Of course I like a GUI desktop environment. I can put a lot of xterms on one screen then.

I'd never name a kid "Ed" for the editor. Too many unpleasant memories on a variety of systems. Never use an editor named "ed" if you've got a choice.

8-10 years ago, I was working on an application that was annoyingly slow, and a profiler showed that 80% of the time was spent in one particular function that was long and repetitive. I rolled up the calculations as tightly as I could, using as little duplicate code as I could, and sped the app up markedly. I roughly halved the amount of time that function took.

Or a better language.

Seriously, I can type a whole lot faster than I can think, so "for (" is a mere wisp of thought, with no delay whatsoever.

Also, if you're copy-pasting code, you're going to get too much or too little sometime, or leave something unchanged that should have been changed. This is likely to be the worst of it, if you're reasonably competent.

If there's something you specifically want me to read, give me more indications. I found a discussion thread on my own, read the article, and skimmed through the talk page.

Earlier, you said that " I don't believe fractional reserve banking with bitcoin can exist". That's a pretty strong statement. The general consensus of what I've read is that it could exist, and people have varying predictions about whether it's likely to, and I certainly haven't run into any convincing arguments why it can't happen. Either you've not given me a good pointer to your own arguments, or they aren't convincing.

It seems to me that it may take a while to get a bank of sufficient reputation, but certainly Mt. Gox could have done it well before its collapse. People were using it as a bank.

I don't have to find an example of something to prove that it can exist. Are you willing to say that self-driving cars cannot exist on Minnesota highways? There aren't any there, and there never have been any.

FWIW, I haven't been noticing stuff like that in what I've been reading, and I'm a pretty good natural proofreader. Perhaps we've been reading books from different sources.

TSA screenings are often physically invasive, and generally require somebody to submit to groping or nude photos. They may not be effective at all, and in any case provide only a really, really tiny amount of additional security. The TSA was first put in place when airliners were used as weapons, and it's been continued to simply "protect" passengers on what really is an incredibly safe method of transportation.

As a US citizen, I welcome changes that make people free to strike out and start their own businesses without having to worry about one health care emergency wiping them out.

Driving a car is dangerous, too. You can do a lot of damage with one. I don't see a major difference.

You seem to be basing your beliefs on a rather strict interpretation of the Fourth Amendment. It protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, and doesn't define "unreasonable". It then puts a requirement on warrants, for those cases where a warrant is required, but doesn't say that warrants are required for searches. I consider it reasonable to require restaurants to be inspected and banks to be audited. I'm not at all sure about DUI checkpoints, and I think the TSA has gone way beyond reasonable.

Apparently you've never had to run a payroll.

First, you're saying 8 hours a day. However, this only matters for international flights, and they can expect to get in pretty much whenever. We want to have coverage for more than when your flight happens to come in. Think 24 hours a day. That's something like 40 or 50 additional agents. Remember that number.

Second, people cost a lot more than you actually pay them. You have to pay FICA on top of that, there's likely to be benefits of some sort, and you need to manage these guys, hire and fire, and keep track of everything. That's going to push the cost up by probably 50%.

Third, these guys have to do more than look at passports. They have to be able to deal with what might come up as customs officers. This involves training and supervision, and you might not be able to get good enough people at $10/hour.

Overall, then, you're massively underestimating the costs. I'm going to estimate well over a million a year to keep these stations staffed, and I'm being conservative here.

As far as costs go, I really doubt it's general government incompetence. I suspect it's at the Congressional and Presidential level, where irrational budget decisions are made because neither party wants to go along with what the other sees as rational. (Remember the Sequester, which actually cost more money than not sequestering?)

No, that we may as well do it carefully and try to learn from it first. We're going to get an Ebola victim anyway, and the more we know about it the better.

You know what was so nice about Borland's Turbo Pascal when it came out? It was being able to write, compile, and run programs without restarting applications.

Consider my first C compiler for my home computer. I had to bring up an editor and write the code. Then I got out of the editor and ran the compiler and then the linker, and then I had an executable. Then I got Turbo Pascal, and I could work on programs without invoking multiple applications and switching disks. Yay! I'm a lot less impressed with IDEs when I can have multiple xterms and, for example, just keep vim up all the time.

We're currently using Visual Studio and Subversion. I'm not claiming that Visual Studio is better than vim/g++/gdb/make/gprof/etc., but it works well enough. My main complaint is how slowly C++11 features get into Visual C++.

Look, a live human body with ebola is going to enter the US sometime or other. The incubation period can be weeks, which is plenty of time to fly to some nice East Coast megapolis.

I think it highly likely that an Ebola victim is coming in on an airplane sometime. If we fly one in now, very carefully, we are likely to be better prepared for the guy who boards the plane to New York in the time after infection and before symptoms start, and who starts feeling flu-like after a few days here, and then starts leaking blood.

Look, MegaMultinational, Inc. can be ordered to do things by a US court. This may include making a request of MegaMultinational BmbH, who may reject it as illegal. If they have direct access to data, though, they can be compelled to hand it over.