Fifty bucks says he would have to google to find out what the Iran/Contra scandal was. And after he does, he'll have a million reasons why a president who committed high treason and got away with it is "better" than one who gave America it's longest time ever without an active war. And all one million of them will basically mean "because his name was Reagan".

That's the sad irony of the current Republican handling of Iran - it's likely to lead to yet another war where Republicans send American soldiers to get killed by weapons that republicans sold their enemies.

And maintaining sanctions is a cause worthy of comitting high treason for ? Because that's what 43 Republican senators did.

When they are facing charges for that treason, you can start imagining you live in a country where everybody is equal before the law again.

You know, like when Reagan was charged with high treason over the Iran/Contra scandal... oh drat...

Right when Nixon was charged with high treason over the watergate scandal... oh drat.

I know when Bush and Cheney were charged... oh drat.

Wait, which republican high-up has ever actually been criminally charged over anything they did no matter how heinous ?
But the country did charge a president for getting a blowjob... now THAT is clearly a bigger scandal than selling guns to your enemies in order to fund a gang of drug-dealing, torture loving hooligans in Nicaragua.

The same enemy actually... that this generation's pubes rather badly want a war with. That should be fun - republicans sending American soldiers to get shot with American guns sold to their enemy by a Republican president.

You realize that Bill Nye was one of the Engineers who designed the Boeing 747 right ? His credentials as an engineer were pretty damn well established before he ever hosted a children's show.
And clearly he has experience working in teams doing massive engineering projects on hugely complicated designs.

What he may not have much experience with is those teams working on a budget slightly less than the one you get from the sperm bank.

The law is pretty clear that other does apply. If it doesn't then no libraries are copyrightable at all.

Thank you. Though I confess upon deciding to do so I didn't act immediately, I got myself another job first.

Absolutely not. The VOLT should not get any subsidy at all.

Fair point, as somebody who primarily specializes in python and ruby, I'm aware of much of what you say. I also have certain habits that help mitigate the potential downsides.

One the other hand there are some incredibly powerful things you can do with their data models, functional patterns are great, functions as objects as data - then using functional patterns on functions as data...
It's beautiful, it's elegant and it's fun.

But there are always trade-offs. I just don't think that the suggestion that weak typing is automatically less secure holds much water. Good coders make use of the benefits of weak typing but prevent the risk by always, always forcing the type whenever a different type could change the behaviour.

Fair point - though that is fixed in python3 (I just checked).
In python2 it returns True for some reason (even if you do 3 "1")

That said - most professional python engineers are smarter than that. Specifically smart enough to always do casts when we can't absolutely guarantee the types of variables.
Basically: we would never do 3 "3" - we would do 3 int("3")

That said - this was a bug, which was fixed in later versions. It says nothing about safely typed languages in general that a particular safely typed language had a bug in it's type safety system in previous versions. It means there was a bug. You think the C static-typed system never had bugs in 40 years and a dozen different compilers ?
Ruby for example does the right thing - which is to throw an error.

Wrong.
  The GPL prevents linking via API to existing GPL'd libraries. It does not stop you from writing your own library with the exact same method declarations but your OWN implementation.
What google did is specifically NOT prevented by the GPL either.

The GPL focusses on linking because that means MY implementation is used by your code. If you write your own library with the same declarations and your own implementation - then even though your application code is unchanged, I no longer hold a claim.

Indeed most of GNU's libraries (both those under the GPL like readline and those under the LGPL like glibc) could not have existed if Oracle is right - since they were mostly re-implementations of long-existing APIs that every Unix OS ever developed also included. LibC in particular - EVERY unix since the very first Bell Labs one has had a generic C library - and they all implemented essentially the same core set of functions. Their APIs are all virtually identical yet they were all deemed legal and all under their own distinct copyrights. Some were proprietory, some were BSD licensed (i.e. the libc's in every BSD today) and GNU made theirs LGPLd.

A better example would be the wine project. Wine reimplemented just about the entire windows API - all the calls are identical - so identical that you can run windows programs and games with Wine - but every implementation written from scratch as a clean-room reverse-engineer process. That has been legal for many, many years -this case threatens that. It would make it possible for Microsoft to get Wine declared illegal.

If this is illegal Wine would actually be MORE illegal since it is much more compatible with the original API than Android is with Java. In fact that is Oracle's entire PR about this matter: that they are trying to sue google for NOT making the API ENTIRELY compatible with theirs !

Disclaimer: I am a former Oracle engineer, I quite my job because I could not in good conscience keep working for the company that filed this suit !

Yes... just like ICE's were full of fail until you could refuel them everywhere you could buy coal for a steam engine ?

The benefits are NOT the same. The volt is an ICE with partial electric drive, the Tesla's are fully electric.
Those are not similar outcomes.

Nope you're wrong. Being the FIRST trees - they were the very first plants whose cell walls contained the molecule lignin. That's the molecule that makes woody plants hard enough to form tree trunks - the difference between trees and other plants.
Lignin never existed before that point, and bacteria and fungus capable of digesting it did not and could not evolve until after there was lignin.
That is what caused the carboniferous period to be so different, the differences we named it after - a kind of plant matter that nothing could decompose which fossilized in massive amounts was unusual.
I never said it was ALL fossil fuels, the peat-bog mechanism certainly accounts for some, after all plants and animals fossilized before the carboniferous and since - but those are small numbers. Several million years where EVERY tree fossilized is a once-off event, and it had a massive impact - including producing the vast majority of fossil fuels.

So wait... you're saying Paul took a position against a position absolutely nobody has ever suggested as a law at all ?
Why would he bother exactly ? Unless, of course, he was constructing a strawman to try and appeal to the anti-vaxxers without entirely alienating the sane people.

The only measures anybody has proposed in law was that vaccination should be a requirement for public school.
Scientifically speaking, that's bullshit - it should be mandatory for anybody who doesn't valid MEDICAL reason not to because public school or not kids will still go out in public, especially when they stop being kids.
Nobody's actually tried to suggest that as a LAW though because then people claim it's an intrusion on liberty. Well yes it is, but it's a perfectly justifiable one. Your liberty is SUPPOSED to end BEFORE you harm others or recklessly endanger them.
The whole point of a government is to intrude on liberty at precisely THAT point.

But nobody has actually had the political guts to argue that as a law, the most they've tried to do anywhere in the US was demand it for public school kids.
So his argument is scientifically wrong, philosophically wrong and legally redundant... while he also denies climate change - he is definitely not an example of a pro-science candidate.

Oh and no, I'm actually NOT a democrat. I'm not even an American. I do follow American news quite well though because of the sad state of the world where who Americans elect will have a direct impact on my quality of life (and everybody else in the world's as well).
It's quite undemocratic that everybody on earth's safety, security and economic prosperity is dependent on whether there is a good or bad president in the USA (and the president here matters far more than congress since he is the one in charge of foreign policy) - but we get no say in that.
Basically we are being governed by a president we don't get to vote for. The guys we elect back home simply don't have the clout to influence the global politics and economy we all depend on the way the US president can.

Typical... grammar nazi failing to spot the difference between a typo and a grammar error, I actually thought he was sincerely asking what part of the dragonfly the measurement was based on.

I think your first point is the biggest. The Republicans believe that politics and religion should be one thing. They give massive creedence to religion and religion has always been anti-science.
Evidence-based thinking is simply flat-out incompatible with faith-based thinking.