"Cheaper" is hardly the issue. Salaries can be adjusted. But forcing citizens to compete on workplace conditions with "guests" for whom getting fired is an equivalent of getting deported is quite another story.

it's portable, doesn't require a runtime and had bindings in most languages you'll want to use.

OO is a nuisance. If C just added direct access to the return value space instead pushing the whole return value on stack, OO would have been an esoteric footnote in some theoretical comp sci book. Instead, you get a paradigm which mixes data and code in one name space and completely takes attention away from the duality between data and functions. Oh, and without yield, no one would have heard of Python. You'd just here the gripes about whitespace being overly restrictive from everyone who wants braces. yield is what makes Python elegant. Metaclasses (ie, post-creation templates) and descriptors (ie, pre-creation templates) are actually somewhat cludgy. You understand that you can do everything in Python without ever having to worry about creating a single queue simply because of yield, do you not? Do you really not see how that simplifies code?Breadth-first tree traversal via simple recursion? Show me what other language will let you do that.

I was wondering why ALA stopped offering them altogether after the New Year's. I guess they knew something was coming ahead of time and didn't want their name to be pushed into the mudslinging to come.

ASN.1 is a way to universally describe data. It's expressible in multiple languages though. So the gp is right.

Nah, C++ itself is the problem. Linus got it right. Instead of standardizing name mangling and RTTI, the language went in the direction of accomodating everyone who didn't think to use auto_ptr when returning containers from functions. The whole reason for virtual functions is to get around huge case statements resolving discriminated unions. But without standard discriminators for these discriminated unions (and relying on points into virtual table instead) these cannot be persisted or sent over the network. So you end up with people still using multiple enumeration schemes which cannot be even logged in a consistent way. Mess, mess, mess!

I don't remember the full list of programming languages that I use or have used at some point (yeah, like you remember that Expect script that you wrote 15 years ago), but I can promise you that Mathematica is, in fact, different. It lets you mix the compile-time and run-time constructs (and treat them pretty much the same). The only think that is even close to being as revolutionary as Mathematica is Python's "yield" keyword (which allows functions to not only be a substitute for a stack abstraction, but also for a queue abstraction).

If the DOJ needs data stored in Ireland, why not ask Ireland first? It's not exactly a safe heaven for drug trafficking. I am sure they'd extradite a drug dealer. So they would release any data in drug trafficking case. DOJ just wants to prove that they shouldn't have to ask?

It will act in accordance with the goals set for it. Same human beings can be caring fathers and deadly soldiers depending on the context in which they apply their intelligence. Intelligence is a capability. It is a key which opens many doors. What it will do will depend largely on what it is tasked to do by those who are setting goals for it. Once it becomes ubiquitous, there may be some nihilists who'd use it to entertain their end-of-the-world-screw-it-all-to-hell fancy.

And if UN thinks that EU should be broken up, does that mean it should?

You can cross-correlate multiple medical term searches and conditions and see the trends in search over broken down by regions. It's not limited to flu. You can do it by other (some slowly-spreading) medical conditions.

Given the opposition to software patents and the general demand that genius be considered a public property, it's hard to call him even insane. I didn't actually know that he was still alive. I just assumed he was part of Hilbert's generation because of the Grothendieck basis. Well, good for him I guess.

Why not google trends? It's already categorized.

Ok, as long as we agree that simple pride is not racism. The main commodity in tech development is attention span. Anyone who thinks that many would bother with outside priorities like ethnic or racial background is kidding themselves. Vi vs Emacs was about as heated as tech bias got and even that has largely gone away now.

Condescend all you want, but mandatory insurance produces higher premiums and lower payouts regardless of how well it is regulated. In fact, regulation only increases administrative regulatory costs instead of reducing premiums. However, you missed a subtle point. Most of the newly insured will lose money on this even if they get sick and will receive insurance payments to cover some of their medical costs. Insurance companies are now in the business of delaying treatment. Approvals, medical justifications, reviews, etc... it's all there to stretch the time between doctors' ordering procedures and patients getting the treatment. It lowers the treatment received per unit of time. And it's gotten significantly worse since Obama Care was passed. You can't possibly think that calling a mandate to buy something that lowers the quality of medical care and increases costs can be justifiably called "help."