Yeah, you're right, you can't really fix stupid.

Do you know what a "Dixiecrat" is?

Doesn't sound like it. None of you "Lincoln was a Republican!!!1!1" idiots do. Well, either that, or your cynicism knows no bounds.

Or you can refuse to get into the hash table.

I always found it quite amusing that it's much easier to immigrate to US as a relative (and I don't mean someone really close like a spouse or a child, but e.g. parents?) than it is as a skilled worker. Of all the countries that I've looked into, US is the only one like that. All others (of interest to me) had shorter immigration tracks through work than through family.

Hi, another libertarian-turned-liberal through life experience here. Well, not liberal, in truth, I prefer the term "left libertarian" as well - but hardly anyone in US knows what it is, and many people think it's like hot snow.

And the philosophy you describe is pretty much exactly what I came to espouse, as well. Freedom and minimum intervention as a foundation, but I've come to recognize that the degree of intervention that's necessary for a functioning society in practice is way more than most traditionalist libertarians consider their limit.

Also 100% in agreement on GOP needing to go libertarian if we are to see any true inter-party competition moving the society in the right direction. And I think this will happen sooner rather than later. They can try to cheat the demographic shifts for a while (with gerrymandering, voter ID laws and such), but those still give only a brief respite, and the clock is ticking. They'll have to go libertarian or yield the system to Democrats in its entirety. In fact, barring any tectonic changes in GOP platform, 2004 shall remain the last year this country had a Republican president for a long, long time.

And you can already see signs of the coming fracturing in the party. Sure, GOP "libertarians" are still insanely conservative, but the difference between a guy like Bush or Romney, and Rubio or Paul, is quite impressive. A few more electoral cycles and they will grudgingly accept that their "small government" platform contradicts their messaging on social issues - if only pragmatically, just to get more votes.

Or maybe we'll actually make electoral reform happen first, and then there will be more parties. I can't really call any specific one my own, but of all the small parties out there, the Modern Whigs approach and platform appeals to me most.

You can, if the benefits aren't instant, but rather kick in gradually as you work and pay taxes (possibly the faster, the more taxes you pay - hell, why not even let people dial their own rate above the certain required minimum).

In fact, it would probably make all the social programs solvent again, at least so long as the rest of the world still has people left in it (who have enough money for a ticket, but you could hand out loans for that, too). ~

I think he is referring to all immigrants, not just H1-B.

The only catch is that if you also have a sponsored green card application with the original employer, you have to start from scratch if you switch.

And the queue for green cards is, what, about 5 years currently?

This is very messy code.

It could have been a lot shorter, too, with something like bottle.

99% percent of the time, people use the search to basically type just enough text to get the item they want on top, and then press Enter. If your list of installed apps doesn't change frequently, over time you just learn what to type, and it becomes sort of a keyboard shortcut. You don't need a fullscreen search screen for that.

BTW, Start Menu in Win10 is not fixed size. It grows as you pin more tiles to it.

Have you actually seen Win 8.1? What you describe is what's coming up in Win 10 only; Win 8.1 still had the new Start screen in all its glory, not in the least resembling the Start Menu of Win7.

An interpreter would be slower. A JIT-compiler, OTOH...

VB6 compiler is written in C++.

What's even funnier is that C# and VB.NET compilers are also written in C++, even today (yes, there's Roslyn, but Roslyn-based compilers haven't shipped stable releases yet; the ones in VS 2013 are still the C++ ones).

You mean, like this?

It's actually really simple (though I agree that it is surprising): if an identifier is assigned inside a code block (which is e.g. a body of function or a class; but not a body of a loop or a conditional statement), that variable is treated as a local variable throughout that entire block, unless there is a "global" declaration for it in that block. So:

x = 1; y = 2
 
def f():
  x = y
 
def g():
  y = x
 
def h():
  global x
  x = y
 
def m():
  print(x)
  x = y

Inside f, x is a local (because it is assigned to), and y is a global. Inside g, y is a local and x is a global. Inside h, both x and y are globals.

This gets more interesting in m, where you'll get an error trying to read an unassigned variable when printing x, because x is treated as a local throughout the body, not after assignment (and the scope is still lexical, not dynamic - it doesn't even matter if assignment executes or not).