come on, that's naive. the real reason for wars is always power, and power nowadays comes with money. and politicians follow what they are told by the people in charge.
it's not oil they are after at the moment, it's controlling the power of the dollar. in the future it will be wars about water or any kind of expensive resource

pointer arithmetic is useful for efficient code, it has nothing to do with "high" or "low" level.

so it's actually more limiting than helpful. I don't understand why people want garbage collection. it's a hindrance, you cannot allocate the memory the way you like, so there is no optimisation possible, in memory usage or in performance.

what's wrong with a PIN ? that cannot be forged. civilised countries do use them for credit card payments now you know.

the difference is that in europe you cannot patent a simple idea.

which seems to be the case in the US. you can call that software patent, an algorithm or whatever, at the end of the day it's just an idea.

patents were designed for "inventions", which at the time implied a realisation (a prototype) of the thing, now with software patents you can simply patent an idea, without actually using it for something.

when the european parliaments rejected software patents they rejected the concept of patenting lines of codes, as being just an idea, and already covered by copyright. I guess you can patent software in europe, but it has to be part of a technical realisation of something, you cannot patent an algorithm or a process, as is done in the US.

please, don't try to sound educated if you don't do it properly. it's "au contraire"

well, except that the reason so many people die of hunger has nothing to do with usage of fertiliser but much more with political instability. that and american food aid which destroys incentives for local food production

that's all nice and good for your web programmers, but when you have 80MB of ram available, in two different areas with different performance on each you are very happy to be able to do your own memory allocation. all these talks about "high level" language assume that everybody is only programming applications that do not need to worry about memory issues. but try to program an operating system or a video game without "worrying" about it, and we'll see where you go. the day they give these languages the same flexibility that C++ provides I will stop using it. until then, C++ is king, and scripting languages are useful, well... for scripting

it's not an assertion, it's a personal feeling. and if you can't see the difference, well, go back to your lab and your wrist games

"third world commie countries like France" mod that as a troll please :-) define third world then, there are less poor people in France than in the US, there are less filthy rich of course, but with a better health system, better education system, I woudn't call that third world. and "commie" ??? the french president is more right wing than Obama, it's USA that is becoming a socialist country. and yes, we can all see how great the american legal system is, it seems that everybody on slahdot is so in love with american lawyers...

yes it is. that's why we're humans and not animals, we take care of our own kind.

people tolerate it because they're brainwashed. 60 years of television propaganda has its effect. and American propaganda is the most effective there has ever been, you were the first to introduce psychological analysis for product placement, and that very early.

don't joke, we're going to get the same kind of law as soon as they managed to write it in such a way that it becomes constitutional. considering the constitutional council is mostly right wing conservatives it shouldn't take too long