YES! UIDs three times as high as mine are now considered low! I knew this would happen one day!

... holy shit I've been on here too long.

I meant complement, of course.

Fucking almost-homophones.

Nothing could have better complimented my post somewhat upthread. Thanks. Only way it could have been better is if you'd responded directly to that one. The first paragraph in particular perfectly illustrates the insurmountable differences in both approach and level of understanding facing anyone who bothers to attempt reasoned discussion on the topic of taxation and government, especially online. The last paragraph's pretty excellent as well. I couldn't have written better.

The solution is probably either fewer two-income households/fewer single-parent households (no idea how you'd manage that), or excellent, affordable (subsidized when necessary), likely state-run day care facilities.

The latter is expensive, but not doing it is likely more expensive. Prisons aren't free, and a workforce full of dumbasses represents lost money, too.

But like most sensible policy that'd be evil socialism or something, I'm sure, so good luck making it happen here.

It's mainly difficult because it requires much greater familiarity with Greek, Latin, and Euclid than most high school graduates possess these days.

I do wonder what percentage of students studying Greek and Latin back then ever achieved the ability to read long works in either language with good comprehension and with little enough effort that it wasn't a chore, i.e. how many practiced it enough in school to use it through the rest of their lives, rather than just getting by well-enough not to look like dumbasses in class, then forgetting most of it and never using it again after graduation, as most of us (even programmers) do with the bulk of our mathematics education, for example.

Of course I'd like for government to be less wasteful. Who wouldn't? Preferring Obama to the only viable alternative doesn't mean one wants the government to spend money to little effect.

Also, the idea of Obama's having a "spell" is something you, or someone who influences your thinking, invented out of laziness.

I've seen many approaches to trying to persuade the anti-civilization, barely-understands-what-government-even-is, taxation-is-theft crowd, but I have to say, yours of simply calling this one a 3rd grader and a whiny little bitch is by far my favorite. It's something about your style—you really sell it.

I'm not kidding.

Bonus: you don't waste a bunch of time trying to bring them up to speed on 2500 years of political philosophy, the history of the last two centuries, and basic political economy.

But can anyone explain why the US Chamber of Commerce is the top money giving lobbyist, by 3x?

Uh, why wouldn't it be?

Regular

I hardly think it's controversial to assert that English grammar is less predictable and orderly than French. I'm certainly glad I didn't have to learn English as a second language.

French probably does have more rules, though, so you're right about that.

OK, that makes sense—I thought you meant that our grammar in general is simpler or more orderly, which is certainly not true.

the more regular grammar results in more predictable/compact function/keyword names

I wouldn't describe English grammar as more "regular" than French. Maybe more flexible, put it in flattering terms.

Between seeing a FedEx guy tossing one smallish Dell-labeled box after another on to the ground from hip height as he sorted them in his truck, and watching baggage handlers at the airport tossing bags a dozen feet on to a pile, I now just assume anyone paid to move my things around is going to beat the living fuck out of them, and they probably don't even care if anyone sees it.

I've found Windows' power management to be much more reliable since Vista, though of course only OSX gets it mostly right, and that's largely because Apple controls the hardware. The only time I've ever had hibernation working close to 100% reliably in Linux (so, no crashes after resume, no blank screens, and the only broken drivers were network-related and fixable with a couple rmmod/modprobes) was on an old IBM Thinkpad, and that's only because it had a feature that let you create a special HD partition and have the BIOS handle the whole thing. It wasn't a deal-breaker back when Windows was as bad or worse, but their power management's not awful any more.

That on top of a pile of other annoyances has driven me away. To be fair I've never put much effort in to shopping for Linux-friendly hardware, but then again that sort of extra work and worry is exactly the kind of thing I'd rather avoid these days unless I'm being paid to do it.

I do still like it on the server, provided someone else is supporting the hardware and guaranteeing it'll work smoothly with Linux.

Run Windows 7.

Run Linux in VirtualBox.

Never worry about getting multimedia, games, power management (say, hibernation), wireless drivers, etc. working on Linux ever again.

Bonus: you can probably just run Openbox or Windowmaker or something else light since you've got Windows to do most of the stuff you needed KDE/Gnome/XFCE for.

I've yet to see a feature it has that other scripting languages don't, that doesn't qualify as "cool for a 'gee, look what I can do' demo, but for the love of god never do that in production code that someone else will one day have to read". Worse, the culture seems to be all about these unreadable-and-dangerous-garbage-producing "features"—adding shit to instances so you have no idea what any given object might actually have on it at any given time, modifying prototypes of built-in objects (!!!!), anonymous functions everywhere all the time because fuck code organization, reuse, and sensible levels of indentation, etc.

So its benefits are, IMO, dubious, and in exchange for those features you have to put up with a pile of fundamental flaws (hoisting, the worst scope model ever, broken type detection, etc.) so bad that if you turned Javascript in for an undergraduate assignment in language design you'd get an F. The whole fucking language is one giant gotcha, but oooh prototypal objects!