when George Bush's title "the last US President" should be the more permanent "The Last US President"? Yeah, yeah, flamebait me into oblivious, but no matter how leftist you are, you know Obama doesn't even bother with the law even if you agree with his goals. At least, Bush hired lawyers before deciding on where to walk the fine line between legal and illegal. Obama's more of a "law shmoe" kind of executive. So his DOT puts out SciFi as prediction for the future. Sure. Why not. He can't say we are in a recession because that would mean that we are. He can't say that Romney's plan for solving the national health care problems was better than his plan (and than Romney's plan for solving MA health care problems), he can't say that Russia is waging war in the Middle East (and winning) in order to divert attention from its war in Europe. Never mind that he can't say that the only way he could figure out how to solve the housing crises was to inflate the prices of everything else until they kept up with the prices of inflated housing market. So he puts out SciFi from DOT. Why not?

How to lie with statistics... "up to"? What's that "down to"? What's average and what's the median?

You can only expect people to buy the "most of world's data is stored on IBM mainframes" crap for so long. Virtualization made mainframes irrelevant. No one ever needed the full resources of a mainframe. They were only used to run multiple virtualized instances. The cloud made the difference between instances running on one piece vs instances running on multiple pieces of iron irrelevant because of cloud storage. You CAN compute a billion transactions in a day and then not use the hardware used for those calculations for the rest of the day now. Mainframe model simply can't compete with it. Oh, and all the legacy code which is presumably irreplacable because no one understands it... well, all the language research which was done because of the domain specific language fad has now made it trivil to tranlsate solutions between languages fairly efficiently. IBM simply has lost every single niche they had up to now. It's not the death of an industry as some suggest... just of the business model of that particular company.

If someone is instrumental to a law practice, they get a partnership. Why shouldn't the same model apply to other endeavors where people are required to be highly competent and creative in their endeavors towards increasing the outcome of a business. The 9-to-5 model is a remnant of the age where people worked on assembly lines and performed repetitive tasks. If you want individuals whose work is non-repetitive and requires half-a-lifetime of dedication to master, why should they settle for anything less than a partnership?

From the article:

Also from the article:

Simple question: how is a civilian gaining control, without authorization, of command-and-control equipment of police departments and federal agencies not a threat to human life? Did he inform them of their security vulnerabilities in order to allow them to fix em? Granted, it's not his responsibility to do so, but hacking into multiple government facilities for any purposes other than concern for their safety should at least indicate that he is a person worth watching, shouldn't it? It's not like there is a kill-on-sight order against him. He is on a watch list.

How is this different from what Harvard Apparatus is already doing in clinical studies?

Well, technically speaking, if your C++ spins python instances, it's JIT as well. Not to mention that it might be generating and loading shared libs (or at least accepting some sort of signed injected shared libs) in order to deal with unpredictability of changing requirements. I am actually somewhat baffled that the same people who think that dynamically generated shared libs are clever can be the people who think that JIT runtimes are crutches.

Having said that, let me actually get to your point. Semantically, C++ is C + syntactic sugar. So, while it's not implemented this way (anymore), it can be. So can any other language which has a run-time similar to that of C. Once you allow for language costructs which call into the native C libs on a platform, your language is good to go to be pre-processed into C at compile time and than compiled with whatever compiles your C.

BTW, syntactic sugar is not an insult. Syntactic sugar is a Good Thing (TM). It allows to offload to machines work which would otherwise have to be done by humans.

an hour by train or 2 hours by car.

Except that this

is not the case. Giulliani to deal with 2-3 feet of snow in 1 night ('95 or '96) and the city was back to normal within a few days. Effective didn't require national guard or anything. The city managed it. Effective leaders are effective.

Not really. There was a time when NYC got 2.5 feet of snow under Giuliani. Subways didn't run for a full day or two AFTER the snow. Effective government is effective. Delusional government is full of hot air.

nature laughs.

Minerals (such as table salt) can be found without any additives containing DNA.

"Cheaper" is hardly the issue. Salaries can be adjusted. But forcing citizens to compete on workplace conditions with "guests" for whom getting fired is an equivalent of getting deported is quite another story.

it's portable, doesn't require a runtime and had bindings in most languages you'll want to use.

OO is a nuisance. If C just added direct access to the return value space instead pushing the whole return value on stack, OO would have been an esoteric footnote in some theoretical comp sci book. Instead, you get a paradigm which mixes data and code in one name space and completely takes attention away from the duality between data and functions. Oh, and without yield, no one would have heard of Python. You'd just here the gripes about whitespace being overly restrictive from everyone who wants braces. yield is what makes Python elegant. Metaclasses (ie, post-creation templates) and descriptors (ie, pre-creation templates) are actually somewhat cludgy. You understand that you can do everything in Python without ever having to worry about creating a single queue simply because of yield, do you not? Do you really not see how that simplifies code?Breadth-first tree traversal via simple recursion? Show me what other language will let you do that.