I find it ironic that in spite of our ridiculous survival advantage over nearly every other species, it's the most biologically simple ones that have a real chance of taking us out.

You have no idea how irritating statements like that are. I'm supposedly on your side, but your reasoning is just bullshit. You're not being clever, you're just being ignorant.

If climate change were a lie, then taking the drastic efforts necessary to do something about it would not be making the world a better place. You seem to think there is no economic cost in dealing with climate change -- that there are no sacrifices to be made. But if that were true we wouldn't be having these heated discussions.

Try to get your head around this one fact, because it's one thing the "other side" is right about: Dealing with climate change is going to itself be a huge economic disaster, and people will suffer because of it.

The question is will it be less of a disaster than not dealing with it.

Yeah, that's Texas. Millions of square miles of nothing combined with a population who think cars are a god-given right, but taxes equal communism. Come back with something less contrived.

I don't even want to imagine a situation so bad that not even PHP can make it worse.

For various reason having to do with the instruction set, x86 and x86-64 code is impossible to verify as safe to run. Google Native Client gets around that with a combination of static analysis and an execution sandbox (separate from the sandbox chrome already uses.) That's pretty close to what you're asking for, but afaik only works in chrome. It supports x86-32, x86-64, and ARM.

It's complicated imo: many processes involved with a single browser tab, with lots named pipes, all branch instructions have to be thunked, requiring a lot of overhead for branches. You also have to have compiler support. Google only supports C/C++. There are third party tools for Lua, Python and Ruby, and some work is being done that would allow you to use any language that can target LLVM's intermediate format.

The lack of browser support is the biggest problem though.

If the authors of computer programming books wrote arithmetic textbooks.

RIP Abstruse Goose

Humans don't even always do this. Many people are willing to die and have died for some abstract cause.

Self-preservation is the highest level goal, and takes priority over any other possible goal. The catch is that "self" is itself an abstract concept. To the extent that I conflate my concept of self with some abstract cause, I am willing to die for that cause. If the cause lives on, so do I, because I believe in some way that I am that cause. If the cause dies, "I" die.

An Artificial Intelligence with a self-preservation instinct and an abstract concept of self could be just as willing to sacrifice itself for humanity as a soldier is.

You would think so, but experience has shown that without a working proof of concept exploit, software vendors dismiss the vulnerability as theoretical, downplay the severity, or outright ignore it. Sometimes they even ignore vulnerabilities with working exploits, if it isn't actually being exploited in the wild (that anyone knows about). And a working exploit is useful for testing your own systems.

XHTML serves a purpose. It adds the eXtensibility so that XHTML can be encorporated into other XML documents and visa versa, and it allows you to parse, generate and manipulate it with XML tools. The fact that browsers still have to deal with non-XML HTML doesn't take away from it's advantages.

If you're generating HTML, there's no reason to not generate XHTML -- it's only the code that consumes it that has to deal with HTML. And what, besides a browser, consumes HTML? (Whatever it is, it's probably doing it wrong.)

Absolute moron or not, I think you misunderstood him.

That comment makes sense if "Subsidies" means money given to the student to pay tuition, which he's claiming raises the willingness to pay. I assume that's the correct interpretation, since that's what TFA is about. You're talking about subsidies given to the school, which by the same logic would raise the willingness to sell.

So there are subsidies on both the supply and the demand side. I'm pretty sure the subsidies to the schools (supply side) completely dwarf the subsidies given to the students (demand side), and this proposal would have little effect.

But the premise "prices are determined by where willingness to pay meets willingness to sell" is flawed anyway:

• 1. Community College tuition is usually set the state legislature, so there's that.
• 2. International enrollment is high and increasing, and would be even higher if it weren't limited by policy. International tuition is double or triple what in-state students pay, so we already know tuition is kept low despite high demand.
• 3. Most private money also goes to the supply side. That's why University of Washington has "The Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering."

There's nothing magic about it. Inflation raises the price of everything, including labor.

I hope you're right, but you might be underestimating the stubbornness people are able to maintain in regard to AGW. We're far past reasonable doubt already.

Many people will only be convinced by an argument that goes like this: AGW is real, but don't worry we've solved the problem in a way that allows you to not make any sacrifices to your god-given way of life, and your taxes aren't going to go up.

We've been tinkering with the climate for a hundred years, that's why we're even talking about this.

And yet all that work is the reason it's destined to be patched.

In my quarter-century professional career I've seen just as much one-upmanship and trying to make other people look stupid in the workplace. What I haven't seen much of, in the places I've worked, is women.