because random bus people are a grave threat to democracy

unlike gerrymandering, disenfranchisement, plutocratic corruption...

Voter fraud is a nonissue fearmongered and blown out of proportion to enact the real disenfranchisement: Republicans pass laws making voting harder for blacks and the poor.

http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...

It's interesting because it's a last ditch desperate effort to preserve a voting base of old white conservative people which is quite literally dying off.

Then there is the gerrymandering to make sure the Republican voters always dominate in any given Rorschach ink blot of a voting "district."

But after that, Republicans have a real problem keeping and growing a voter base.

Long term, they either die off, or they radically change their ideology.

Wasn't that the other programming language whos users would look down on us Basic programmers? My good friend from school was one of those. Now he's a teacher and I'm a software developer.

Pretty much sums it up, doesn't it?

OK, jokes aside: Seriously, who cares how a PL is "rated" - whatever that's supposed to mean. How much it's used and how it gets the job done, or, more precisely, how much do I get paid for using it is what counts.
Example: I love Python. I'm measurably more productive in Python. But I do PHP at work. Why? Wordpress and Typo3 are built with PHP. Python only has Plone and that has almost no market here in Germany.

Its that simple.

And to be honest, there are many neat exotic programming languages out there - all of which I would love to have the time to look into, but don't. Pascal definitely isn't on that list.

My advice to anyone today would be to let go of Pascal and however it is "rated" and learn some other flash exotic language - perhaps one of those countless new ones that run on the Java VM (Scala, Closure, etc.), no?

My 2 cents.

Why don't we just put MANTIS and Super Force on the list while we're at it...

"STNG fans can't cope with anything that doesn't have a patronising explanation..."

You're confusing TNG with Voyager.

It wasn't impossible to write cross platform browser stuff in the late 1990s, when most corporations started this whole "We'll standardize on browser X" policy making, but it required a discipline that had most developers throwing their hands up in the air in disgust.

I had these arguments many times back then. It was laziness more than anything else. We were writing cross-platform web applications without problems at that time. We were trying to convince other developers to follow the same route, but their attitude was mainly "IE has 90%+ market share, why bother?" They didn't believe a time would come when proprietary IE code wouldn't work - even if other browsers caught on, they were expecting them to copy the IEisms. They certainly didn't believe that even later versions of Internet Explorer wouldn't support their crappy code.

- IE4+ was the most standard. Yes, really. Those versions had a relatively complete implementation of CSS.

Let's not overstate things. Netscape bet on JSSS and when the W3C selected CSS as the standard instead, they scrambled to fix Netscape 4 to convert from CSS to JSSS on the fly. So Netscape 4 was exceptionally bad at CSS. Internet Explorer 4 was merely very bad at CSS. Opera was ahead at that time. I don't think you can call IE4 "relatively complete" unless you only compare it to Netscape 4, which was unusually bad.

There is no reason that we have to pick one and abandon work on the others. I don't see that the same resources go into solving more than one, except that the meteor and volcano problem have one solution in common - be on another planet when it happens.

The clathrate problem and nuclear war have the potential to end the human race while it is still on one planet, so we need to solve both of them ASAP.

Or would you prefer Star Wars be a bland story about absolutely good guys versus absolutely evil guys.

I dunno, worked pretty good for the original trilogy. Darth Vader is dressed in black and will blow up your planet if you cross him. And yet nobody condemns the original trilogy as bland.

The Senate is necessary. They were inept due to bureaucracy and corruption, and thus explained why some Jedi and others felt they had to do things outside the system. That was the point.

How do you know the senate was corrupt? When did any Jedi do anything "outside the system"? Seriously, work it through: how is the Republic corrupt, apart from the bare fact that Palpatine wins in the end? How is the corruption substantiated? It's pretty obvious that Lucas wanted the Republic to be corrupt, sclerotic, superannuated, bureaucratic, whatever, because that's the trope. But, he never really showed how it was, or why.

I mean like, when Amidala goes to the senate and demands justice for Naboo, Terence Stamp is going to do it but then someone else demands an investigation. OK. Why isn't the word of a Queen and two Jedi enough for Valorum? Why is an investigation corrupt? It's all "imputed qualities," we're merely told, by Palpatine of all people, that the senate is corrupt and bureaucratic. And despite this, Senator Jar Jar, with no real opposition is able to propose the creation of an army and the senate straight up and does it with no debate whatsoever. They seem to be really efficient when they want to be.

Right from the beginning, we are told that the Empire is evil and therefore the Rebels must be the good guys. We don't see that developed. We are just TOLD that and we must believe it.

Are you kidding? The Empire kills everybody on a little ship they easily overpower; Vader snaps the neck of a rebel subaltern just because he doesn't know what he wants to hear; the Death Star blows up Alderaan and nearly destroys the moon of Yavin. Tarkin flatly states that the fear of his battle station will oppress the entire galaxy, and orders the death of Leia's family, friends and planet right in front of her.

When does, say, the trade federation do anything of the type? They blockade a planet, but nobody on the planet actually seems to suffer. They demand a treaty signed, but we never actually find out what the treaty is for, or what it entails. And they're in cahoots with Sidious, but we have no idea what they actually have to gain from the dispute. I guess it stands to reason they have to gain something, but there are no stakes, there is no drama.

i stopped reading there. you're a hopeless moron

seizure in the usa is already way out of control

the recent federal review of asset seizure laws is welcome, but weak:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

worrying about banks seizing funds is the least of your problems

call it zuckerbucks

it's for zuckers

so you're ok with child porn and death threats?

can i take photos of you having sex with your significant other and put it on a billboard in your hometown? it's just free speech dude

everything has limits. including free speech. not because i say so, but because of simple logic and reason: it ends where it impinges on the freedoms of others. classic example: yelling fire in a crowded theatre

the fact that i recognize that freedoms are not boundless, but logically constrained by other people's freedoms, does not make me an authoritarian, it just makes me smarter than you

Point of order, the annual average humidity is lower in Dallas than it is in LA.

go to google news

type in "shooting"

and let's dip into the ocean today

http://www.newsday.com/news/ne...

http://www.post-gazette.com/lo...

http://www.ketv.com/news/omaha...

http://www.twincities.com/crim...

http://miami.cbslocal.com/2015...

http://www.whsv.com/home/headl...

etc.

etc.

tomorrow it will be another collection of dozens of shootings

every fucking day in the usa. oh it happens in other countries. at a much lower rate. because they make guns harder for douchebags to get

the usa enjoys no amazing lower rate of rape, robbery, assault, etc., because of owning lots of guns, as compared to our social and economic peers, we are no crime free paradise. so owning a gun doesn't confer magic anti-crime properties. it does confer something though: a massive increase in homicide. pointlessly. needlessly. every little confusion or altercation in the usa has to lead to death. and this is somehow better

completely unnecessary, completely fucking stupid, and completely ok according to my fellow countrymen who are fucking braindead douchebags

we need gun control in the usa badly

and we are going to get it

you can't ward off logic and common sense with stupidity, lies, and propaganda forever

if i read something, i expect it to have a fucking point. your post, for example, has a point. but if it's a meandering brain diarrhea dump, i'm going to complain. i don't have the right to do that?