Have the actions of Snowden, and, apparently, the use of weak encryption, made the world less safe?
Talk about yourselves. The world isn't UK, you know. If anything, Snowden's revelations have shown that it's the UK who performed hostile acts of espionage against their European allies, together and on behalf of their trans-atlantic big buddies, not Soviet Russia.
It has always been about preserving the privileges of the elite, and enhancing class distinctions.
I don’t know how it works in China, but in my country that’s the job of freemasonry.
Designing a language is a matter of trade-offs; certain languages are designed to make you code quickly (VBScript), which doesn’t mean that you can’t write robust code with them, and others are designed to make you write robust code (Java), which doesn’t mean that you can’t write buggy code with them.
Which addition operation triggers undefined operation in C because of unmatched types?
However, to be honest, I recall having problems with failing floppies all the way back to the 80s. On the C64, the drive would begin making a LOUD rattling sound as if its head had fallen off the disk and it was banging against the end of the rail; given my age at that time, this usually happened while a game was loading the last level that I had been playing for half a day to reach (no savegames back then). On the PC, I still remember how many times I found myself torturing the R key at the "Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail" prompt, usually to no avail. A friend of mine recommended me to put the failing floppies inside the fridge and try reading them again while they were fresh.
What the hell do French private labour laws have to do with the public debt crisis in Greece?
The banks won't allow any flexibility about my working conditions when I ask for a mortgage to buy my house; doctors expect to be paid with no flexibility when I have to maintain the health of my family; bills needs to be paid inflexibly at the end of the month. So I have to confess that this concept of "flexibility" that we are importing from the US is starting to piss me off, because basically it means that workers, the weaker part of economy and the one that actually does the job, have to take on their shoulders the risk of entrepreneurship, which historically was the moral justification for investors to make money without working.
And hearing that this is necessity from politicians who sit on mountains of public money, and on behalf of CEOs who can earn one hundred times as much as their employees, and can take the citizenship of Monte Carlo to even avoid paying taxes on that much, is unbearable. Again, I'm not talking about the CEO of Mandriva, it's just a generic rant.
Instead, they chose the more sophisticated approach of type erasure - which added a lot of complexity, limitations, and even introduced the concept of compile-time warnings in the Java language - not because of backwards compatibility (adding new kinds of bytecode to the JVM is OK and it happens occasionally), but because they wanted indefinite interoperability between old code (which would see the collection objects “raw”) and new code (which would see the very same objects “generified”).
Now academics universally despise type erasure, but back then at least half of them thought that it was a good idea and you can still see it today if you search the web for their blog posts of the time, where they explained the tricks that they used to overcome the limitations of type erasure and why type erasure wasn't so bad after all.
The fact that you could go back do DOS isn't relevant to the definition of what is an operating system and what isn't. You could go back to DOS in Win9x, too. And you can shut down the OS and go back to the boot loader shell in many computer architectures, including the earlier models of IBM PC where you could go back to ROM BASIC.
Also consider the following example. What does this do?
c = a * b;
Is it a vector product? Is it a scalar product? Is it a scalar multiplication? I need to look at the types of a, b and c to figure out. A method name in place of a single character could tell me more.
BASIC is the Computer Science equivalent of `Scientific Creationism'.