Well, yes. That's what things like Chicktech are - experiments. We don't know everything that's going on.

Compensating for a less-than-ideal past is worthwhile in many cases. The only people currently without a past aren't going to hit the technical workforce an any numbers for twenty years now.

It's well armed, and by APC standards well armored. That doesn't count as heavily armored. It's a gimme to any reasonable AT weapon.

And, yes, I think my irony detector was on the fritz yesterday.

Yup, I'm talking personal computers here. However, I remember the Amiga as being out of my price range while a Mac was pretty much at the top of what I was willing to pay. Did it come down later, after I was already pretty well committed to the Mac?

From your description, I think you're better at hand-crafted assembly than most people. I suspect it would take a lot of time and work for me to get that good. Really good humans are likely to beat optimizing compilers. However, optimizing compilers have improved, and that narrows the gap between what a compiler can do and what a really good human can do. Even if CPUs hadn't improved, that would make assembly less necessary in many places.

Thanks for the reference, but it's paywalled. I may make a note of it and hunt it down sometime.

OK, didn't mean to pick on you unjustly. However, what we know to be true is in very close agreement with what we observe in very many areas. If somebody wants to change that, they have to provide good explanations as to how their theory explains things pretty much as well as current theories, and at the very least a way to distinguish the theories using experiment and observation. I'm not a physicist, but I saw people blast string theory as being untestable.

I closely monitored the education of one particular child from kindergarten through twelfth grade in the local public school system. While there were problems, it was overall a very good education, leaving him well prepared for rigorous college work. This wasn't a carefully picked public school system either; it's in one of the center cities of a metropolitan area, and was basically where I lived (although the school district supplied buses to get to a high school further away in the district, since the high schools had different programs and everybody could apply for the program they thought served their child best).

Except that I didn't need to describe that, did I, since all involved schools were and are in the US, and there is a US educational system of pretty much uniform quality?

Actually, the Japanese didn't compose a declaration of war until after the Pearl Harbor attack. The message you refer to was long, mendacious, and thoroughly inflammatory, and it sure looked like it should end with a declaration of war. In actual fact, it was a breakoff of negotiations.

I'm actually not certain a declaration of war is legal any more under the UN. In any case, a declaration is not necessary for a war. In WWII, Germany was not at war only with the US, and I'm pretty sure that (a) Germany declared war only on the US, and (b) the French, Poles, Russians, British, etc., thought it was a war.

Nationalism and its religious equivalent are similar, and in several historical religious wars the religion was simply masking nationalism.

If that's mandated, then the government has to shut down power companies that don't hit the mandated level, or at least plants, creating electricity shortages. On the other hand, no company that was under that level would have incentive to improve. Some sort of tax allows the market system to work, creating incentives to lower CO2 emissions in all companies and making sure companies can continue to deliver power.

In some cases the improvements will be more expensive than paying the tax, and in some cases it won't be. This is why we need some sort of carbon credit trade, to allow the market to sort out who improves what.

Apple actually screwed up with the Apple II (or one of the typographic variations), holding it back to preventing it from competing with the Apple III. Remember all the people using the III? How it was popular and sold well? Me neither. I think they learned from that. (Source: an issue of Byte from way back.)

iOS is not going to kill off the Mac, although it's definitely influencing MacOSX. Apple is smart enough to realize that people want their desktops to work slightly different from their phones.

MacOS was designed to run on a rather small range of hardware, although it was opening up in 1988. If licensed like DOS, it would have every bit as many compatibility problems.

Moreover, in 1988 it took some pretty upscale hardware to run it properly. (Anybody remember the Epson QX-10, a little earlier, which had essentially a Mac-type UI with a lot less horsepower? I didn't think so.) It also didn't run a great many applications. What we'd be looking at is something like the Tandy 2000, which was a more powerful version of the IBM PC with a color display that didn't hurt my eyes. It wasn't actually PC-compatible, but Tandy got a lot of software vendors to write versions for it. It was pushed in Radio Shack computer stores all over the country. Considering what happened to it, I just don't see Apple doing a whole lot better.

In what way does that matter for the purposes of the IRS, or of people investigating money laundering? The IRS wants to know your income, and doesn't really care if you got it through a bank, in small unmarked bills, BitCoins, or whatever.