Who do they charge? Or do they charge all the electrical companies for access to their grid, thereby adding one more layer of profit for which the consumer must pay?

And all of the handguns are replaced with walkie-talkies.

I mean, all the alcoholic drinks are replaced with kleenexes, or phones, or pens.

I, for one, resist our pablum-spewing Hollywood overlords.

Have you even seen Coraline? It was produced via stop-motion, using 3D cameras. There were some digital effects, but not many. So, no. For Coraline, it wasn't thrown in "just because."

Norman Spinrad's 1987 novel Little Heroes also had virtual pop stars. Not a great novel, by any means, but he beat Gibson to it by 9 years.

The idea isn't that new at all.

What is the unit of complexity? How do you measure complexity? At what point does complexity become "irreducible?"

Irreducible Complexity has fundamental problems that are far more severe than a simple biological example can ever show. The ID folks can provide as many examples of "irreducible complexity" as they desire, and their proposition still has no grounding in actual science.

Behe has proven this by constantly moving the goalposts. "Oh, that example might not've been irreducibly complex, but this one is, certainly."

Another one in Cleveland, at 3050 Prospect Ave.

Lat: 41.501395
Lon: -81.666189

Haskell is beautiful. I wish I had more opportunity to use it, rather than just playing around with it. You have good taste.

Not really subjective. You made the assertion there wasn't much there for general-purpose computing; I mentioned several features that are good for general-purpose computing. There's nothing subjective there, other than whether or not you like them.

Obviously, many people have found them useful, from the original NeXTStep coders andLotus Improv creators to the modern OS X and GNUStep developers.

In any case, while I prefer Objective-C over C++ (it just fits my style better), I can definitely understand the desire for stronger compile-time type enforcement. That alone is sufficient to warrant C++ over Objective-C, especially for a project that relies on input from many other people of varying skill levels.

My inner language fanboi came out when you glossed over most of the unique features that make Objective-C a versatile language.

Oh, one other complaint about it to add to your list: current implementations don't properly support private variables and messages.

This is also one of C++ weaknesses. Troubleshooting templates is a royal pain in the ass. I'd rather chase a pointer to hell and back than deal with another set of poorly-written templates. And templates are almost invariably poorly-written.

They are damned useful when done right, though.

True, that. Objective-C sacrificed compile-time type checking for flexibility. Well-written Objective-C code is almost beautiful (something that can't be said even for well-written C++ code), but you really need to be careful with your types.

"Smart pointers" are really just a kludge to fix up a poor language design choice. RAII isn't all that vital in Objective-C, either.

You are attempting to say Objective-C is deficient because it doesn't support the design patterns you use in your C++ code, when those design patterns are necessary because of the language itself.

You ain't kidding. It's getting easier with each iteration of the language, but the GC is kinda particular. Conscientious use of refs is a must.

Riiiight.

Again, I think you are judging Objective-C based on your C++ experience. Late binding, associated references, adding messages to existing classes at run-time, message forwarding, and so on are all excellent general-purpose programming idioms that aren't supported in C++. Couple that with introspection (which is supported in C++, to a degree), and you can write very powerful fully-OO programs.

Objective-C isn't perfect. No language is. But it certainly isn't as anemic as you seem to think.

Objective-C isn't necessarily that slow. Message passing can be about four times slower than C++ method invocation, but once cached, the two are comparable. (SEE here for some interesting stats.)

In a system as IO-heavy as GCC, your bottlenecks probably won't be your method calls / message passing. And as for being deterministic: why would a compiler have to be deterministic? There are no hard real-time considerations for compilers. Your variation in compile-times will be minimal, even with a non-deterministic GC.

I think your point 2 (typed) is fairly valid. Part of the reason to move to C++ is to provide a language that is more strongly-typed than C. While the run-time binding of Objective-C makes it a great language for some applications, it does remove some compile-time type checking. (You do get warnings about an object type's ability to process a message, of course, so you don't lose it all.)

That's "were," you fucking moron.

Jesus, I hate people who can't spell.

I dunno. KLM Flight 867 lost all four engines after flying into Mt. Redoubt's ash plume, back in 1989. I was in Fairbanks at the time, and many people I know where stranded, trying to get home for Christmas vacation.

Ash is not good for jet engines. Period.

They cause earthquakes, don'tcha know.

Yeah. That, or become President.

Just sayin'.

This'll be great for the hearing-impaired. We're all gonna have to learn sign language to interact with our computers.

CEOs especially have to be careful. They don't want to piss off their biggest customers. Nor do they want to say anything that might negatively affect their stock price. And that could be anything, especially whinging on about Gates or Jobs.

Shooting your mouth off about everyone in the business is not a good way to win friends and influence people.