No, I don't consider it worthy of note unless a lot of people give a shit.

I have a Titan running SOKP.

So, you call it an ivory tower when it's intellectual, what do you call it when it's just a tower made of stacked-up money? The reason why "global business leaders" don't know about technology is that they are completely divorced from the daily life that normal humans live. They don't have to know shit, so they don't know shit. Then they want to tell us all about how to be successful. We're always having to endure quotes from Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, who both were born with silver spoons in their mouths, about how we can supposedly be successful — but they actually have no idea how to become successful, because they were born into positions of privilege. We should not give one tenth of one very small shit about what they think about becoming successful, because they never did.

What you don't seem to realize is that this is the equivalent of that for connecting your smartphone to your car. If only you knew anything about the subject at hand, like about cars or automotive infotainment, you would know that these are technologies for interfacing to your phone while in your car — and that these are both major standards. That means that virtually all smartphone owners will be able to use the interface in the car, designed for automotive use, instead of the interface on their phone which isn't.

Hahahaha

What we did in Iraq was separate peacefully coexisting communities of the people you're talking about. We deliberately set social progress back a hundred years there. What you think we need to do is literally the opposite of our government's intent.

Obama has been consistent, at least since taking office. Before taking office, he spoke out against mass data collection. But ever since taking office, he has consistently stated that we require this data collection to be safe. We have met the enemy, and he is us. And that very much includes Obama.

Obama has been consistent in calling for more surveillance of Americans. Sometimes he says there's more need to be sure that we're doing it properly, but he doesn't ever say we need to do less of it.

How about it? Literally the only thing of note I can think of which requires it is Skype.

Hell, I just updated my Titan to a new SOKP based on 5.1, and I had to manually set my proxy settings... which are per-connection, so I will have to set them all over again if I roam.

And we're doing it in a way that brings us right back to the era of mainframes. Although far more advanced, the model is highly similar to that of the IBM mainframe systems whose semi-smart terminals understood form fields and submission.

By spending half or more of their income on their mortgage, and by having a co-signer and a down payment. It's not rocket surgery, it's just dealing with the evil, evil banks. The banks are sitting on something like three houses for every homeless man, woman, and child in America, refusing to drop their prices to market level.

Share your wealth or they will share their poverty.

The more money people have, the less they tend to do for the poor. If it worked the other way around, you wouldn't be whinging now.

It's a shame the middle class won't band together and come after the rich, but those poor idiot fucks won't realize that they have a better chance to win the lottery than to actually work their way into the upper echelons of society. They still think they're going to be the ones looking down their noses at someone else someday.

That depends on where it is and if it's a family or just a person. Just a person in the boonies making $70k is doing great. A family literally anywhere (even someplace totally shit) in the Bay Area living on $70k? They're scraping by, because over half of that is likely to go to rent or mortgage, when conventional wisdom says not to spend more than a quarter.

1) Give this battle up now. The industry has moved on into the world of cutesy names long since, and you have no chance to win. Infotainment is the official, accepted term.
2) Better infotainment systems means less fucking around with the gadgets, because the systems make it easier.

These career govt employees feed info to the pres, make recommendations, and fight for their interests. Even if a new pres wants to turn on a dime, Washington DC is a large ship that turns slowly.

Bingo. The old UK comedy "Yes Prime Minister" was a rather cutting illustration of this phenomenon at work.

What happens to someone when they become the prez? Enormous numbers of apparently experienced people begin telling you all kinds of secret things. They stress the importance of secrecy. They tell you about this plot or that plot. They say it's vital they get new powers and they not-so-subtly imply that if you don't help them Women And Children will DIE! And although it's left unstated you know perfectly well that if you don't give them what they want, you will see leaks in the press from anonymous officials that paint you as a prevaricator, as weak, as unconcerned for the lives of Patriotic Heroes And Their Women And Children.

The problem any US President has, and I daresay many other countries presidents, is that they are immediately submerged into a fantasy world woven from the agendas of the people around them mixed with their own pre-existing views, and those people are themselves also in a slightly less extreme form of a personal fantasy world and so on all the way down. A toxic brew of patriotism, belief in American exceptionalism, militarism and most of all pervasive classification means that it's impossible for a prez to penetrate the fog of misinformation that surrounds them. They can be manipulated into believing nearly anything because it would take an incredibly strong willed personality to say directly to the senior bureaucrats feeding them classified intelligence, "I think you are bullshitting me and I am going to personally audit your shit and prosecute you if you're lying to me".

Obama is very much NOT a strong willed personality. He sees himself primarily as a reasonable man who finds compromise between different factions. This makes him easily manipulated: all it takes is for people who agree to present him two apparently opposed positions - one extreme and one very extreme - and Obama will reliably pick something that is quite extreme. And the officials around him know that.

In hindsight it should have been obvious. Obama has no real track record of achievement in politics. He supported no particularly controversial positions, or showed any particularly clear thinking. Compared to Bush he seemed like a genius of course but Bush was a fucking man child, so that wasn't hard.

For that reason, Rand Paul fans might be disappointed if he won. I don't expect he would be able to accomplish as much change as people would like.

Almost certainly not. But it looks like Rand Paul is made of stronger stuff than Obama. Paul consistently argues for positions that piss off most of his party. He seems able to come to conclusions about things himself regardless of what other people believe. He seems to have fairly strong principles. He doesn't come across as the sort of wishy-washy people person that Obama is. If there's any US politician that actually might tell the people in his secret briefings "stop bullshitting me or I fire you", it's probably Rand Paul.

That sort of logic holds true when moving between languages that are very similar. The transition between Python and Ruby or Java and C# spring to mind.

However if I need a C++ programmer and need one pronto, I'm not gonna hire a guy who has only JavaScript on his CV no matter what. Learning C++ is not merely learning a different way to create an array or slightly different syntax. To be effective in C++ you need to know how to do manual memory management and do it reliably, which takes not only domain knowledge but more importantly: practice and experience. You need to understand what inlining is. You very likely need to understand multi-threading and do it reliably, which takes practice and experience a pure JS guy is unlikely to have. You need to be comfortable with native toolchains and build systems: when the rtld craps its pants and prints a screenful of mangled symbols you need to be able to understand that you have an ABI mismatch, what that means and how to deal with it. Unfortunately that is mostly a matter of practice and experience. You might need to understand direct manipulation of binary data. There's just a ton of stuff beyond the minor details of the language.

Could the pure JS guy learn all this stuff? Of course! Will they do it quickly? No.