People seem to miss the opportunity for incredibly bad behaviour. What about if a company like Google starts reporting on who you want to vote for? There are a lot of reasons the post office doesn't open the mail -- and our electronic equivalents should respect that same privacy.

Agreed. Even good outcomes do not justify bad behaviour. We should not be happy that Google is perusing the content of our E-mail with anything but automated tools (for advertising, etc.)

Canada has spent over a billion dollars on genomic research in the last seven years or so, this is an interesting project but he's a bit shy of 'world leader' status with this investment.

Where's all the pro-science crowd who keeps telling us to blindly trust medical science when the stories of people (mistakenly) avoiding certain well-tested drugs come up?

The rhetoric does nothing but defeat their actual viewpoint and this is why -- bad science is being done, and it needs to be accounted for to the sceptics, no matter who insane they may seem. Bad science is the enemy of good science because it undermines trust in the system.

The people who respond on Slashdot about Linus aren't in any position to have opinions but they feel the right to share them anyway.

Meanwhile, Linus is in every position to have the right to his own opinions about the things he rants about.

Oh quit whining. Asking incredibly gifted people to continually stifle their feelings because of everyone else's is just as unfair.

The GCC people don't have to care what he thinks, but if they do, now they know. Nobody got berated in person, nobody got flogged, nobody got fired (yet).

I for one hate dealing with people who tiptoe around their feelings. If I ask someone what they think of something, I want to know what they think, not some edited version they prepared to spare my feelings.

Based on the NSA's spying behaviour and the number of federally sanctioned assassinations (by drone or otherwise), I could've sworn the commies lead the US into darkness, not the other way around.

Its only brilliant if you do something nobody else has already done. Imitating success is not brilliant, its obvious.

If you value that book Amazon doesn't sell, and its publisher isn't bright enough to sell it to you somehow, they deserve to go out of business.

Actually I'd argue it is the government's job to protect cultural value; that's precisely why they fund libraries and museums. They just shouldn't be doing it by forcing Amazon to charge shipping.

So you think Amazon should know exactly how many books its going to ship in advance so it can divide a known quantity (bulk shipping costs) by an unknown (total shipments)?

Or maybe you think Amazon should retroactively bill people for their shipping at the end of the year?

Amazon can charge you $50/book for shipping if they want, or $0.01 ... so long as they're paying the shipping company what the company expects to be paid, it can't possibly matter.

Then maybe you should check again.

What you meant to say was that "even though writing your own JavaScript identical to what Dart can be translated into would execute just as quickly, I doubt the capability of the Dart compiler to find speed benefits in JavaScript that I wouldn't find."

See optimizing C++ compiler vs. ASM arguments.

"If you can convert C++ to Assembler, I don't get the point of C++ ..."

So you can write your code in a nicer language, obviously.

What problem have you ever had with indent-based parsing?

Many many people have a problem reading other peoples' C and C++ code because of how it is not always enforced and allows some incredibly poor legibility.

You may not personally have this problem *writing* code but you've almost certainly had it when reading code.

Not all Python is readable, but forcing programmers to use good style is one of the first problems in a braces-based parsing environment. Python just formalized it.