I suspect a long period of suffering by most, followed by a French revolution style bloodbath.

For movies and video games there is a thousand years worth of public domain sheet music your musicians can perform. You can do anything with Beethoven's music, for instance, that you want. Bend it, shape it, make it fit your game or movie.

That's very true; I spend far more time proofreading and editing than I do writing, but it's like being a bricklayer: the final product is what's important; it's the accomplishment itself that's worthwhile and makes the drudgework part bearable.

Interesting article, but a bit suspect. I think probably the difference between "Deep Tracks and KSHE is that "deep tracks" is a secondary stream similar to KSHE2; you need a digital radio to pick it up, and KSHE (which is listened to world-wide) is the main feed, and KSHE2 isn't streamed. Your link says "A great deal of care went into the "Deep Tracks' station, making it one of highest quality rock stations in America. the music was locally programmed and carefully selected. DJs were used to give greater insight into songs and deliver a better listening experience. Most recently, the DJs used were local rock radio veterans Seaver and Byrd"; no different than tonight's show on KSHE.

Tonight you can hear Journey - Departure, Joe Walsh - So What, Steve Miller Band - Book of Dreams, Def Leppard - Hysteria, Blind Faith's only album, and Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here. They play the whole album uncut and uninterrupted without a disk jockey talking over the music.

Oops; that was last night, being retired I lose track of what day it is. They haven't announced next week's yet.

So I suspect "deep tracks" is in trouble not for the format, but for streaming their second channel. Also, the RIAA and ASCAP collect higher fees from streaming than broadcasting, making that article look even more suspicious.

You yourself talked about "until they reach 18 years of age"; abortion is clearly but one aspect of this, and arguably not the biggest one by far (there are far more children who are born, but have their rights limited until they are of age, than aborted fetuses).

I didn't want to touch on abortion for the simple reason that it's vastly more complicated - there's the issue of when you start considering a fetus a person (it is obvious to any rational person that a fertilized egg or an embryo is not a person in any meaningful way, while a pre-birth fetus is; but where do you draw the line in between?). There's also the sticking issue of the fetus, regarding of any rights it may have as a person, potentially infringing on its mother's rights to her body. Reconciling those two rights is not obvious.

In any case, none of this has anything to do with this particular case.

It's not like he's throwing bills into a fire. That money goes back into the economy which is good for everybody, and its recipients are still free to spend it on whatever good deeds they want.

This is not true, actually. The hardline conservatives are into cop worship, but libertarians are pretty strong in pro-gun movement as well, and they are generally not a fans of police militarization and excessive use of force.

Assuming that you're referring to actual babies that have been born, then they still have human rights that their parents or legal guardians can't deny them. For example, you can't lock up your kid in a cage, even though other more reasonable limits on the freedom of movement are allowed. Generally speaking, it's okay so long as it's in their interest. Similarly, in this story, they're not letting the orangutan go where it wants, but admitting that the current arrangement is definitely not in its interest.

I thought about it as well, but now I think there might be precedent for a kind of a special status there. Think about those uncontacted Amazonian tribes - they're definitely considered human, and if you were to kill one of them you'd be charged with murder, but I'm pretty sure that those tribes don't know or care about e.g. Brazilian laws, and they are not actually enforced against them. I do wonder how they word that in law, though.

I would assume that if this ruling stands, the law would treat an ape the same way it treats human children, or adults that are considered incompetent. This means that someone else makes the decision for them, but the law still protects their fundamental rights (such as e.g. a right to life), and, at least in theory, the decisions must be in their best interest, which can be legally enforced in some circumstances. It's still way better than being treated as property.

There is a difference between tolerating and supporting. With Batista, US has actually supported him - helped him maintain power and suppress his political opponents. With Cuba, we're talking about tolerating what they are. Which is clearly the best that can be done, given how several decades of attempting to pressure them did absolutely zero good for anyone in the country.

The only people who object to the lifting of sanctions are those that are motivated by personal revenge against the Castros. There's no other logical reason for the embargo.

They were okay with hitman contracts, but not with guns?

That's hilarious.

Compiler optimizations don't really help if your code is I/O or input-bound, which accounts for most of the code written today - so users rarely see the benefits. Occasionally you get a situation where one particular code path is CPU-bound and is hit often enough that optimizing it matters, but in that case it's usually still easier to use C++ for that particular bit, and some other high-level language for the rest.

Granted, with all the changes already in C++14, and more good stuff coming in C++17, C++ itself gets more high-level every year. Right now I'd say the problem is really more with the tooling than with the language... debugging C# or Java is still a much more comfortable experience than debugging C++. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Promises and async is indeed a good point. I've been writing async (UI) code in C# for the past two years, and have almost forgotten what a mess it was before tasks and await.

BTW, async/await is also proposed for C++, though it is a much more generalized construct there:

http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/s...

VC++ has a preview of the implementation in the current betas:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog...

I'm not saying that everyone will have to grow their own food; robots will do the planting, tending, harvesting, and transportation.

The elephant in the room is that capitalism will collapse; in a robotic society, the only workable government will be communism.