How about both?

To be fair, the UN is actually better than most of the governments that compose it. And it *does* appear to have reduced wars. That's pretty good for something that was originally set up as a military alliance to allow "allies" who didn't trust each other to work together.

Well... to be fair if the energy of insolation were already being totally retained, then increasing the amount of CO2 and methane would have no effect on heating, and one should expect a decrease in effectiveness as one approaches the limiting case. Not that I think they are actually reasoning that way, and not that this would mean the other effects would decrease...

Well, actually since they quote 95% they're being conservative. 100% of the models are KNOWN to be in error. The questions are always "How much in error?" and "In which direction?". And nobody really knows the answers to those questions, though sometimes there are reasonable estimates.

What he's really saying is "I don't like your answers, so you're wrong. And I don't need to prove it." Since he's politically well connected this is actually largely correct. The only error is logically evident (from my phrasing of "what he was really saying").

If you're going to consider obsolete languages (the keyboards are no longer made) I'd nominate Prograf. It was a dataflow language that would have been great for multiprocessor systems except for two problems:
1) It was released for the Mac System 3 and never successfully transitioned to later systems, and
2) There was no text representation of the programs, it was all graphic, which was quickly too verbose to handle as the programs increased in size.

Not clear on what you consider "good". The ones that occur to me are WxWidgets, Qt, and Tcl...which can be good depending on your purpose. All of those can be used on Linux, Apple, and MSWind, and probably on BSD. All of them can be used from C, C++, Python, and Ruby. And, I assume, other languages.

If you want a good graphic builder IDE, then Qt has some quite decent tools. I'm not sure about WxWidgets. Tcl used to, but they seem to have died of neglect.

Then there's Java which goes its own way, and has it's own GUI, and IDE with a gui-builder...but while adequate for many purposes, I find the Java gui to be limited even when compared to Tcl. Still, it *is* cross-platform.

So I guess it comes down to "what do you mean by 'good'?".

If I read the article announcing the release correctly, then while the basic C# language is (probably) open source, it's definitely not free. You can't make a version of it without the agreement of MS, and the released version by MS is ... incomplete. Parts of it are portable, others aren't. So you can only use it as MS desires.

IIRC the release agreement said something like "permission is given to any full and complete implementation that fully implements the specifications" I forget whether the specifications were subject to unilateral change by MS, but even if they weren't it means that the language cannot be implemented by anyone except as desired by MS. Also, of course, the libraries were not made available, which reders it essentially useless except on MSWind machines.

Now just because their public promise didn't allow something doesn't mean that they won't ignore any "infringing" code as long as they feel like it. But it does mean that only a trusting (characterization deleted) would put their own time and effort behind it...without some form of idemnification.

So I'm going to pass on C#. It'd rather trust Oracle's Java (which I also avoid, though not all the time).

Different langaguages are different.

OTOH, I disagree with the basic premise of the article. It is my belief that one shouldn't learn a new language to improve ones job prospects, but rather to improve ones skills as a programmer. So if you know C++, then you don't learn C# or Java, but rather Eiffel, Lisp, or Haskell, or possibly OCaML.

OTOH, If you already know C++ or Java, it's certainly easier to learn Python or Ruby. So easy that a basic knowledge can be learned in a day. So if you're tight on time, that will allow you to expand your capabilities in small increments. (But a basic knowledge won't teach you the libraries, which is where the important differences lie.)

FWIW, I first learned Fortan, actually FORTRAN, since it was before Fortran 77 was standardized. But then I went on to Snobol, PL/1, etc. I never did really master LISP1.5, but I didn't have access to a running implementation. With Lisps a decent IDE is nearly a necessity to start with. (Currently, if you want to pick up a lisp, I'd recomment Racket Scheme from PLT. It's got a decent development environment.)

OTOH, I dropped C++ about 20 years ago, and am no longer fluent in the modern dialect (something I keep meaning to correct). My current favorite language is D (Digital Mars D, or dmd), before that I cycled between Ruby and Python. Before I retired I normally wrote in whatever my employer chose, which, towards the end, was MSAccess Basic...a really foul language. So foul I wrote routines in Eiffel that did the work and just used the MSAccess Basic as a driver. Not only was it faster to write, it was also faster to execute, and unlike MSAccessBasic, the programs wouldn't arbitrarily start failing after a few months of use. (In the AccessBasis I used to need to save the programs as text files so that I could re-import them after the system corrupted them. Figuring out that there wasn't actually anything wrong with the programs took a lot of quite furstrating debugging, since a newly entered program would work properly. It's my guess that the system was storing some invisible binary code in with the source, so the source became unusable when the code got corrupted...why the code ever got corrupted I never found out, but it happened repeatedly to many different programs.) I presume that MS has by now fixed the problem, but it persisted over at least 5 years and multiple different versions of MSAccess.

That's a reasonable thing to expect, but it doesn't seem to be a part of the current US political culture. Is it even any longer a part of the Japanese political culture?

Bingo! I'd forgotten that! That definitely qualifies as a scandal, since her communications are supposed to be public.

???
I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean. I rather despise Obama as a president, but I can't think of any particular scandal...and I mean something *I* consider a scandal, not something that titillates the shocked sensibilities of those who are appalled by a "wardrobe malfunction". The closest I can come is his acceptance of RomenyCare as his health plan (i.e. "ObamaCare"), but while appalling, I can hardly consider that a scandal.

Well, while I do agree, the Secretary of State is not supposed to set policy. So she doesn't deserve much blame for that.

Well, to be fair as secretary of state she appears to have followed the direction of the president. There have been worse examples (including one who barricaded himself in his office and refused to resign under Lincoln).

It you actually believe that, I have a fine bridge to sell you.

The "innocent until proven guilty" bit is refering to the opinion that should be held by a juror, not to facts in the world. Were I a juror I would require that his guilt be proven. As I'm in the role of a reader of an article about it, I cannot take the same stance, lest I not have an opinion about anything.

Yes, it *IS* the task of a court, and in particular of a jury, to decide legal guilt. But legal guilt is not actual guilt, and, in fact, often gets things wrong. (Not, however, as often as a biased and illegally acting police officer.)

To the police he should have been a suspect. They apparently murdered him. But even this, alone, would not have set off a civil disturbance. That is clear evidence that this is a part of a pattern of behavior on the part of the police such that the community believed them to be habitually violent thugs biased against the community. (It's not proof, but only strong evidence, that this is an actuality.)

I'm *NOT* saying he wasn't maltreated. In fact I suggested that he was probably murdered. But I'm also saying that I the evidence indicates that he was not an innocent (which doesn't mean he was guilty of anything in particular).

Please note the distinction between "an innocent" and "innocent".