I mean this as a genuine question: why is the US so far behind Europe in this?

I haven't seen a cheque in years. Is it too expensive to move everyone over to electronic transfers (surely it's cheaper to get rid of cheque processing)? Too difficult to change the habits of a large population quickly? Concerns about fraud? Plain unwillingness to change? It can't be the recent banking crisis because we had that too...

I cut my teeth on BBC BASIC back in the 80's. It was simple, powerful, let you do pretty much anything and best of all came with a built in assembler. Now that was really neat.And it just worked. It was easy to optimise individual subroutines in assembler. This was age 10. At my simple state school with a couple of BBC Model Bs in the corner, I wasn't the only one doing that either.

I make a living writing C++ now and seem to do fairly well at it. The kids coming out of university that I interview these days haven't touched BASIC, or C++ for that matter. We want them to write good C++ when they come and work for us. The intelligent ones adapt easily to working with pointers etc. The less able ones that have somehow made it through the interview process struggle.

Looks like DNS has already gone...

Searching for cryptome.org. A record at G.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. [192.112.36.4] ...took 31 ms
Searching for cryptome.org. A record at D0.ORG.AFILIAS-NST.org. [199.19.57.1] ...took 9 ms

Nameserver D0.ORG.AFILIAS-NST.org. reports: No such host cryptome.org

If you want something that works everywhere now, you're out of luck. JOGL probably works in the most places, but I've not seen many things use it. WebGL has a lot of potential. When I visited Google a couple of weeks ago, one of the guys there showed me a port of Quake 2 to WebGL. It was pretty impressive; the game is quite old now, but it was running in Chrome on a Mac without needing any extra plugins. All of the resources were loaded on demand, which produced some interesting effects (the walls were flat shaded when you started the level and only became textured a few seconds later, as the server provided the textures), but you can fix that with precaching.

You'd be surprised. My health insurance (in Gemany) pays for all homeopathic treatments up to the age of 12, and only for specific treatments after that. The caveat is that the treatment is only paid when prescribed by a certified physician which has had additional training in homeopathy.
Treatments from "natural healers" without medical schooling or certification are not allowed.

I'm going for the latter.

Plenty of 3D plugins have come and gone over the years. There's obviously no real demand, DX11 or otherwise.

PS: Why would DX11 be more compelling than (eg.) DX9?

For an erudite discussion of the challenges of applying the scientific method to historical sciences, I suggest you read Stephen Jay Gould's wonderful book "Wonderful life".

Well if you actually think about what you're saying, you'll realise why it's such a stupid suggestion. You put cameras in every home, you have to look thru all the cameras in every home for a change of finding something wrong, which means you're looking into the homes of mostly innocent people. Even the good cop would have to be. However, if you place the camera/tracking device on the thing that's actually being stolen, and activate it when it is reported stolen (many cars have this) then any interaction you have with that security device is not invading anybody's privacy, except for whomever's trying to steal it, and they don't get privacy protection. An abused system doesn't mean a useless system, it just means measures should be put into place to stop abuse, for example, the owner of the thing in question (laptop, car, or in this case it should be the kids' parents) has a security code that enables tracking software, so the tracking software cannot be used without their authorisation. Problem solved. Without any need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. That wasn't so hard, was it?