That is stuff Tolkien actually talked about at more length in the LotR appendices and in material published after his death. It seems reasonable to include it, since this is really intended as an LotR prequel rather than just The Hobbit on its own. I'm not entirely crazy about the way they wrote it, but it's not something they invented out of whole cloth.

I'd have liked to have seen more of Saruman, in fact, but that was limited by Christopher Lee's health. It ties in to the continuation of the Gandalf plot line from the second film.

So you would like to buy a carpet, sahib? Here, enjoy a glass of tea.

So. You are able to regurgitate the Israeli propaganda that was fed to the world's press organizations, 40 years ago - building the myth of the ruthless Palestinian and the incomparable IDF.

But the BBC - that revolutionary hotbed of anti-Israeli sentiment - had this to report, confirming what Victor Ostrovsky and others had intimated for many years:

But newly released documents contain a claim that the 1976 rescue of hostages, kidnapped on an Air France flight and held in Entebbe in Uganda, was not all it seemed.

A UK government file on the crisis, released from the National Archives, contains a claim that Israel itself was behind the hijacking.

An unnamed contact from the Euro-Arab Parliamentary Association told a British diplomat in Paris that the Israeli Secret Service, the Shin Bet, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) collaborated to seize the plane.

The flight was seized shortly after it took off from Athens and was flown to Entebbe, where 98 people were held hostage, many of them Israeli citizens.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6710289.stm

FACT: Shin Bet organized the Air France Flight 139 hijacking in 1976.

Everything that little fascist country does and says is a lie.

Israel's problem is that they have an ethno-centric, fascist state ideology - based on mythical stone tablets from a fairy story.

Israel's problem is that this ideology breeds a sociopathic self-righteousness - one that allows them to keep children walled into a cage, and then to bomb the cage, because of Israel's innate "tolerance" and because they are an "embattled victim".

If everyone on earth has rejected "you", for five centuries? Maybe the problem isn't "them"... But psychological subtlety has never been a strength of fascist ideology.

It's not absolutely safe (is anything), but it meets the criterion of being a little safer than password/key alone.

I really don't know much about that; can you amplify a bit? I mean, economics said that it should happen some day, as all that money washing into China should eventually translate into demands for higher pay, but there were plenty of places to squirrel that money away rather than pay workers. And there were a LOT of potential workers.

So what finally caused the labor rate to rise enough? I gather that the goal was to establish dominance in some kinds of manufacturing so that we'd have to re-establish the industry from scratch, raising the threshold for bringing manufacturing projects back here. Did the achieve that, or what?

I hope so because that's what I stream.

Then again, I DVR most of it before I watch it so I can skip commercials... So it was streamed at one point, but I since I collect it, I'm not watching it streamed. What a crappy poll.

Maybe if we define streaming as 'Start watching something before you have all of it"

That's terrible advice. If you want the big bucks, get into Python, Node.js, or Go and find a startup that just received VC and has tons of money to shove at developers. C++, Java, and C# are great for long-term "comfortable" jobs, but that's not where the seriously good money is.

"Staticness" and "strongness" are orthogonal properties. Python, for instance, has strongly typed values (you can't convince an int that it's a str), but dynamic variables (a=123;a='foo' is valid). And while C++ is statically typed, I'd be hard pressed to describe something with void* and unions as strongly typed.

TL;DR: Words have meaning. It's OK to disagree about whether a particular language is strongly or weakly typed, but it's not OK to claim that two different concepts are the same thing. When you make a fundamental mistake in the third paragraph, I'm likely to ignore anything else you have to say in the rest of the article.

However, he can't order the next President to continue his policies. There's a lot to be said for pinning these things down so that they can't be changed on a whim.

But we are at Dice, sir:

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Pros: Today's article has more content than the usual Dice front page linkage. Great article if you're not a programmer but feel stymied by the wide assortment of languages out there. Although instead of hemming and hawing before making your first project you're better off listening to Winston Churchill and sticking your feet in the mud: "The maxim 'Nothing avails but perfection' may be spelt shorter -- 'Paralysis."

Cons: It barely scratches the surface of an incredibly deep topic with unlimited facets. And when one is considering investing potential technical debt into a technology, this probably wouldn't even suffice as an introduction let alone table of contents. Words spent on anecdotes ("In 2004, a coworker of mine referred to it as a 'toy language.'" like, lol no way bro!) could have been better spent on things like Lambdas in Java 8. Most interesting on the list is Erlang? Seems to be more of a random addition that could just as easily been Scala, Ruby, Groovy, Clojure, Dart -- whatever the cool hip thing it is we're playing with today but doesn't seem to quite pan out on a massive scale ...

Since you posted anonymously, it is sufficient to declare that almost everything you are stating is false.