People die of cancer. stroke, heart attack, emphysema. and countless other disease, but aging isn't one of them.

With AIDS the HIV virus gradually destroys the immune system. Then some infection isn't successfully fought off. The immediate "cause of death" is the infection. But the underlying cause of death is the destruction of the immune system by HIV.

Similarly, with aging, a host of systems gradually fail, through a number of mechanisms, of which telomere-shortening is the underlying cause of most. Eventually one of these systems failures results a disease process (or failure to reverse a disease process), and that disease process causes death. The recorded "cause of death" is the particular disease process. But the underlying cause is the system failure from aging.

Take cancer: Accumulated errors in DNA replication, perhaps combined with a couple pre-errored codes inherited from the parents, result in a clone of cells that don't stop replicating when they should, and are able to evade the self-destruct mechanisms (including the hayflic. The accumulation of errors is one aspect of aging. The failure of the immune system to recognize, destroy, and clean out the clone of misprogrammed cells, more common in older people, is another.

Raspberry Pis are used primarily for very small tasks, controlling a few motors and lights in a haunted house gimmick, running cool Christmas lights, or an alarm system reading sensors once per second. A CPU capable of a BILLION operations per second is about ten thousand times more than what's needed.

Similarly, over a billion bytes of RAM. Controlling twelve zones of Christmas lights uses an array of twelve variables - 12 bytes. The program code might be another 200 bytes. So you have 1,073,741,600 bytes left over.

I'm laughing at those Windows 8 users posting here complaining that a friggin GIG of RAM isn't enough. Most rPI projects are also done on Arduinos and similar, with a 20Mhz clock and RAM measured in bytes. Typical Pi programs are hundreds of bytes. 1024 bytes is 1024 small variables; how many do you need to turn lamps on and off, or position a servo?

Running your 200 byte program on top of a Linux kernel is just a convenience. It's not made to run Microsoft Office on it all day, it's designed for reading a few switches, turning on a motor, and lighting an led - which requires about 24 bytes of RAM.

Of course some people use them as entertainment media centers. That's kind of the one oddball use that needs a thousand times the resources of most things people use their Pi for.

I see you chose the nick "robycodez" to declare your allegiance to Ruby. As you mature in your profession, if you choose to mature, you may find that information systems isn't high school football, and that what works best is to use the right tool for the job. The "fan" thing wears thin as the guy or gal in the office next to you produces validated, documented, elegant, efficient, maintainable, correct systems in half the time it takes with whatever language or vendor you've sworn allegiance to. You may find that he uses Perl for one thing, C for another, Python a week later, and the Python calls a .Net assembly, with translation between them done by declarative xslt. Right tool for the job, he may say, use the right tool for each job.

FYI it can target most any virtual machine. Parrot is just one. The JVM is another. For example, Rakudo Perl is a Perl 6 implementation which targets JVM, MoarVM, JavaScript and Parrot.

Unfortunately, the tax treaties for the most part only cover earned income. When I worked in Canada, I had to be careful not to spend more than 50% of my time in Canada (i.e. I had to live in the U.S. and commute). Canada bases their taxation on residency - if you've spent more than 50% of the year in Canada, you're a resident and have to pay Canadian taxes on all income. If I did that, my unearned income (e.g. bank interest, stock gains) would've been subject to double-taxation. U.S. taxes it because I'm a U.S. citizen, Canadian taxes it because they'd have considered me a resident.

I wouldn't really mind the taxation based on citizenship if it were applied in a fair and uniform manner as you're proposing - e.g. I pay the greater of U.S. and/or foreign taxes. But the IRS seems to apply it in whatever manner maximizes its income. Even if it would hypothetically mean you could owe more in taxes than you made (e.g. foreign country and U.S. both charge more than 50% in taxes).

It's insanity because it's based on the misconception that taxing companies is somehow different from taxing people. What do you think those companies will do if you increase their taxes? Roll over and just fork it over even if it puts them in the red? No. They're going to raise their prices, and/or cut their costs to compensate.

Ultimately, all taxes are paid for by taxpayers. Whether it's directly through income and sales taxes, or indirectly through corporate taxes which get passed on to customers as price increases and employees as pay cuts (or smaller pay raises). The end result is the same - less money for taxpayers, more money for the government.

You can argue that we need more taxation. But never make the mistake of thinking that taxing corporations has zero impact on taxpayers. It has exactly the same economic effect as directly raising taxes on taxpayers. The only thing that gets changed is who gets blamed (people curse the companies for raising their prices, instead of the government for collecting so many taxes).

* Numerical example for people who still don't get it. Say you make $50k/yr and pay $10k/yr in taxes, thus leaving you with $40k/yr to spend on yourself. The country changes law eliminating income tax, and getting all funding from corporate taxes instead. Do you think you'll now get $50k/yr to spend? No. Companies now have to pay an extra $10k/yr per citizen in taxes. So either your pay gets cut to $40k/yr, or prices increase 20% which after adjusting for inflation leaves you with $40k/yr just like before. You see, average real income is purely a function of productivity. And changing how taxes are collected doesn't change average productivity per capita. So where from the economy you extract taxes can't change the amount of real take-home pay. It's all just shell game.

>. Unless Larry took features away

The first thing decided about Perl6 was that some things would go away, meaning you wouldn't have automatic full backward compatibility. Certain constructs that result in a dense line of punctuation marks were an early example.

To be clear, you can now do those things in a more clear, consistent, general and intuitive way - the power wasn't removed, rather special cases and sparse syntax were replaced with concepts that are more generally applicable, using a more clear syntax.

Perl6 began July 19, 2000, announced by Larry Wall in his State of the Onion address.

Yes, it will indeed include the feature you requested, via this new operator, which looks much like Perl's other operators: :O ==8

There's actually a lot of truth in that joke. It's been fifteen years not because nothing was being done, but because a lot was done, and done very thoughtfully, after thorough analysis. The goal was not to get it to market quickly (ala Java) or to solve a pressing business need right now (Google's assorted languages and tools). The goal was to do it RIGHT, really right. Based on the Perl idea of right, of course. Perl6 is like Pavarotti - neither everyone's favorite nor appropriate for all occasions, but damn good at what it does.

Sounds like a plan to cut off your nose to spiderface. Never spiderface: no good can come of that.

From a decade ago until now, the Perl devs have spent those ten years improving upon what you either misunderstood or are exaggerating for comedic effect.

Java was rushed out quickly, and early versions of Java made that obvious. Perl6 is the opposite - they've taken all the time needed to perfectly implement their vision, to make it exactly what it's supposed to be. Not everything is nail, so a hammer isn't the right tool for every job, but Perl6 is a mighty fine hammer. If you have a task well suited to what Perl6 is made for, it's a fine tool for the job.

As you noted, the altitude of the locker room is effectively the same as the field, so altitude would not be a factor. You made me curious about barometric pressure, so I looked it up. The highest-ever recorded pressure was less than 1 PSI above standard pressure, so even a record-breaking barometer reading wouldn't explain it.

The problem with that is that it has to be live streaming video or else sports fans won't be interested. For some weird reason, they just can't stand to watch sports if it's not live.

Were you joking? Jails in many cities in California now require you to pay for your stay, unless you want to be shipped to a state prison instead. We're not quite the statist utopia yet, but Cali comes close.

Yes, yes, we've heard it all before, it's those 99% of police who are bad apples that give the other 1% a bad name. Totally unfair of me to overgeneralize from several such occurrences in my actual life when arguing about someone else's fantasy.