If you are trying to save time you can always use a DbC system for some of your "documentation" of what the function is intended to do and have that become an actual error check on your code. You can even use the contracts to automatically generate unit tests for you. It's also harder for documentation to fall out of sync with code since it is part of the testing and flags an error if it isn't kept up to date.

Well it could get interesting when the red states have to bail out the blue states (see California for example). I mean, bail them out with what exactly? It's not like the red states have any money ...

Sure, but in the end you'll get stuck footing the bill anyway. See Greece and the EU, and multiply by the degree of concentrated political and economic insanity that exists in many states.

FTFY.

As far as I'm aware the 128 "qubits" aren't entangled at all, which means it is useless for any of the quantum algorithms that one generally thinks of (Shor's algorithm for factoring, for example). It simply has 128 separate "qubits" that are queried individually, and is, essentially an augmented classical computer that gains a few minor advantages in some very specific algorithms (i.e. the quantum annealing algorithm) due to this qubit querying, but is otherwise indistinguishable from a really expensive classical computer for any other purpose.

I think it's a matter of taste and need. Many people who want static typing will cry foul if I suggest they use either a language that has sufficiently powerful static types (such as Coq) to allow proper theorem proving with automated theorem provers, or that they annotate their code with an appropriate specification language (Frama-C for C, JML for Java, SPARK for Ada, HasCASL for Haskell) that will allow automated theorem provers to (at the very least) catch whole classes of errors that are impossible to find with static types alone (even with, say, Haskell's type system) or (at best) formally prove correctness up the specification. They feel those would be too much work for too little gain. And the reality is that, for the sort of code they write and the sort of problems they tackle, they may well be right. And, of course, for the sort of problems fans of dynamic typing tackle and the sort of code they write, static typing is similarly too much overhead for too little gain. It really depends on how badly you need to be absolutely correct, and how mcuh work you're willing to put in to get there -- and there's a very big slope of different options.

So I take it you use SPARK/Ada, or Java with JML and ESC/Java2, or C/C++ with Frama-C? I mean there's way more static compile time checking you can do with a little bit more comprehensive annotations than just types (say a nice formal language with appropriate first order logic quantifiers).

Try "Shattered Glass"; Christiansen's actually quite decent in that -- not the greatetst acting display ever, but perfectly respectable and shows enough acting talent to beliebe that, given a decent director, he can do just fine in a wide range of roles.

The dilemma with "publish or perish" is that the metric is stupid. Saying its "Do your job or get fired" is all well and good, but it is more akin to being a programmer and the sole measure of "doing your job" is "number of lines of code written (including comments)" -- it's frustrating because it encourages and rewards what most would consider "doing your job badly".

Yeah, I hear that guy Andrew Wiles spent 7 years not publishing any papers. Oxford stupidly put up with that instead of canning has ass at year 2, and they've gotten nothing but disrepute ever since. I mean has anyone ever heard of Wiles? Has he published anything of note at all? Oxford definitely would have been better off without him.

I've heard that part of the reason that UoT and Western signed on to this is that they found the working sufficiently ambiguous in the actual contract and have their own interpretation of it that differs vastly from what Access Copyright intends. In other words, they think they have some "interpretation" loopholes big enough to drive a truck through and win big on this in the long run. I suspect the issue you point out here is exactly suhc a loophole.

Can you provide a reference for "receding glaciers ... exposing Viking settlements"? All the historical documentation of Vikings referred only two Greenland settlements -- the Eastern ad Western settlements. You can look at Googlemaps images of the sites for the Western and Eastern Settlements:
 
  Eastern settlement area, and Eastern settlement map
  Western settlement area, and Western settlement map.
 
Just for reference, here is a zoom of the area of the Brattahlid and Gardar farms (two of the largest/richest farms), and a zoom of the Sandnes farm area from the Western settlement.

Want more? How about on the ground photos of the ruins?
Gardar ruins
Bratthlid ruins
Hvalsey church

They are a long way from receding glaciers, and quite green in summer. So again, at least some reference for these newly discovered Viking settlements that were underneath glaciers would be appreciated, because otherwise I'll just have to assume you are making shit up.

Because destructive operations (like close) should be kept separated from non-destructive ones (like maximise/minimise). NeXT (and by inheritance WindowMaker) get this right. Fortunately most window managers also make it easy enough to change, which I usually do.

How someone who shies away from writing some simple javascript against well defined and well documented interfaces can call themselves a "power user" is beyond me.

Functionality changed. Some things were removed and replaced with other ways of doing things. There still exist perfectly good and very powerful ways to extend the system to do whatever you want if you are an expert user (I despair to think that "knowledge of javascript" now qualifies one as an "expert user"); in fact far more ability to customise has been exposed -- there was little you could do to make some things happen in GNOME2 without hacking around in the C -- with pretty nice javascript bindings for, well, pretty much anything you could want to do. Quit whining and actually customise your system. Or is a text editor instead of a pointy-clicky interface too daunting for a "power user" like yourself?