Given that there were only about 100 CDC 6600s ever built, you might just be able to emulate all of them on your phone.

I think we agree (mostly.)

Note that I was referring to "a fluid economy with lots of buyers and sellers to encourage fairness." I didn't mean that liquidity leads to fairness, rather that fairness can flourish only in an environment of liquidity, i.e., one with numerous players who aspire to fairness, but who are motivated to pursue it by the presence of their fellow players.

To put it another way, even the noblest among us can be corrupted, but it's harder to succumb to such corruption when others are watching and keeping us honest.

Your post is insightful and deserves modding up. However, I respectfully disagree with you and AC on whether Bitcoins have value. I claim they do.

IANAE, but it's my understanding that the intrinsic value of money is determined by what a buyer and a seller agree it's worth as payment for something, in a fluid economy with lots of buyers and sellers to encourage fairness. The Bitcoin network provides an infrastructure for transactions in such an economy. But without Bitcoins, you can't participate in it. So, I would say Bitcoins do have value, and they have that value because of the existence of the Bitcoin network. But to say that the network itself has the value in question is to overload the definition of value. At the risk of misusing terms of economics (again, IANAE) I'd say the network has utility (because it offers satisfaction in the use of Bitcoins) but not value.

"Portable assembly language" is an oxymoron. And I have never heard anyone use that phrase to describe C.

Never mind building abstractions. The C language itself is a significant abstraction from the machine level. Only a small handful of operators and constructs in C have a close analogue to assembler statements (e.g., accumulation, shift and bitwise logical operators.) Therefore I maintain that it is not a low-level language.

No, it's a reference to this.

Assembler is a low-level programming language.

Machine language is a low-level programming language.

C is not a low-level programming language, although you can do low-level programming with it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Q: How many hardware engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: None. We tell the software engineers to patch around it.

Hemisphere-wide communication by strobing The Sun!! Mwahahahahaha...

Of course, the latency sucks (9 min both ways) but I'm working on it.

'Scuse me, I'm off to Kickstarter...

Or companies owned by Jehova's Witnesses can opt-out of health-insurance plans that include blood transfusions.

Or companies owned by Orthodox Jews can opt-out of plans that include medications derived from pork products.

Or companies owned by Hindus can opt-out of plans that include health products derived from cows.

We all want our friends and neighbors to have religious freedom. But when they become our employers, shouldn't there be a limit to their expression of it when it affects our access to health care?

Tell that to the person who modded the OP as "Informative."

You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: 'now, you are free to go where you want, do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.' You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe you have been completely fair... This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity—not just legal equity but human ability—not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.

-- Lyndon B. Johnson

Well, that's basically a tautology. It's like saying "research shows most people think water feels wet." True statement, but so what?

Considering the Windows-centric nature of .NET, it's hardly surprising that Visual Studio has far more VB and C# programmers than any other IDE.

And yes, I know about MonoDevelop.

Light years ahead?

Between Eclipse and VS, I'd pretty much call it a tie. They're both good.

This.

Someone once said that IQ tests only measure how good you are at doing IQ tests. I would put it another way: they only measure a certain kind of intelligence -- the kind that is good at solving logical puzzles. Not necessarily the kind that excels at sports, arts, empathy, ethics, etc. As the OP says, they might be a proxy for ranking within groups, but not between them.

Good point. Thanks.