taking the survey, I suspect.

I'd fully support removing any barriers to that. They'll surely get charged out the nose, but it's a reasonable proposal. What's not reasonable is having regular drivers subsidize Uber drivers by letting Uber drivers do commercial work on non-commercial insurance.

This is true and good, so long as you're interested in making software that can be done entirely with existing technologies. As soon as you hit the brick wall of "but there isn't anything in the standard library that does this," you need the old graybeards who spent their entire careers making the standard libraries you rely on.

Speaking as one of them, the pay and hours are both good and it keeps me on the cutting edge of some fascinating technologies.

The common idea is that we over-40s who've been doing this professionally for 25+ years can't adapt to modern software dev practices. Quite the opposite, really. Mostly we're kept so busy that we don't have the time.

None of this is meant to disrespect what the younger generation does with (as you say) "connect the dots library calls". That code needs to be written, and it's best if it's written by smart people who care about their work. :)

Did you ever try to run C on the Apple ][? UCSD Pascal was available, and worked well. C required an add on z-80 chip, and it was still a subset implementation. (Check out "Lifeboat C", though I think that was a later, and more capable version.)

So the situation is more complicated than you are assuming. I didn't get a full C compiler until AFTER I had gotten an 8086...which means probably that the IBM PC was already around.

No, but money changing hands (commerce) impacts whether it is "commercial", and requires a commercial license.

"Impacts", perhaps. But it's not definitive. Especially in California.

For instance: I bought a pickup truck, to use as a tow vehicle for my camper and my wife's boat. Then I discovered that CA requires pickup trucks to be tagged with a (VERY pricey) commercial license, regardless of whether they're used for business. (You CAN petition to tag a particular pickup truck as a personal vehicle - but are then subject to being issued a very pricey ticket if you are ever caught carrying anything in the truck bed - even if it's personal belongings or groceries, and regardless of whether you're being paid to do it. (Since part of the POINT of having a pickup truck is to carry stuff home from the store this would substantially reduce its utility.)

The one upside is that I get to park for short times in loading zones.

If we aren't going to require commercial licenses for commercial driving, then why even have them at all?

And if we ARE going to require them for clearly personal, non-commercial vehicles that happen to be "trucks", why NOT impose this requirement on putatively commercial vehicles that happen to be cars as well?

The real answer to your question is "because the state wants the tax money, and the legislators and bureaucrats will seek it in any way that doesn't threaten their reelection, reappointment, or election to higher office" - in the most jerrymandered state in the Union. The Uber case is one where an appraent public outcry arose, bringing the bureaucrats' actions, and public outcry about them, to the attention of elected officials.

The full form of the so-called "Chinese curse" is: "May you live in interesting times and come to the attention of people in high places."

Haha, yeah, I remember back when all that was on fark.com was a picture of that squirrel with the oversized genitals. Heck, I knew him before Fark.com, when he was the wizard Cletus on the mud Three Kingdoms.

God I feel old...

Sorry, but the length defined strings are optional, though common in Pascal. UCSD (and other early) Pascals usually buit that into the language, but I believe that now it's a part of a standard library, and alternates can be defined (though probably not with the same name). I'm not sure why you consider Pascal data structures more "well defined" than C structs.

P.S.: Strings in C can also be handled with a length byte. The zero terminated strings are purely a library convention, and can be overridden.

FWIW fpc Pascal has a string type in it's library that uses a length value longer than a byte.