Please read up on 'broken window fallacy'. Early failure of products has nothing to do with a strong economy.

What I understood was that Detroit had no problem designing cars that people wanted to buy. SUV's were and still are very popular. They just weren't able to make a profit building and selling them.

Think about that for a second. The ex-president was going to leave to avoid the taxes.

Thought about it, and came to the conclusion that the ex-president, who is now trying to get back into politics after being through many court-cases, is quite probably trying to get an upper-hand on his rival. Has he left? No. Will he leave? No chance.

Not saying that 75% tax rate is a good thing, but taking Sarkozy as an example is not very convincing.

On the other hand, if you plot periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom versus the Earth cycle around the sun, it will show that cesium 133 is a horrible clock. It's even worse, if you have two cesium 133 atoms that accelerate differently, they will go out of sync! We luckily only have one Earth, so it cannot go out of sync with itself.

There's another exactly one correct way to do it. Lengthen the nanosecond to be in tune with the Earth's revolution around the sun instead of counting periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.

You really think that? Linux runs in practically all data-centers globally, saving trillions of dollars world-wide for business annually. It powers most devices, including a very popular type of mobile phone, used by billions, and you're comparing that to a president of the United States, or even worse, a governor of just one state? These are career politicians that have only a marginal influence on an economy that largely drives itself. Politicians are simply not that influential. Of your list, only Bill Gates qualifies as comparable, as he did something enormous as well: create a market for software alone (before MS, software was a means to sell hardware). The others are small fry: politicians and people that run a business worth a few hundred billion with simply operate in the economy. They didn't change it.

You're probably mislead by the fact that from the economic impact that Torvalds made, he didn't become exceedingly wealthy. But the impact is there, and it is enormous.

I loved the segment on, what was it again? Either the Daily Show or John Oliver's bit, where they were quoting a CIA report about the effectiveness of their operations. The only place where they reported a success was in arming the Mujahadeen against the Russians in Afghanistan. Great job, until the Mujahadeen transformed into the Taliban and gave Al Qaida a safe haven. I think we should indeed chill, and get rid of the spooks. Their track record is appalling.

Good for you. You're probably looking forward to the day that you have to eat some very tasty paste because vegetables are deemed to be too demanding on the ecology for feeding 100 billion people. Great new world.

Like it would be good to teach a kid how to define an exact and unambiguous procedure that instructs a machine to accomplish a task.

So let's all build arcs then. Our invisible friend in the sky might at any moment decide to flood the earth again. He did it once, so it's probably overdue.

In short: "no matter how unlikely" can be extremely unlikely. That's when we use reasoning instead of blanket statements.

Ditto for operators - "foo + bar" does something quite different to "bar + foo".

This holds for practically all languages that overload '+' for string concatenation. Luckily in C this doesn't hold: there "foo+bar" always equals "bar+foo", even for strings.

So what do you suggest we do if a person is incapacitated, and doctors need someone's direction to perform life threatening surgery or not? Ask a random person in the hallway, or ask the person that is legally designated as the spokesperson?

I much prefer an elected government to decide upon these kind of issues than a religious tradition based on the necessities of living in the desert.

Because that's uncharted territory for law. Suppose there are three people in a marriage relationship, and one gets mortally sick, say in a coma. Who of the two others will represent the spouse, particularly when they are in disagreement. How would divorce be handled? Do the two left need to remarry, or does the contract allow to be continued? How does the estate get split up? How does alimony work? How would inheritance work? How would pensions work? What if there are 4 people, 10, 50? How would all this be structured legally?

Even in contract law, it's a big shift to go from two parties to more than two. Too much needs to be sorted out with too many institutions. That's why 2 consenting adults is the best we can do at this point.

Good point. I was commenting on presidential elections, but now see your comment was on congress.

Wazzu...wot? Arguing for legalizing abortion and for gay marriage does not equate tax implications. It's completely consistent to be for legal abortion and against free abortions. Likewise, it's completely consistent to be for gay marriage and against tax benefits for married people. So again, what are you actually arguing?