Perl and C are my primary languages, but I used Ada for years in times past.

In Ada you have to specify things like upper and lower bounds and floating point precision for nearly every such variable. That means you have to consult with the manual of the specific target board. It was a chore, but during run time Ada kept track behind-the-scenes and let you know if an out of bounds number was created, or if something was trying to access an array with an out of bounds index. There are other constructs that are no fun, and are foreign to other languages.

There is no other language that forces a programmer to do so many things. Ada will never be popular for fun programming. On the other hand, I would love to see the world turn to Ada for all mission critical ventures.

I did the same sorts of things when I was 5-14. Stores used to sell rolls of what we called "caps" for cap guns. Most boys had such things. I liked to create an explosive device from the caps and put it in a pipe. I was thrilled at the loud boom, and of course at the beauty of the explosion. It was educational, exciting, and it kept me out of my parent's hair. There were also pellets that looked like little stones. I would put them in a paint can with drops of water. I would hurry and slam the paint can lid on because a gas was quickly released by the stones and water. I would put my foot on the can and light a match to the pinhole in the back of the can. It is still the loudest boom I have ever heard. I cannot remember what the pellets were.

Um, in case those school officials are reading this, that was over 30 years ago. Please do not send the police.

A passive cooling system means you do not have to pump the water. Hotter water rises to the top because there are less molecules per given volume, hence less weight, than cooler water. Actually implementing a gravity driven cooling system is a big deal.

> His reasons are coherent, visionary and easily searchable. If you do not have the time to trouble yourself reading up on the guy, I have no time to waste on you.

Absolutely!

First, Zontar_Thing_From_Ve sets himself up as an expert on the subject, then basically - reading between the lines - declares people who are willing to take stands to be fanatics, then declares - again reading between the lines - that they are fanatics about most things, and states "they do not get at all that they are the weird ones."

What hubris!

> NT didn't really take off until after Win95 had beaten OS/2

Yes, that is true. Good memory!

This is simply not true.

I am not suggesting that MS will do well with their hardware products. And you are right in that MS now appears to hold sway with IT. However, that is far from how they started out.

For those who have long enough memories, there was an MS versus IBM world, with MSDOS versus IBM's DOS (Disk Operating System, not Denial Of Service). IBM held the corporate IT guys. MSDOS had no one but the masses to appeal to. The MSDOS was just as good and was nearly half the price. IBM with their hubris thought the masses would stick with IBM because they were IBM. The MSDOS got good reviews so the masses went for the much cheaper DOS. That is how MS grew so large and so fast. A few years later it was an MS NT versus IBM OS2. Both were hard to install, but huge numbers of people could not install OS2, and small numbers could not install NT. To add insult to injury, the free phone help ("fulfillment") numbers IBM published lead me to a phone number I would have to pay for. Needless to say I sent my OS2 back and purchased NT.

Microsoft won because Microsoft had a much better, faster and cheaper product. Sadly, that was then. This is now.

A con man cheats an unwary person out of a dollar while a nearby pedestrian walks across the street without staying within the pedestrian lines. A nearby murderer yells "con man!" at one, and "jaywalker!" at the other. It can be argued that they are all lawbreakers and hence equally guilty of their respective crimes, but even a blind man can see a big difference amongst them.

I would highly recommend R. Buckland videos for learning. I monitored his UNSW sponsored Semester 1 Computer science course "1917", from 2008. He has a Semester 2 course on youtube as well. There may be others, The first semester course has 50-some videos, each roughly an hour long. He explains even difficult things very clearly.

> doesn't really tell you much

I get the point. Jim Croce received cash when he was "small", and the record company got big bucks as Jim had hits. Jim did not get appreciably more. However, that is the chance one takes when taking a lump sum payment like that. Even in Jim C's case, IMHO I'd say the record company was taking a chance, and deserved the rewards as they came along. Jim C could have been a dud, in which case they would have lost money.

Didn't Michael Jackson get hundreds of millions of dollars from a Japanese firm in exchange for MJ's selling rights? In that case, the Japanese firm had (and still has) every right to the money from sales of MJ's music.

Proof of evil always has to be shown by the accuser. Not the other way around. Otherwise all companies could get the family jewels of all other companies.

Notice the word "credit" in two lines of your reply, and "expensing" in a third line. That does not mean that there is a money flow from government (Read:our) pockets to theirs. It means that we (the government) are not taking as much from the oil companies.

Personally, I am in favor of removing all corporate taxes. Taxing the corporate entity, that is, the paperwork, bricks, plaster, and other building materials, is like pulling feathers out of the proverbial golden goose. It just makes the owners of corporations move out-of-country. Tax the thousands of stock owners more, if that is what must be done.

In summary, failure to take money from someone is twisted to mean subsidy, and it is one of the big lies out there.

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From the given link, the President said ""So my attitude is let's stop giving taxpayer subsidies to oil companies that don't need them ...".

He, too, believes that allowing the subtraction of losses from profits prior to taxation is a form of subsidy. Even a child at his Kool-Aid stand knows he has to pay his parents back for the paper cups and Kool-Aid before seeing how much he profited. That should not change when the child gets 50 years older, and it is an oil business instead of a Kool-Aid stand.

"They don't need it"

Unless you are the richest person in the world, there will always be someone with more than you, that you can state that about, to try to justify taking it from them.

>Subsidies for oil companies? That is a harmful myth. Being able to subtract losses from profits before paying taxes is NOT subsidizing the oil companies. It has the added advantage of giving incentives to look for more oil.