Well, since leaving college I've rarely used my Physics degree. He's just taking that to the logical conclusion...

Exactly. This is a problem Microsoft has had for several decades they lack mechanisms to generate internal consensus. So they build a capabilities based security model but then don't build all the tools and support that their user community will need to make it work so everyone just runs as admin. Then they tone it down and put a permissions based system in place. But that still has problems. Then they start tightening and then use sandboxing for yet another capabilities system...

As is the case a lot (not all) of the time with Apple. They're worth a lot in click-bait, so what you do is try to find something outrageous to say about a popular product, put adverts on the page to generate you cash, and try and profit from the massive public interest in yet another Apple product...

Or maybe I'm getting too cynical in my old age.

Simon

How about median income: http://static.cdn-seekingalpha...

As for rebounding we got hit worse, and harder.

Military coups are the kind of thing that happen in a society that does not abide by the rule of law and respect property rights

Nothing I said undermined the rule of law. I endorsed changes in law. If you are going to critique then you should be honest.

When welfare economics disappeared the people of the United States experienced stagnation. People like me have been in power in Europe and the people there are doing rather well compared to the people of the United States. Argentina had problems in the 1930s when into decline and since 1989 has seen its GDP rise 700% (vs. 200% for the USA). So yeah multiple coups are bad for the business climate.

Sure all things being equal free trade is a net benefit to the country. But in our current economic climate we have stagnation being caused by wage collapse and concentration of wealth. The bad effects are outweighing the good.

They wouldn't be nationalized on a flimsy pretext they would regulated and have time to adapt. The USA isn't going to totally change its attitude towards business just because it becomes slightly less pro-corporate. There is a difference between pro-regulation and pro-theft.

So the US dollar would quickly reach (and then fall below) parity with the Mexican Peso.

Well if the dollar were to at parity with the Mexican peso USA exports would be massive and our market would be effectively closed. All these regulations people are advocating wouldn't be necessary with a weak dollar economy.

Self sufficient island sounds good. Especially since I suspect Europe, Japan and a nice chunk of the 3rd world would join a less corporate driven island.

Nonsense. What would the mechanism of total economic collapse? The assets are in dollars. What would happen is companies would charter a USA company doing business according to USA law and foreign companies chartered under foreign law that owned them. They would pay duty on imports to the USA company at worst. Or they would just pay more taxes and pass the costs on. That's it. No catastrophe.

The situation isn't at all similar to South American governments which aren't doing business in dollars and don't have international influence.

There are studies which show some level of decreased investment as taxes rise. But for example that can be countered by taxing assets (wealth) not just income. In any case it is far less volatile than conservatives would believe. At a marginal rate of 50% you start to see shifts towards consumption from the rich, with very little effect below 50%.

How was it "our idea". America was a protectionist country, it was the UK which worked hard to open the USA up to European imports and wanted the USA to move away from protectionism.

So I don't know who the "us" is in this sentence. But no globalization was not the USA's idea. Americans became pro free trade during a period after Europe was devastated financially. It has been very contentious since the 1970s as free trade has expanded.

goes back to roman math (seriously, according to common core, the way to add 62 + 36 is to draw 9 squares and 8 lines and then add them. If you don't draw your squares you fail, BTW)

That's been standard in the math curriculum for decades at least. You don't remember it because you were young when you learned to grasp why you can't just add things in the "tens place" and the "hundreds place" together and instead had to line numbers up. Until you do that exercise kids will gladly do things like 32.5 + 60 = 33.1, 38.5 or 632.5.

I don't think we should do that. We should just start moving away from free trade arrangements. Go back to having tariffs likely through a VAT with subsidies for domestic job creation. That way Microsoft can contribute to the economy by providing jobs or they can can contribute by (indirectly) paying tariffs to import their work from overseas.

Two things.

1) Fortran has low level mathematical data operators that are more powerful than those in C. I.e. in practice Fortran code compiles to faster code because the programmer is more aware of what will be faster.

2) ALUs evolved around running fortran code fast the same way modern CPUs evolved around running compiled C code fast.

Functional code can't be maintained immediately by the random programmer. They need to learn concepts first. That's also true of languages which are tightly coupled to hardware, languages which are tied tightly to databases or BI tools or languages which uses other conceptual frameworks like logic programming. Everyone learns: do X then do Y when they are a toddler.