An even bigger issue than buying replacement batteries is replacing batteries in cell phones that are said to have batteries that aren't replaceable.

It shocks me that companies can be so hostile to their customers as to force them to buy new cell phones after the inevitable degradation of the batteries.

When your head has been blown apart by multiple 9mm hits or you're rendered brain-dead by a thorough beating, you won't hear any "wooosh" anymore.

Everyone dies, Anon.

Try your armchair revolution tactics before a phalanx of well-armed cops, see what happens.

What happens is that the cops must choose between doing nothing or attacking unarmed people. Former means their weapons do them no good, the latter means they expose their evil for all to see, thus deligitimizing their authority. It's an extremely efficient tactic that turns the very armed might of your opponents against themselves, but of course it requires you to be ready to die - or spend the rest of your life in jail - for your cause.

You do realize that this has been demonstrated multiple times in the past century alone?

But I strongly doubt you would dare.

Nobody knows until the moment of truth comes. But I think it's more likely you're afraid they just might dare, thus exposing your worldview as a delusion held due to fear.

Might makes right: if someone with more power than you says you can't do something, then you cannot do it. There are no noble and high principles that can stand up to reality. It sucks, but that's the way it is. Get over it.

Which is why Pirate Bay has been shut down, just like Ghandhi's resistance was quickly and efficiently suppressed by the British Empire. Not to mention the hard-line communists who stopped the dissolution of Soviet Union through military power, and the US stamping out drug use through its War on Drugs.

Perhaps you should take a look at reality, and consider how well your own principles stand up to it? Then again, posting as AC strongly implies you already know you're spouting bullshit.

No, they want the science to be settled more-thoroughly before we re-model our entire society in response to it.

No, they want to avoid any change since that risks the status quo that works just fine for them and their buddies. Demanding more evidence is simply a delay tactic at this point.

But the bottom line is: people aren't as stupid as you'd like to think they are, and they don't need the science community usurping the decision-making power by internalizing the debate and lying to everyone.

And they're never more ingenious than when they're coming up with excuses for why they don't need to change. Which is their problem when it's their own body or personal life they're ruining, but becomes my problem when it's the entire world that's at stake.

Republican, Democrat, WHATEVER, they're all saying the same thing to you (whatever they think will make you vote for them) now, and doing whatever the fuck they can to maximize benefit to their personal pocket book later.

It occurs to me that this is precisely what a corrupt politician would say to paralyze the public with hopelessness, so they won't be voted out. It's also what a lay Republican party member would use to excuse their support of a hopelessly corrupt and outright evil organization.

Why not use the dollar, like everyone else?

Because US economy can't back it anymore. Income is concentrated on too few hands to keep up the demand without accumulating massive debt, which is ultimately an unsustainable model. And as they've demonstrated, the US government can't even pass a budget without turning it into a crisis. It would be unwise to tie your economy to that of a country on its way to the bottom.

This is the correct link: no one really understands the causes of it.

I have to say, I agree with Bjarne's answers, especially his answer to the notion of dropping compatibility with older features. While it does make the language more complex to keep that cruft around, it's equally important to allow programmers to wrap up older libraries with newer interfaces, for example, and make sure the codebase still compiles cleanly.

Is there some reason you couldn't do backwards compatibility the same way every other data format does: just provide a version number so the compiler knows what you're trying to say?

I don't doubt they improve performance. But they can't improve above the performance of code that has no need for that.

That wouldn't be (good) C++ code, since C++ has inheritance and so faces the exact same problem.

But the real problem with "var" types is that the compiler can't check type safety for you, so you get a whole new class of bugs at runtime. Why not go the Haskell way: the compiler inferes type information where it can, you provide it where it can't, and you can optionally provide it where ever you want? That gives you the best of all worlds: short "script" programs are fast and easy to write, all functions and data structures are generic by default, and the whole program has run-time type safety?

Sex and the city = perfect example of what results when cultural toxins like feminism run amok.

So basically, you're saying they're harmless?

Once again, the fascists display their true colors.

Dunno about Mussolini, but didn't Hitler have this weird fetish for getting SS to live in small farming houses on the countryside? Something about it being the traditional German way of life...

I'll never live anywhere that won't let me have a car or where for whatever reason cars are uneconomical. I just refuse to live like that.

To each his own. I'd give up the car in a heartbeat if I could. Maintaining and fueling it is just a bother, and driving tired is dangerous.

It makes no sense. Spread out, people. Its a big world. Doesn't anyone want to listen to music without having to worry about whether the neighbors will object? Doesn't anyone want a dog or a garden or just some space that is theirs?

Some people want space, some want fast Internet, some want services and shopping to be within walking distance, most want both. There's a tradition in Finland of having a second, primitive home in the countryside you visit on weekends. That way you get the best of both worlds without having to commit to either.

Complexity. the "vertical" transport system only goes to given floors in a given building. The roads go everywhere. I can drive from NYC to Los Angeles... and anywhere in between.

But I only need to go between points A and B, and don't much care about hypothetical point C (since I can always rent transport there, if needs be).