Not just companies. The political network overseen by the Koch brothers is getting ready to spend $900 Million on the 2016 elections.

"on board" ... "in bed" - whatever. Wear a condom Congress-critters and feel lucky. Most of "we the people" have to wear two when taking it from - I mean "dealing with" - Comcast.

I always thought Pascal was better for most purposes than C and its offspring.

Ok, has anyone ever written an OS kernel in Pascal? How about bare-metal code which tweaks registers?

Canadians are generally very nice, polite and reasonable, so I imagine we could simply ask them ... w/o the mess of actually invading.

Bugging individual suspects is not ethically worse than pervasive mass surveillance of the population as a whole. The former may or may not be unethical, depending on the circumstances, the latter is always immoral and dangerous to democracy.

Nope, Beta was not far, far superior. You're totally forgetting that Betas could only store 1 hour of video. (They later fixed this, but by then it was far too late.) Who wants to change tapes in the middle of a movie? VHS tapes could store a whole 2-hour movie, so they easily took over. Not having Sony's stupid licensing costs helped too. And by the time Beta was on the way out, VHS had caught up to it video-quality-wise too.

None of that matters... The fact is, a thousand of these crimes are committed every day, how many of them have international arrest warrants with all the money spent on them that this one has?

The sheer effort put forth is beyond nuts... the whole thing stinks...

But there are a number of times where explicit copy/paste is much nicer.

I don't know what DE you're using, but in KDE, both modes work, and they go into different buffers. So if you feel the need to do the explicit copy/paste with Ctrl-C/V, it works fine, and you can even highlight something else afterwards, then paste the two separately with middle-click and Ctrl-V.

No, having one buffer is not better in any way. It's stupid in fact. Better is KDE's Klipper, which keeps a history for this buffer and lets me choose things I previously highlighted or copied.

Yes. For people who use real computers, middle button = "paste selected text".

Yep, that's exactly what I use it for too. I make very frequent use of this function.

However, I have no problem just pressing on my mouse's scroll wheel to do this. I'm using a Dell laser mouse I picked up on Ebay for $6 and it works just fine this way. My previous Logitech G5 worked fine this way too (unfortunately I had to stop using it because the laser part stopped working for some reason).

IMO, the *real* reason for commercial licenses was the concept that commercial drivers are driving much larger vehicles that require special training/skills to operate safely on the roadways. (Your average licensed driver can't just hop into an 18-wheeler and operate it.

Exactly. That's the same reason people should be required to have commercial licenses to drive pickup trucks. They're much larger vehicles than regular cars, and need more training to drive properly. From what I've seen of most pickup truck drivers, they obviously lack the necessary training and skills for driving 6000-pound vehicles, especially ones with dual rear wheels.

A vehicle anyone buys at a regular car dealership and uses as a "daily driver" for things like commuting or trips to the grocery store should NOT require a commercial license.

Yes, it should, if it's a large vehicle. If someone buys a Kenworth and uses it for grocery runs, should they not be required to get a commercial license? It's no different for a Hummer. If you want a vehicle for getting groceries and commuting, get a 4-door sedan like everyone else.

This is an idiotic comment.

C, C++, and PHP are still very popular languages. Perl is not; it's largely faded away except for a few niches, for various reasons, and has been replaced mostly by Python.

Pascal has been mostly dead for a long time. However Python (which you obviously favor as "clean") is hugely popular these days, and Java is still holding its own in the enterprise space.

Obviously, your opinion of what is "ugly and unreadable" or "clean" has absolutely nothing to do with which languages are popular.

People gave up on Pascal and moved to C++ back then for a reason. Now you're asking people to go back to something which was abandoned in the past, for presumably good reasons. You need to have a **really** good reason for this, instead of just moving to a more modern language.

My university actually taught/used Pascal in the classroom in the early/mid 1980s and I graded programs written in it. Kernighan's criticisms of Pascal on BSD are spot on - I know, I tried using it for a (more) serious project. The semester project for my Operating Systems class was to simulate an interactive operating system - in Pascal.

The system used for the class was the University's IBM 4381 mainframe running MUSIC ("McGill University System for Interactive Computing") and the version of Pascal had *lots* of libraries and features.

I was a undergraduate research assistant (working on an AI project, funded by NASA, in LISP and Prolog) and had an account on the VAX-785 running 4.3BSD and wanted to use *that* (on my schedule) instead of standing in line to use the IBM. My instructor said "sure", but I'd have to port the support libraries he wrote for the assignment. Unfortunately, the version of Pascal on BSD was just the basic language - as specified in the Language Definition book by Jensen and Wirth. Porting the code from the "richer" version of Pascal on the IBM/MUSIC to the "basic" version on VAX/BSD was simply not possible.

So, I asked my instructor if I could, instead, do the semester project in C. He said "sure", but, again, I'd have to port his libraries from Pascal to C. Now... I didn't know C at the time, but porting his code to it and doing my semester project in it was a great introduction - and I passed the class. All-in-all, this experience help me out immensely with my CS career as I do a LOT of cross-platform work in many programming languages - though not Pascal :-)

I'm 51 and created (parked) an account in 2012 and have one tweet posted from April 2014 -- after they changed the site style/layout and started nagging people with a sample "first tweet" for those w/o any tweets. It says: "Shut up Twitter; I'll tweet when I want to."

Sometimes, I post a tweet or two, but usually delete them after a while once any current relevance passes. Ya, that's not how you're suppose to use it, but so what. If you're not promoting something and/or yourself, Twitter is just a pointless waste of time - like all the rest of the social media sites.