When I was a kid, and mum and dad weren't at home, my brother and I would eat raw egg yolk mixed with sugar. In one way or another we're all alive due to luck, I prefer not to push mine too much.

One of the largest internal migrations in US history was in the early 70's when 20 something hippies started leaving cities in droves and building mud brick utopias. Only a handful of the communes survived more then 2ys. The common cause of downfall was human nature - a bully would arise in the commune and take ownership of the land by pushing people out one by one.

I grew up during the cold war, the term "plan C" sound vaguely familiar. The military is expected to "plan for every scenario", it's unsurprising they came up with silly plans for a nuclear - most primary school kids knew that fallout made "duck and cover" a sick joke. It's an attempt to make people feel like they can "do something" other than dying.

Um, you realize that C came out at almost exactly the same time, don't you? Granted, I wasn't programming anything in the 1970s, but I know enough history to know that the Unix kernel was already being ported to C right around 1970.

"Lacks" is a strong word; it's just not inherent. Back when I used to write software in C and C++ for money, I would religiously put "}//end if" to make sure I could keep track of which braces went where. If I needed even more context, I would put " }//end if(var1 == var2). It's not that hard. Like many things in C, you have plenty of rope to hang yourself if you really want to, but you can also make it tidy and sensible if you care to. C is not your friend, and is not your enemy.

C is like an M1 rifle. Sturdy, proved in battle many times over, occasionally finnicky, and ready to put a high-powered round precisely where you aim it without apology. Whether you aim at your foot is your business.

Well said, you can pull up a lawn chair next to mine anytime.

You hit the nail on the head, somewhere in the early 90's, language vendors stopped claiming "Our language supports OO concepts" and started claiming "Our language is OO".

The first C++ compiler I used professionally was Wacom's (circa 1991). Back then the Watcom C++ extensions were not part of the language, they were implemented with a bunch of C macros pulled in with include files, the macros themselves were riddled with goto (another macro) statements. I still have nightmares....

The fact is any general purpose language can be used to implement an OO design because OO is not about language features, it's a design methodology, or at least that's what I was taught when studying for my CS degree in the late 80's. As my smalltalk lecturer pointed out at the time, most of the examples in K&R's "The C language" are also great examples of OO design that were written long before the term OO was invented.

Disclaimer: These days I spend much more time tying spaghetti balls with different flavoured source together than I do trying to untangle the individual gordian knots.

I recall reading about the mirror when it was being made, the precision with which it was polished was mind bogglingly accurate, if it was the size of Australia the largest deviation from perfectly smooth would be less than a millimetre. The problem was the shape (which changes slightly when put in zero-g), an extra shim in the framework that held the glass while it was cut was found to be the cause of the problem.

Cannot fathom why your post id marked redundant, OT maybe, but redundant?

Maybe they don't get the 'lazy evaluation' part if they've never dabbled in functional programming

"Lazy evaluation" is an optimization technique for evaluating Boolean expressions, I've never heard of a programming language that doesn't use it by default

Taxation is not theft, the only natural right it 'violates' is the right to be a selfish prick.

Actions sometimes send messages, but they are not speech.

Old troll but a good one - both planets have seasons, parts of Canada are inside the Arctic circle, if Canada had zero air pressure then winter would be as cold as Lunar night time.

Here's a random conundrum for you - why is February the hottest month in Melbourne when the summer solstice in is December?

That's exactly what the "public service" are supposed to do "speak truth to power" and I think NASA, NOAA, EPA, and many other government institutions have done an outstanding job over the last 20yrs on this issue. The politician's aren't stupid, they just can't find the courage to "speak truth to their sponsors" who don't give a shit what happens after they die.

If we did that then this debate would have ended in 1958 when spectrographs designed for heat seeking missiles became good enough to separate CO2 and H2O absorption lines. It was previously assumed they overlapped but the new spectrographs showed they were interlaced.

The best "ringer" I recall was Michael Crichton, author of "Climate of fear", "Jurassic park", and dozens of other popular "science gone mad" stories to testify as an expert witness on "climate science". I've watched some of the worst bits of those climate change hearings, I stopped because they anger and sadden me.