Mine is similar; however, I've come to the conclusion that it's not the language itself, it is the use of incredibly inefficient building blocks from elsewhere. If you don't do that, you can do pretty well in c++. Personally, I have little use for most c++ idioms; what OO I find useful is generally better handled directly.

So called 'positive rights' are entitlements that require that governments strips rights from some people in order to provide those 'free' entitlements to others.

Agreed. However, this not a bad thing in and of itself. By stripping you of the right to arbitrarily murder me, they give me the right to not be arbitrarily murdered. And vice-versa. I call that a complete win.

In the case of what many like to stuff in the same bag as "entitlements", the rights being stripped are fractional portions of income, and the rights being enabled are, quite often, the difference between life and death or suffering and no suffering, or disease transmission and no disease transmission. I tend to regard those entitlements as entirely worth my loss of right to my income. Others do not share my interest in the general well-being of the public. Debate ensues.

It is not always clear that such rights-trading by force as government fiat is inherently bad. Some rights-trading is no doubt bad.

For instance, part of my right to my income is being traded for bombing and otherwise harming foreigners for the sole purpose of subsidizing the MIC (extend their right to a cushy income), and I am dubious that an adequate defense could be made for this kind of thing.

Net Neutrality is an entitlement, where people are trying to use force of government to strip rights from individual ISPs to shape their traffic on their networks the way they see fit.

When an operation - electricity, communications, water supply, networks - consumes some portion of an inherently limited domain, and that operation is critical to the good fortunes of the public, then we may need to regulate what those given the opportunity to provide services in said limited spaces can do.

The FCC regulates how wide and splattery a transmitted signal can be. This is an appropriate act of guarding the use of a privileged, limited resource for the benefit of the public, though it inherently limits the rights of the transmitting party. The PUC regulates prices charged for fuel. This is an appropriate act of guarding a limited, privileged resource for the benefit of the public, though is inherently limits the rights of the fuel provider. And so on.

This is what makes the debate legitimate, and the potential application of limits / restrictions legitimate. Bandwidth providers are players in such a limited space. If they want to do something where they are not critical to the public good, and therefore responsible for the public good, and therefore held to limits designed to address the public good, then they should be in another business.

Yes, I do. Because we have no such evidence; we can't make the measurements it would take to get said evidence.

You are confusing assumption with evidence. They are not the same.

There are two types of efficiency here.

The first is up front design efficiency. The time it takes to develop the code. This could be impacted by a combination of a poor c/c++ programmer and a decision to use it. You pay for this loss of efficiency once, if indeed it is a loss (likely it would not be much or any of a loss if the c/c++ programmer is competent.)

The second is execution efficiency, that cost that is paid every time someone uses the facility. Here, using c/c++ can (should, again with a competent programmer) provide a much faster response time with all the benefits that accrue from that, and these benefits will be gained again and again, every time someone uses the facility. As compared to, for instance, Perl or Python.

You can consider client-side execution, but if you choose to use it, you're locking out many potential visitors who will not be able to use your pages. There are huge numbers of devices out there that are old and/or small, and they simply don't do client-side stuff. Even knowing your site is targeting "only" owners of, say, IE, doesn't justify such a choice; because in the real world, people won't always have IE in their pocket. If someone can't browse your site at lunch with whatever is in their pocket, the odds of them coming back later -- much less buying / participating now -- drop precipitously.

Part of the job is to determine what kind of traffic could be encountered, while knowing the capacity of the hardware you have available, and then figuring out which efficiency you're better of going after.

If your web site serves one person in the organization, and they only check in once a day, then if Python is fast enough on your desk, its fast enough on their desk, too, at least if it doesn't impact the site's ability to do its other tasks, like serving WAN customers. But if your thing is WAN facing, and could potentially see any number of customers up to the max the server can handle, then you'd best consider execution time efficiency before you consider up-front development time efficiency (and again, if you hire a competent c/c++ programmer, there probably won't be a huge difference. Even less if they have already done this for you once or twice.

Make your websites a PDF file.

What you're doing here is making sure that a whole raft of smaller/older devices won't be able to display your pages. Which is exactly the same thing as intentionally reducing the customer base of your client.

You want PDF printables? Put a link to a static PDF version on any HTML web page the user might actually WANT in PDF form. HTML pages should be in either HTML, HTML+CSS, HTML+CGI, or HTML+CSS+CGI. HTML and HTML+CGI produce the best quality -- most usable -- pages. Use of *any* other technology cuts off some number of smaller and/or older clients at the knees, but of those technologies, pure front-facing PDF would be difficult to beat for complete failure of a website to show up for the person trying to look at it.

If you think an indication of when someone joined slashdot (/. UID) gives you a reliable insight into how old they are, or how long they've been doing technical work, or what technical work they can do, you are one thoroughly deluded human being.

Nah, I just bought one from Dyson. Works great!

The energy of the vacuum HERE would be decreasing over time,

You can't assume that everything everywhere behaves the same. You can't assume that energy drawn from one location will show up as a deficit in another (you find running water in the street's gutter... you learn Joe's pool is draining. Assuming Mark's pool is also draining doesn't follow.) You can't measure anywhere but (very) locally, which also means you can only measure data very near temporally -- and so you really have no bloody idea what is going on without resting your conclusion on assumptions made entirely free of supporting data.

What you're claiming is equivalent to saying you know exactly what's going on on a planet orbiting some star in Andromeda because you've done some observations as to what is going on here. Evidence is utterly insufficient to your claim.

You're assuming that they already know that you have the keys. If they don't know that, then demanding that you open the cabinet amounts to a call for self-incrimination—not because of the contents per se, but because it would show that you had access to the contents. (Perhaps you received a locked cabinet with no key, and have no idea what may be inside.)

Similarly, if they haven't already shown that you have access to the social media account in question, then simply revealing that you know the password would be self-incrimination. Perhaps someone else set up the account in an attempt to frame you.

It might be simulated turtles all the way down.

It's virtual turtles, you insensitive clod!

If they know that an account was used for cyber-bullying, but don't know for sure that it was you using the account, revealing that you know the password would already be self-incrimination. You don't need to make up a convoluted password in order to plead the 5th.

Because empty space is full of particles

No, see, by definition, that's non-empty space. Empty space is... empty.

Timezones exist because the world is curved around the axis of rotation, meaning that the angle to the Sun varies according to one's longitude. If the world were flat, but still rotating so as to allow for day and night, then the Sun would be at (very nearly) the same angle to the ground everywhere, and thus the time should be the same everywhere.

Unless there are people living on the back of the plane, that is, in which case there would be two diametrically opposed timezones rather than the continuous variation you get with a sphere or cylinder.

I am pretty certain that calculations of the vacuum energy do not depend on the size of the universe.

I am pretty certain the idea's never been tested. And may not even be testable. So you might want to adjust your confidence level a bit. At least until we can go everywhere and measure everything. Breath-holding doesn't seem to be called for.

How can we definitively tell if the vacuum over there has the same energy density as the vacuum over here?

Further, how can we tell if the energy we think we find in vacuum here isn't energy that arises from particulate contamination? Or, for that matter (ha) is coming from somewhere else? Has someone managed to (a) create a perfect vacuum and (b) measure its energy and (c) determine that whatever was measured as appearing at X, definitely hadn't disappeared from all the possible Ys? Somehow, I doubt it. If for no other reason than our access to some of the other Y (say, around Andromeda) is... limited. As well as non-contemporaneous -- if something disappeared from that region, to appear here, we wouldn't have any indication it had happened for about 2.5 million years. And even then, our ability to measure vacuum precisely at that distance... not so good.

My (admittedly not very deep) understanding of vacuum is that it is defined by a lack of content, and that a perfect vacuum would be defined by a perfect lack of content -- and were that simplistic idea correct, then I don't see why how much perfect vacuum there is has any bearing at all upon the total amount of energy.

And, if vacuum is indeed empty when perfect, but we think there is energy detected in what we consider a perfect vacuum, then perhaps we're simply misinterpreting the goings-on within an imperfect vacuum. Perhaps there is more to get rid of than the molecules and particles we know of at present.

Or, perhaps space is infinite and at least somewhat plastic to start with, and our situation (going with the idea that the space we can observe seems to be expanding) is more like adding a thimble of water to a planetary ocean (let the ocean conceptually be infinite for the sake of an example.) Perhaps space over there is contracting, while space over here is expanding.

My own position is that any cosmological proposal that includes the phrase "arose from nothing" or similar is probably better filed under astrology until actual evidence is found of the idea -- not possible precursors or echos, but an actual example of what is being described. We seem to be pretty clear on the idea that matter and energy are essentially interchangeable, and we have no experimental data that proves stuff arises from non-stuff, so at least at this point, I see no reason to take an assertion of "arose from nothing" seriously.