According to Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel, that is most likely a consequence of Native Americans not having access to any arable staple crops. Once the option to grow corn for food became available, the Native Americans began settling down into cities. Unfortunately for the Native Americans the difficulty in acquiring a staple crop left them thousands of years behind the Europeans in their development and the subsequent exposure to European Germs wiped out the Native American cities. Somewhere around 95% of the city dwellers were wiped out during the initial contact with Europeans.

So that means that Native Americans had already discovered "economic development" when Europeans arrived, but the vast majority of those practising it were killed by simultaneous epidemics of smallpox, typhus, measles, influenza, bubonic plague, cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, mumps, yellow fever, and pertussis all introduced (at about the same time) to North America by Europeans.

I usually buy direct in store. Shipping time zero. Prices have adjusted, at least around here, so that in-store prices aren't much different from the online ones.

Typically I'm browsing at a book store on the way home from work, and discover a book I might like. I could order it and get it a few days later, or walk out the store, book in hand. I'm an adult, with disposable income, so a hundred yen or two price difference doesn't matter to me. Being able to get the book right then does. Amazon is great for finding out what other people think about the book before I buy it.

Another example was my used oscilloscope. Buying second-hand things online is a gamble, and returning it is a major pain (get a cardboard box, arrange for the return and get and fill in a return label, be home to do the delivery). I went to a local shop instead. They hooked it up right in the shop to make sure it worked and to show me the basics of using it. And had there been a problem they would have come by in a car to pick it up directly. Much better. But Amazon did tell me which of the available models were better for me.

I'm happy to see improvements in the review system. I rarely buy anything from Amazon (shipping takes time, returns are a hassle), but I often use their pages to check reviews and compare items before I buy them.

Selling an unlimited service and then limiting it is fraud. People should go to jail for that. Requiring vendors to tell the truth about their product and adhere to their product claims in not an unreasonable intrusion into their cost structures.

True, but the problem is employers define jobs in terms of tool use. You can be good at JavaScript and happy manipulating the DOM to your heart's content, but if you don't have node.js or some other library/API on your resume' they won't look at you.

To give an idea of how bizarre it has gotten, I'm seeing a ridiculous number of job ads for senior software positions that list "git and GitHub" as either requirements or nice-to-haves. To me that's like asking for the ability to use a pencil and paper in an engineering design position. Anyone remotely qualified will have said experience, or be able to come up to speed on it in a day or three. It's like HR just has to make that list of tools as long as humanly possible.

Take anyone who has used Mercurial or any other modern distributed source control system and sit 'em in front of git and they'll be fine within a very short time. Take anyone who has used Eclipse and sit 'em in front of Visual (or vice versa) and they'll be able to do the job adequately almost immediately. They won't know all the stupid Visual tricks that someone who has used it since 6.0 days knows, but so what?

And if a person is not capable of that, you've made a bad hire, because technology and tools change all the time, and if the can't adapt to your toolset they won't be able to adapt to the future. So there is absolutely no loss to a company in hiring someone unfamiliar with their specific tooling. There might even be a gain, because if they fail to adapt they can be let go painlessly while still on probation.

So long as companies continue to use toolprint matching for hiring, schools will focus on teaching the tool-du-jour.

>just to accommodate those who want to carry on their luggage

I don't want to carry on luggage. I want to avoid baggage claim, not lose my bag and skip the line at check in. Carrying on is just means, not the motivation.

Or we could write programs, compile them and let users run them on their computer.

If you're using normal numbers. Any self respecting field is closed over its operators, including division.

It works in the physical world. Don't be so dismissive.

That's why I never use floating point. It's a mess. It's impossible to achieve a uniform random distribution of floats. The space isn't uniform.
Fixed point is nice, as long as you have an idea of how big your numbers will be.

Yup.

Graph y=0/x as x -> 0 from both sides. It's a straight line (y=0) heading for (0,0).
Graph y=x/x as x -> 0 from both sides. It's a straight (y=1) line heading for (0,1).

At x=0, it could be either of those answers, or anything else. No one answer is correct.
 

Can you explain why you think the government should not be representative of the combined will of the voters?

Potentially, but that doesn't mean that's actually the proper reaction.

I'm am genuinely under the impression that they weren't, feel free to prove me wrong, but all of the credible commentary and discussion I've heard from experts on the topic indicate that Harper is running the most dictatorial and partisan government in living memory. Additionally, Stephen Harper is infamous for his micro-managing, his stage managed appearances and his defiance of the experts on virtually every topic. It's why this conservative government is just 2 for 45 on court challenges to their laws and has picked fights with just about every group that's not a conservative lobby group (and some that are).

Personally, I think you're using a false generalisation to dismiss valid criticism of Harper.

It seems like the problem with people like you is that you can't even imagine there being anything between two polarizing options. Either someone acts like a dictator or they do not. Is there no room for someone who only acts like a dictator some of the time? And shouldn't we prefer a politician who, when elected, spends as little time acting the dictator as possible?

I had high hopes for Harper when he was chosen to lead the Alliance party back in the day, but he's disappointed me at every turn since then.

Because it's a betrayal of the principles she claimed to stand for, in more ways than one. One of Ayn Rand's positions was that the government shouldn't be looking after anyone because people who can't care for themselves and who don't have friends who are both rich enough and care enough to support them are useless parasites who don't actually deserve to live. Yet when she found herself in the exact same position where she dismissed others as not worthy of life, she chose to sacrifice her principles and live a bit longer.

It's not only the betrayal of her own principles that is at issue here, it's also her failure, with access to opportunities that many Americans never had, to plan for her own future to the extent where she wouldn't have needed government assistance. If Ayn Rand, who had the motive, the means and the opportunity to care for herself on her own dime was not able to do so, then why should we expect everyone else (including those who lack the means the opportunities) to do what she could not do? Why should we accept the Rand libertarian’s view that those who find themselves in the exact same situation as Ayn Rand should be dismissed as "takers" or "parasites"?

The point is popular, because it is a textbook example of an ironic fate, though people may not recognize that that is why this fact about Ayn Rand final years provides so much amusement.

I too was puzzled by how I muddled up preemption with instruction restart for paging or virtual memory. I wasn't even drunk.