I guess someone didn't know the difference between POS software and POS software.

Doing that would eliminate almost all support for passing a bill to prevent domestic spying. What happens after he leaves office?

Yes, I'm sure that what you measured was productivity.

Maybe an even better measure of productivity would be a measure of how much energy your GPU uses?

Actually, that reminds me... earlier today I read that you can make some interesting stuff by microwaving some graphite. Apparently it's "just like popcorn".

As opposed to just randomly matching people so as to not have to learn things about people in general nor their users in particular?

edit: 1) Users of OKCupid trust OKCupid's rating system enough to try harder when it suggests a good match

No, it means that:
1) People trust OKCupid's rating system enough to try harder when it suggests a good match
2) OKCupid has to take into account their stated match rating, not just length of conversation, when trying to use conversation length as data to improve their algorithm.

Except for when it comes to actually building stuff with it.

The potential is there, obviously... but compare to how long it took to roll some up into simple tubes in an economically acceptable manner (ie, nanotubes are only just getting some actual use). I'm sure graphene as a computer component will be totally awesome -- but not until someone finds an *easy* way to build it, at most only 100X the cost of the equivalent in silicon.

I don't really think it's the government's business to tell merchants what they must accept in exchange for their goods. For example, they shouldn't be forced to accept the $10,000 US dollar bill, even if it is legal tender, nor whatever flavor of credit card. I'm sure the merchants can figure out for themselves what to accept in payment if they want to have customers.

They may think so, but it is people who decide what is money and what is not. People have burnt money as fuel in the past, when it was cheaper than coal or wood.

Well, because now we can cure even the most obscure diseases that afflict mice.

The NSA owns your computer, and the computer you want to trade bitcoins with*. They could enforce any regulations if they were willing to admit to this. Being a cryptocurrency rather than a physical one also means that they can vanish your money with the click of a button instead of having to personally visit you.

* Maybe I'm just paranoid, but there are so many hardware and software components, any of which could have backdoors or keyloggers installed. They could demand any domestic product secretly contain them from manufacture, and "inspect" any imports. Even easier with domestic software, or they could get a few of their agents helping to develop the software (I hear they have lots of talented folks).

Yes.

If you don't like it, go start your own anarchist country.

The laws should be identical to the extent possible, between different forms of currency.

you'd have a vast library of libraries. Something like CPAN or something you'd get in the C world. Libraries written to perform some task and nothing more. Then documented with care and the API published.

Anyone wants to do something, they take the library that appeals to them and adds it to their program and build up a program from these bits.

Now the problem today is that a) some only use libs that come with the OS or language framework, b) the libraries that are out there are shit, written quickly and for a bit of a mishmash of scenarios.

For example, you can get an XML parser and it will work perfectly. It will only parse XML though, but then, that's what only what you want from a XML parser library! .... well, except it also comes with network routines and specialised SOAP parsing and a suite of http helper methods, including a web services subsystem :-(

So the problem is not so much that we have libraries, but that the libraries we have are not good enough as library code.

I'll agree there - thought its not Java at fault necessarily - not unless you lump in a bunch of other languages like VB, C#, JS etc.

The problem is of the library code you're using. Libraries should be small, well defined, easy to use, and documented.

The problem today is (especially with code written in Java, .NET or JS) that it is knocked up to solve some problem but the problem is not only not properly understood, but the code that is provided doesn't solve it particularly well. Its not defined as a discrete task, more as part of some greater whole that someone thought "worked ok for me in my circumstances, so should be fine for others too".

If libs were properly specified as libraries and their API documented fully, then we would see more code reuse and better, cheaper code. If only, but the cost of making such a library tends to be too slow and difficult for the 'I want it now' majority, and this is why we continue to have this kind of shitty code problem.