I don't know how you can say this when the primary language for dynamic sites run by Apache is PHP, which is mountains of shit worse than C#.

I wasn't happy with Bush, but I found some of the liberal hatred for him to be extreme and more than a bit distasteful. I'm also really unhappy with Obama's compromises with Obamacare (which could have been a great savior for healthcare in this country and may now be the opposite) and his willingness to continue to expand drone strikes and spying. However, I don't see him or Bush for the matter as maniacal dictators bent on destroying this country. I see them as victims of a system that has become too powerful and too interested in things that either don't matter for the little guy or are actively harmful to the little guy. And I must recognize the good that's been done in any case. It's easy to see the world as a shithole and to hate everything. It's harder to recognize good and good enough in grayish mess we live in.

Who needs facts when we can engage in massive hyperbole? Obama's nothing special. He ain't great. He's failed to change things that needed to change since Bush. A lot of the stuff you're complaining about is simply a continuation of existing policies or slight expansion. I'm not happy about it, but let's not pretend that he's some sort of Hitler, seizing power and single-handedly changing the shape and function of our government. Hardly. Get over yourself.

He hasn't been great, but he has done many of the things he said he would: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/

Same situation here in NC. We have a free local paper called the Independent Weekly. It's definitely liberal (perhaps leftist), but they do investigative journalism and are always happy to expose problems in local and state governments. They also have a lot of information about local events and music, including useful reviews by real people with real opinions. There are ads, of course, but it's actually better than the for-pay papers.

I think you underestimate how pervasive government, local, state and federal, is in most people's lives. You also underestimate how dependent we are on the corporate system we have, which is itself very dependent on the government. As I said before, this is not like centuries past where people were more or less self-sufficient on farmsteads and would be little affected by changes in government. Consider our credit card processing network, or the internet itself, mostly maintained by big oligopolies heavily involved in government. The power grid? Same way. Any disruption to those systems would have massive economic consequences, consequences that would affect people in the cities and suburbs, which is the majority of the US population.

I'm not rich, but I think I'd be pretty fucked if the US government collapsed or was overrun by a foreign power. Maybe the bottommost rungs of society would be "fine" in that they aren't currently "fine" so they'd likely be no worse off. There are a lot of people, though, who aren't on the bottommost rungs of society who benefit directly or indirectly from the stability that a republic offers.

In ancient days, you'd be right. Outside of the raping and pillaging, it often mattered little who titled themselves king or nobleman. They were some far off "power" who asked for taxes and military services from time to time, but otherwise were of no concern in day to day life. The modern world is much more interconnected, and dependent on a stable civil structure to function, for better or worse.

You are really giving short-shrift to new programs. Yes, there's some fluff and junk, I won't deny it. But I think some of the things that modern IDEs do (and plugins like ReSharper) are very very useful, but also fairly resource intensive. You can code without them, but it makes life a lot more pleasant. Likewise, although I could get real work done in assembly, I'd prefer to use a high-level language.

Also those old programs did a lot less than many of our new programs. People often forget that when complaining about performance.

That's not to say, of course, that modern programs couldn't be written more efficiently. Because of Moore's Law and other considerations, we have moved away from spending a lot of time on performance and efficiency.

As a noun, "affect" means emotional state (more or less). As a noun, "effect" means result of an action. As verbs, only "affect" and "effect" have a clear semantic relationship, with the verb referring to the action and the noun referring to the result.

I thought that was my point? It seemed that you were trying to argue that the input was actually different.

Again, the article says that they used the same input. This can be verified with a simple diff. Same input leading to different results means that some other input (that is, the circuitry of the CPU or software libraries) have to be at fault, unless you want to start to argue that computer hardware is non-deterministic. Then you've opened an entirely different can of worms that your error margin system will do little or nothing to address.

Alright, alright, I'll get off your lawn.

Which native state would that be? They're always moving, reshaping and disappearing.

Well, since neither of the things you mentioned is true, there's no point in any further discussion. If that were the case, and somehow Facebook was involved in all of this, then you might have some sort of point, though in that case, the blame would rest on the government and not Facebook.