Solar isn't nearly efficient enough to do that without pretty much paving over the entire southwest with solar facilities, further enraging the environmentalists and bird lovers.

Since you're going to piss off the environmentalists no matter what you do, shy of simply having a massive human die-off (and please do that in an environmentally thoughtful way, people!), we might as well piss them off by using a technology that can actually do an adequate job of large-scale desalination: nuclear power.

Exactly. And we use all of the tools at our disposal - especially the most efficient ones we can when they make sense, things like drones - to make it costly and more difficult for groups like ISIS and Al Queda to do what they're trying to do.

That's the whole point. Tools like drones are designed to help stop mass killers like ISIS without having to use less-precise, larger-scale weapons. You do get that, right?

Yes, it makes much more sense to go back to using manned aircraft in those situations, because that way the aircraft can be louder, bigger, and burn more jet fuel. As a bonus, the planes can perform a lot more dangerous in-flight refueling maneuvers, or make make many more trips to the same region, require larger localized airbases and far more on-the-ground support people and a bigger supply chain.

Or are you really saying you'd prefer that we use a massive ground force to attempt to achieve the same goals?

Oh, I get it. You're speaking code. When you say you don't want drones to be used, what you really mean is you don't want people like ISIS to be counter-attacked, or for it to be risky for groups like Boko Harom or AQAP to move their leadership and people around between attacks on infidel schools, that sort of thing. Can you expand on why you think that's a good thing?

Oh, I get it, now, You DO want a huge new ground invasion into places like Syria and a giant new force back on the ground in Iraq, so that we can surround and capture thousands of heavily armed militants in what would be a sustained series of big battles and firefights ... which the jihaddis would make absolutely sure occurred in and around innocent civilians, which they've shown repeatedly they're more than happy to see die in order to score propaganda points. Why you prefer prolonged gun battles in populated areas in order to capture people who post videos of themselves torturing people to death in the name of their religion (rather than simply removing them from the battlefield when we catch them out on the road in a vehicle or small convoy) is beyond me. You seem to have no problem with huge numbers of casualties in the interests of trying to capture for trial people who would see a ground force coming for them weeks in advance. Strange priorities you have.

I see. So we should tell Russia to stop attacking Ukrainian military positions, and that will cause Putin to stop doing so? Do you pay no attention at all to what's going on? The Russians have already been "told" to stop invading Ukraine, and they agreed to do so. But of course they're still doing it, and shelling Ukrainian positions every day. What, specifically, do you think should be said to Putin, differently, that would have him change his mind about lying, the way he's doing right now? What words would you use? Be specific.

Then why are you even saying what you're saying?

"The west" has violated no such thing. The Soviet Union no longer exists, though it sounds like you'd prefer that it does.

ADA updates would be good, bringing in the Spark 2014 and early 2015 extensions would have been nice. (Spark is a mathematically provable dialect of ADA. Well, mostly. Apparently, you can't prove floating point operations yet because nobody knows how. Personally, I think it's as easy as falling off a log table.)

There are also provable dialects of C and it would be nice if GCC had a flag to constrain to that subset. Using multiple compilers is a good way of producing incompatible binaries and nasty interactions. GCC has no business having limitations. :)

With work on KROC at a standstill, we have a reference compiler that talks Occam Pi. Occam is a very nice language to work with but working through archaic Inmos blobs is tiresome and limiting.

Code quality in GCC and GlibC is still poor, the stability of internal interfaces is derisory (these should be generated from abstract descriptions, ensuring the flexibility GCC wants and the usability interface developers want) and the egos of the developers should be taken out and shot. However, it's still one of the best environments out there. Those that are better at specific things are usually carrying three to four digit price tags. I'd write in hand-turned assembly before paying for unquantifiable products that I won't even own.

Thank you. Do not throw out the baby with the bath water.

When giant corporations can come in and steal ideas by small inventors, real, significant ideas, that hurts a lot more than these stupid patents do.

Different animal. Cilk has specific instructions for parallelising loops and similar. It looks like a similar concept to Fortran's capacity to turn anything that can be done as a vector rather than as a sequential operation into a vector instruction.

OpenMP parallelizes at the block level rather than the instruction level. By all accounts (notably comments on the ATLAS mailing list), the performance is terrible.

Too much blind guessing. Here's the correct answer.

The error everyone makes in assuming that because it's bad for heart disease, it's bad for everything.

Obesity is a problem primarily because of cardiovascular reasons, like heart attack and stroke. Otherwise it's loaded with nutrition and calories. This probably explains why "overweight" (though not obese) are the longest-lived segment of society. Thinner people are running more on empty, leading to under-performing immune systems and healing.

That's where I'd start to look anyway.

And on top of all this, high fat content is known to help neurons function in cases with epilepsy, so again it's not a surprise here.

I wonder if chewing bubble gum would also impact a below average student's exam scores. Seems like minimize the distractions from sex, alcohol, and cannabis would tend to help most below average students.

Also, if you can only smoke in these Dutch coffee shops, and spend all your time there instead of in your apartment or dorm, then less studying might explain away some of the exam scores.

But despite the above concerned, I think most of us all assumed that there is some cognitive impact while someone is using cannabis. The debate has always been if this is temporary or is the impact long term. I tend to find a lot of holes in research that shows the negative impact to be long term. I have a hunch that there could be some neutral impact that is long term (changes but not detrimental), but that has been rather tough to measure.

(researching comfortably from my armchair)

No. You are exposed to the same "dangerous thoughts" as every self-radicalized would-be jihaddi killer. The difference? Their message of medieval theocratic dominance and death-to-the-infidels is repugnant to you, but appeals strongly to them. This is a world view issue. If embracing that twisted vision for the future of humanity is your definition of mental illness, then what you're saying is that untold millions of Muslims are mentally ill.

We could have a separate discussion about religiosity in general, and what it means to go through life clinging to a plainly irrational system of magical thinking. But not all contemporary religious people let their magical thinking instruct them to put the infidels to sword (or car bomb, as the case may be).

10 gigabits per second! Sweet! I can run through my entire Verizon monthly 2 gig allottment in under 2 seconds, and run up $10 a second per gig in overage!

You're missing the point.

Sure, just like countless other objects. But if the FAA was worried about safety, they'd be expecting the recreational users of them to also be subject to the regulations they're putting on commercial operators using exactly the same 3-pound plastic quadcopter in exactly the same way. A guy checking out his own roof gutters with a consumer-grade quad, and a roofing contractor using exactly the same device in exactly the same way present exactly the same safety risks ... but the FAA only considers one of those two people to be subject to a $10,000 fine. How do you reconcile that?

I could build and fly around a device that meets or exceeds the size and danger presented by something Amazon might be testing, but if I do it for fun, I'm not hit with the same rules or penalties. Are you suggesting that I, as some newbie who's just figuring out how to build and fly such a thing, am inherently safer than a crew of professionals working for an engineering project? Explain!

There are amateurs who fly heavy, large-scale ducted fan model aircraft that push 200mph. The FAA isn't worried about that, from a safety perspective. But the roofing contractor with the 3-pound plastic quad copter ... scary, right? Or is the roofing guy only evil and dangerous, from your point of view, if he (gasp!) incorporates his one-man business. Eeeevil corporate drone user, using drones to deliver his service faster, by not needing to put up a tall ladder on the side of your house! Eeeeevil!

You're confused. If you want to fly RC aircraft for fun, the FAA requires no such thing. No pilot's license, private, commercial or otherwise.

Let's look at how it actually is. If you, right now, want to stand in your back yard and fly a 3-pound quadcopter to test out a new flight controller for fun and personal research/interest, you have the FAA's blessings. If an engineer from Amazon stands in exactly the same place, and hovers the exact same piece of $200 hardware exactly the same 10 feet off the ground that you do, and does it on the clock ... and he's not licensed pilot, with two assistants, with that device being certified, and him having filed a flight plan ... he's up for a $10,000 fine. If he punches out, and does exactly the same thing with exactly the same equipment following exactly the same safety protocols, none of that matters. This isn't about safety. If it was, hundreds of thousands of people flying RC for fun would be facing the same restrictions that Amazon is going to Canada to escape.