Perhaps you need to define what you mean by "more general purpose". I tend to consider C the most general purpose of languages, because it *isn't* specialized to some task. It's true that , e.g., FoxPro was better at interfacing to the FoxPro database, but that's NOT being general purpose, that's being special purpose.

OTOH (to get back on thread) I don't consider C a very secure language BECAUSE it is lacking in specializations. This means you need to keep creating, e.g., hash tables from scratch, and every time you do it you are likely to introduce an error.

Ada is in an in-between state. It's very secure against some types of errors. The facility for defining specific types is a particular instance. If one defines a meters type, then one cannot store an inches type into it...unless one uses a numeric literal, because one needs to allow instances to be created from numeric litrals. OTOH, this very security introduces verbosity, and verbosity is a common entry point for errors. (I used the meters/inches example because of the nortorious example of the space probe where that was misused. Ada did NOT save the day. And the reason that it didn't was because doing things properly would have been too verbose.)

In principle, every "Turing complete" language is as general purpose as every other. Practical considerations are the distinction between them. If you're doing database programming, then you are less likely to make mistakes if you use a language that contains extensions specialized to make database use easier. (I barely count embedded SQL, because while SQL is reasonably great for manipulaitng databases, it's lousy at interfacing to programming languages. Everything either needs to be converted into a string, or a blob, and blobs are clumsy to handle.) But note that these "databse extensions" are specializations away from "general purpose".

The majority of people in the UK who work for an employer (rather than self-employed), and don't have other income to declare (e.g. part time self-employed in their own hobby business, renting out a property, or rich enough to be generating significant income from investments or savings) don't fill in tax returns, it is managed by their employer through Pay-As-You-Earn. As wikipedia says "because the tax code reflects other income (including the state pension), the PAYE system typically results in the correct amount of tax being paid on all the income of a taxpayer, making a tax return redundant".

Let the flamewar begin :-)

Those who use the bicycle hire scheme in London, which is a subset of all people. But I agree with you, it's very interesting that the data's public. It might not be a violation of privacy if you've agreed to it when you hire the bike though? Never hired one of those bikes myself so I am not sure what you've agreed to when you click on "ok".

OpenBSD?

I don't think that's the answer this time. This time it appears that only one adequate proposal was received.

This doesn't mean that just any proposal that mentions the magic words should get the nod. This seems to be a case where only ONE adequate project was proposed.

No, that was McCain and Palin. If people has seen a better choice they might have gone with it.

FWIW, I may have voted for Obama, I can't recall, but if so it was only as the lesser of two evils. He probably was that. This isn't much as praise, but it's the best I've got in stock.

If that was a joke, possible, it was a rather poor one. I think it was probably also tasteless, but as I can't identify where the joke lies, I'm not certain.

You don't need a specific law for it to be regulation of the market. Yes, it's fraud. But if you want an unregulated market, you want one in which fraud is permissible.

P.S.: Adam Smith appeared to believe that a free market implied that there would be sufficiently good information about rival goods to enable a potential customer to evaluate which was better, and probably even whether any of them were desireable. This, however, can only be (partially) achieved in a regulated market.

Please Note: That can you bought which say it contains 3 servings and 0 grams of sodium per serving may well contian more sodium that some heart patients could safely consume. And it may be more common for one person to consume the entire can at one time than for it to be divied into 3 separate servings (for either separate people or separate episodes of consumption).

Actually, a free market would be an unregulated market, were such a thing to exist. This doesn't make it desireable, and, in fact, no such thing has ever existed. The closest that I can think of are various blackmarkets, where all sorts of competition are allowed, including killing off the competition. Those are still officially regulated, but in practice are frequently only minimally regulated. (Killing off you competitors will often lead to a serious investigation by the police.)

N.B.: All laws against deceptive marketing or mislabeling of what you are vending are infringements on the free market, as are any regulations against killing your custiomers.

The really amazing thing is that people think a free market is desireable. This is because they are usually only considering certain degrees of freedom. (Which ones tend to vary in an unexpressed way between individual proponents.)

HOWEVER: Once you accept that the market will not be free, you run smack up against "Who will watch the watchmen?". Regulatory capture is so frequent that to ignore it is foolish, but no currently used approach has proven effective in the long term.

You missed on education. Cuirrently at least some schools require that the students have internet access to get assignments. Possibly for other reasons, I don't have a kid in school now, but a friend does, and here daughter is required to get her school assignments over the internet. Actually over the javascript web. I didn't ask whether Flash was required.

High frequency trading isn't the issue. The banks are the real "insiders", and are pointing fingers at small, high frequency prop shops to deflect attention from themselves, and to get back to the bad old days when they could really gouge their customers with wide spreads.

High frequency traders make their money by having better pricing models, narrowing spreads in the market, and being able to execute and then get out of a position quickly to lock in their profits and eliminate risk. The banks like to be the middleman, with wide spreads, so that they can pocket the difference.

The net result of high frequency traders is that the rest of us can get a stock much closer to their actual value (due to narrow spreads). Yes, the high freqency traders make good money by selling the stock $0.005 off the "real" value to me and then immediately getting out of the position by reselling it a millisecond later and locking in that $0.005 profit, but I have only paid a premium of $0.005 instad of the $0.35 or worse the banks would love to gouge me for (and used to, a few short years ago).

We get rid of high freqency trading and we'll be back to the bad old days, when the real insiders really did gouge us, and we all paid far too much for our investments, and were able to sell at far too little, with the likes of Goldman Sachs pocketing the enormous difference.

As for the front-running nonsense on 60 Minutes, that's always been illegal (contrary to what we're being told), and it is not at all how high frequency trading works. If someone was in fact doing that, then they're in a whole world of hurt with the SEC (and rightly so), but this entire exercise appears much more like a distraction: blame small outsider firms who've made the marketplace more effecient and tightened spreads for problems created by corruption within the big banks, and hope no one notices...at least until the next bank-induced crash.

You are making assumptions about their goals.

The US legal system derives from the British which, since the Magna Charta, has been about ensuring that nobody who is powerful enough to overthrow the government wouldn't lose more than they would gain by doing so. So the courts attempt to provide a veneer of justice while actually finding in favor of those with the most power, including wealth as a form of power. They don't always do that, but that's always the way to bet. The problem is you don't always know all the players.

Please note: I believe that the Civil Rights movement was fostered by the Dixiecrats repeatedly flouting the desires of the Democratic party, and voting with the Republicans. That's not the way it looked on the ground, and there were easy justifications based around equity, and popular mores, but those had been ignored for nearly a century. OTOH, another factor was a bulge in the population in the early 20's, when people tend to act more idealistically and without fully counting costs. So it's not all for one reason.

Well, passing the Turing test may be further away than I suggested, after all, many people have failed the Turing test.

The thing about corporations is that the same people can be the corporate officers of more than one corporation...and if I understand correctly, a corporation is enough of a person to be one of those officers. So the AI could go "sponsor shopping".

Given our conservative legislative system, I don't see AIs being given personhood through special legislation within the current century, but getting it by being a corporation seems already possible. And If I've got my legal theories correct (dubious) once you get three AIs, they can elect each other to be their own corporate officers, so you have something vaguely resembling a "bottom-up family" where you CAN choose your relatives.

If I understand recent studies on the placebo effect correctly, you don't need to deceive your customers (though that may make it more effective).