Wait, from your description he really *does* sound like a random schmuck who accidentally acquired a lot of money and is doing the silly things that any random schmuck would do with it. I'm not sure how that makes him "cool" though.

Uh, forgive me for not understanding QM, but how exactly would we *know* that the cat is in a superposition of states? As soon as we check, they would collapse, no?

Unless of course we can cause the probability wave of the cat state to interfere with itself in some way not classically explainable, but I have a hard time thinking of a way to do that.

I use Subversion on a daily basis, and I believe everything positive you said about ClearCase holds true for Subversion, except point 9. There are some philosophical objections to 9 (you should test the resulting code before committing it anyway), but I don't know if it's a design decision or a missing feature.

That's not to say that Subversion doesn't have problems of its own though, but using CVS as a representation of the state of version control systems is like judging proprietary software on the basis of Windows 95.

+4 Double Standards

I think that's quite common; Sweden itself has a limit of 4%. Which in my view may be good as it kept some xenophobic parties out of parliament (unlike in many other European countries this election, I'm sad to say). It also makes things like debates and campaign funding easier to manage, otherwise we would have hundreds of parties which would all have to be treated equal.

They aren't saying that 50% of *people* in the UK are sharing illegally, though.. they are saying that 50% of *traffic* is illegal, presumably counting by data volume. That 50% could be caused by a minority of people.

Not that I support them, but we shouldn't misrepresent their made up statistics.

Finally someone who understands the role of chaos/complexity in finance - it seems to me that even economists in general have never viewed it that way (though some are working on it).

I don't think you can come up with the tool you are suggesting, though, because the tool would alter the game and would thus have to take *itself* into account in the model, and it can only do this through the simplifications you want to avoid.

I think you're talking about the FRA law, allowing domestic wiretapping of all data traffic. This article is about IPRED, which makes it possible for copyright holders to request customer information from ISPs given IP addresses suspected of copyright infringement. Or something like that.

Speaking as a Swedish software developer, I don't know any local professional in the field who would even consider writing identifiers and comments in anything other than English. Documentation is a different issue where the choice depends upon the target audience: if it has a chance of being international, it's always in English.

I think the reason can be summed up in four points:
culture - IT is done in English, that's just how it is.
literature - Who would translate The Pragmatic Programmer to Swedish?
communication - It's the lingua franca of software engineering in international settings.
harmonization - All APIs are in English, so having Swedish identifiers would just look stupid and not read very well.

Talk about selective memory. Did you miss the global financial crisis? Everybody elses economy is in the crapper too. Including China.

Time Nazis would make an excellent Doctor Who episode..