You don't need to be writing software for airplanes to understand the notion of an overflowing counter, and why you'd want to use a 64-bit int for it just in case.

The main reason why people recommend it is because of what happens if you mix signed and unsigned. If they are of the same size (e.g. signed int and unsigned int), then according to the spec, the result will be unsigned. So you divide, say, -2 by 1u, and get something very unexpected. If you always use the same signedness, then you can dodge this problem, and in general you do want to represent negative numbers every now and then, hence the default is signed.

In practice it doesn't work so well simply because so much of the language and the standard library uses unsigned anyway. For example, sizeof is unsigned, and so is strlen(), and in C++, size() on all the standard container types, including string. So if you want to write C or C++, you have to deal with signed/unsigned mismatch anyway.

You want to play this game? Fine. I'm well within the 1% of US by income, and while the majority of my income isn't from capital gains, they are a sizable contribution due to stock bonuses and such. I'm quite okay with making personal income tax more progressive, and raising capital gains tax to match personal income, even though that would mean more money taken out of my pocket every year. Why? Well, perhaps because I don't want another Baltimore in my neighborhood?

He doesn't necessarily need to win to produce some tangible change. If he gets enough votes in the primaries, that alone will send a clear signal to mainline Dems that they should pay more attention to the left.

This implies that communists would be against worker cooperatives, which isn't true in general. Marxist-Leninists are, but there are other kinds of communists, including anarcho-communists and Luxembourgists who like cooperatives just fine.

The real difference is in the ultimate goal. Communists are a subset of socialists who believe that it is possible to create a classless society, thereby resolving the class conflict once and for all, and removing the need for any form of state and societal oppression (and hence the state itself - communism is supposedly a classless and stateless socioeconomic system). They typically believe that this is only possible by undergoing through a transitional socialist period, but how that period looks varies depending on the brand of communist, and pretty much any socialist form of organization is claimed as the best by some group somewhere.

Socialists who aren't communists don't generally believe in that future perfect society, and for them socialism is a way to achieve socioeconomic justice and fairness (as they see it) here and now more so than just a means to advance to the point where said justice and fairness is inherent and self-sustaining.

I'm a liberal here in US on an H1B visa, and I'd support Sanders if I could (obviously I cannot vote, and I cannot legally contribute to his campaign). I disagree with his position on the visas, but it's one thing out of many, and there is way more important fish to fry short term.

A big part of it is support for electoral reform. I may disagree with a candidate on 99% of his platform, but if his 1% includes making it easier for me to get the candidate that I actually like into office in the future, that's the 1% I'll care about most. And this usually comes from the fringes of both left and right, from people like Pauls or Sanders.

I think that the people who are actually doing the real work here (i.e. the scientists) all have fairly realistic expectations. The rest of us can party if it makes us feel better, and it won't hurt if the end result is increased funding for science in general. And if nothing happens in the end, well, there won't be any more articles, and in a month everyone except for those genuinely interested will forget it was even there (well, there will also be the occasional science freak posting about it on Slashdot in every future story on space propulsion, but that's what Slashdot is for).

Well, except for all these.

Yes, of course. I don't support this ridiculous notion that we shouldn't try to get something useful out of the experiment just because we can't explain the theory.

Let me guess, you're still bitter from WinME?

Look at what's actually making money. Hint: it's mostly Office, not Windows, and it has been that way for many years now. Why would Office for iOS or Android, say, make any less money than Office for Windows?

Or, say, Azure. It's a money maker, despite playing catch-up with AWS.

Yeah, that's why Code runs on Linux: to let people who use Linux make apps that only run on Windows. Makes perfect sense.

If Microsoft ends up making money doing applications for Linux, it means that Microsoft has won, as well.

The nice thing about this is that there doesn't have to be a losing party.

Are you saying that you would completely ignore the repeatedly reproducible result of an experiment if there were no good theoretical physical explanation for said result?

I mean, it's your choice, but it sounds extremely stupid. If the thing works, figuring out why it works is definitely a very interesting question well worth devoting resources to, but making it useful doesn't require fully understanding the theory.

Note that this is the fifth experiment so far that has reproduced the effect (and every new experiment tries to account for some explanation that could possibly invalidate the previous one; e.g. for the last one, they ran it in vacuum).

A few physicists have already ripped it apart (and the fact that the physics is unsound is why it took so long for anyone to actually try to properly reproduce it). Basically, the thing may well work, but if it does work, it's very unlikely that the explanation that its inventor has provided is legitimate.