Simple, I saw it happen to someone close to me.

Unfortunately you can't ethically perform the experiments that would prove this in the way that you would like. The fact is that a lot of medical evidence comes from looking at the results of long-term population studies which can show correlation but can never prove causation.

What you can or cannot believe isn't important, the truth is that canabis can have a devastating effect on the developing teenage mind. Even if you don't consider that enough to warrant criminalization, that does not justify insulting those of us who do.

Books are limited by physical constraits which require a continuous text to be divided into pages. Computers are not so restricted and provide flexible layout and continuous scrolling. In this situation a portrait screen is more appopriate because the eye finds it difficult to scan very long lines of text (which is why books are usually portrait and why wide pages are often divided into multiple columns).

The good news is that computers give you the flexibility to choose whichever option you prefer.

My personal view is that if you are generating very long lines of output or typing very long command lines, you are doing something wrong.

I get 150 columns in portrait mode which is enough for me, YMMV.

Coding: You get way more lines of code on the screen

Text: It is easier to read pages on top each other than side-by-side

Command-line: You can see more lines of output

Make sure you rotate by -360 degress in the Southern Hemisphere or the electrons will get tangled.

You should be OK with DisplayPort for 4K, it has been around for a while. HDMI is more recent and therefore more marginal.

And I totally agree about waiting for 60Hz, 30Hz feels very sluggish for interactive work. I just got a 120Hz monitor and that feels pretty slick for desktops (as well as games, of course!)

And C got the block syntax from B which got it from BCPL which was a simplified version of CPL which was influnced by the first block structured language, ALGOL.

I was taugh ALGOL at University, though I had already been "mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration" by BASIC before that...

Nope, ENIAC couldn't do that either:

"The freeze on design in 1943 meant that the [ENIAC] computer design would lack some innovations that soon became well-developed, notably the ability to store a program."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

Nope, the program was not stored in the computer, it was configured using switches and cables.

But perhaps you meant to say "EDSAC" :)

It depends where you went to school. I was taught that EDSAC was the first fully programmable computer. Earlier devices (including ENIAC) had to be physically re-configured to run each different program using cables and switches, rather than just loading a new program into the same memory that is used for data.

Even if we had known about Colossus at that time (and it is possible that some of my teachers did...) it would not have qualified as a stored-program computer.

Is there an Internet Law that says "Whatever the real cause of the problem, there is always someone who will blame Microsoft"?

This is a natural consequence of random changes to personal and social preferences over time. You grow up with the particular set of preferences that is accepted by the majority and they become your norm. Over time the preferences in society change and the majority opinion changes so you naturally move from being in the majority to the minority. What was once the accepted majority view becomes a minority view and your opinons become out of step with the rest of society. The older you get, the more this happens and the more you feel out of touch with the "modern" world.

The real problem comes when we consider the majority opinion to be morally superior to the minority opinion. Since these opinions change randomly over time it becomes inevitable that views and attitudes that we form when young become less morally acceptable when we get old, and the attitude of those around us becomes less morally acceptable to us. So we are left with the choice of conforming to the current morality or sticking with the morality that was prevalent when we first formed our moral framework.

The alternative is to follow an absolute moral framework that does not change over time. In this case you will always be out of step with the rest of the world, but at least it won't get worse as you get older!

No, science is just a tool that can be used to predict the outcome of any changes that we make to the world. Science is amoral and has been been used to create the issues you describe as much as it has alleviated them.

Science does not say that poverty, disease or conflict are "problems" so it cannot give "hope" that they can be reduced.

If the ISA is based on single assignment then the compiler will still have to transform the code into this form. In practice the compiler does this anyway when it can and super-scaler hardware does a good job of executing this kind of code. The problem (returning to the subject of the thread) is that not all code fits this pattern and in these cases a single-assignment ISA will perform particularly badly so it is not suitable for general purpose processors.

Researchers have be developing ISAs for decades (including the single-assignment approach on dataflow computers in the 1980s) and the current mainstream ISAs are a reflection of that research. There is no magic new way of executing general purpose code.

I'll bite.

The AC above makes it clear that we are talking about people using language features appropriately, so how do "compiler-recognized interfaces" provide such a significant benefit over appropriate use of C++11 abstract base classes?