You do realize that George Soros was a major anti-Communist activist against the rule of the USSR and helped former quasi-occupied Communist sstates of the Warsaw Pact, like his home country, move towards liberal market democracies.

And Bill Gates? *Bill* *Gates*? A totalitarian Communist supporter? Really? REALLY? A hedge fund trader and a technology billionaires, now because they don't agree with some of the lunatic wingnuttery are now seriously considered to be a sniff away from Trotskyite madness? And people don't recognize how totally insane that thought is? And if some of the smartest leading hedge fund and capitalist technology billionaires are going for the (comparatively) *left* party then that may mean that the right-aligned party maybe could be hurtling into insane madness?

Do you know what a Communist actually acts like and what they do and want? Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro were socialist dictators.

I have heard this.

Is there actual evidence for this? Which Tea Party members of Congress have introduced legislation or policy which significantly reduces financial profits of corporate supporters of Republican leadership?

| Personally, I believe a married gay couple should be able to grow marijuana on their property and defend it with guns. Which party is that again?

The Democratic party, of course.

Where are the the major Democratic politicians (let's say a Senator or a few Representatives) trying seriously to ban legal home-defense firearms in total?
I can't think of one.

| Progressive Christians. Socially conservative but poor and beaten people that have started to realize the filthy-rich republicans they used to vote for aren't looking out for anyone but the very very rich.

This will work when they realize the truth was: Republicans they used to vote for **weren't** looking out for anyone but the very very rich, and they should have stuck with Jimmy Carter instead of the fraud of Ronald Reagan.

When will that happen?

Sure.

Sen John Tester (MT), Rep Heath Shuler (NC), Rep Dan Boren, Rep Mike Thompson.

And by the way, the supposed "anti-gun" democrats, like Barack Obama, have advocated modest regulations.

Compare to the parallel in Republicans.

| I wonder what percentage of contemporary scientists thought Galileo and Copernicus were all wet.

Galileo? Virtually none, if you could describe people at that time as "scientists". They looked through the telescopes and saw the same Jovian moons as Galileo.

Copernicus didn't have convincing experimental evidence, but Galileo did.

And the Catholic church struck back at Galileo as he was also a harsh political critic.

| The Church Rs are exactly like the Leftest Ds.

Yes, the leftist Democrats in the late 1960's, perhaps.

States and local governments are significantly more dysfunctional and corrupt in most cases. Federal employees are much smarter than state and local employees, though frustrated by exceptionally vexatious rules.

In the CA system, (which is a great idea) there are not separate, closed party nomination elections.

There is a primary, and the top two candidates run in the general election. Therefore, if, hypothetically Democrats voted for a right-wing-nut in mass, the wing-nut and a Republican will be in the general election, not an outcome a Democrat would prefer.

In practice, when people have their actually favored candidate on the ballot and are able to vote for them, they do.

The primary purpose of the top-two election system is to change the nature of the candidates who decide to run and think they can win.

It's an approximation to ranked preference voting.

The physical infrastructure---dark fiber---is a natural monopoly, and could be supplied and owned by government.

The service itself, equipment to transport information on and off, and policies would be privately owned and maintained, and competition required.

It's little different than rails or roads which have cars and service operated by competing carriers on the same transport infrastructure.

| Why are you not using a compiler that warns about that? Some compilers even have default warning, and you
have to put a comment (or #pragma or command-line option to disable the warning) that a case statement really
should fall through.

| A shoddy cratsman blames his tools. Compiler warnings are configurable, and lint tools are your friend.

Craftsmen (the real hardware working ones) get to choose their tools and choose them with a good design. A tool which intrinsically prevents the common human problem, instead of having lighted warning stickers, is better. Should they blame their tools if they're a bad ergonomic design? Yes.

The solution was obvious---a "fallthrough" statement to designate intentional fallthrough (the rare case).

The fact that there's a compiler warning for a semantically valid situation---not a known ambiguity or undefined behavior---shows how it's a common problem.

And stuff like this "A shoddy cratsman blames his tools" is powertalk meant to inhibit rational criticism and imply superior capability of the author.

Swift will be as platform specific as C#. Theoretically not, but practically yes.

It's just the new-shiny way to access the NeXT/Cocoa API's, like C# was the same for Windows.

Swift-the-language will probably go everywhere that LLVM goes, but there won't be a significant, and full featured, standard library defined independently of the Apple/Cocoa library. Because then there would be the "Standard" way to do things and then the "Cocoa" way to do things and they wouldn't be entirely compatible.

That is bizarre. So if you see a function signature which takes an array as a parameter, you either do know that elements will be changed, or will not be changed---but only depending on potentially hidden implementation of that function?

And which things have the 'potential to modify' the length of an array? Implementation defined?

Fortran 90+ had it right. You just say for each argument whether the intent is data to go 'in' (can't change it), 'out' (set by implementation), or 'inout', values go in, and may be modified.

In more populated locales of the USA, the density of people and of money is substantially higher than many places in Sweden or Japan, which nevertheless have much superior internet service to the USA.

Is internet really awesome and inexpensive in Manhattan or San Francisco or Philadelphia? No.

Internet is really awesome in the tiny number of places which have Google Fiber.

powertalk, not fact talk