It does what it was designed to do - mega scale batch processing of flat files - fantastically well. Just because a language doesn't have curly brackets and the latest fad paradigm championed by vory Tower Academics Inc doesn't mean its day has passed.

For the record , no , I'm not a Cobol coder, but I'm old enough to know that when something works well in its sphere of operations its worth holding on to.

A network is physical infrastructure - software isn't going to be rerouting cables or installing new wifi nodes anytime soon.

If all they mean is routing tables are dynamically updated then how is this anything new?

This isn't a troll, I genuinely don't see where the breakthrough is.

"I'm pretty sure Finnish voters don't give a shit about Spanish situation though"

They should. If they think Finland lives in a protected bubble then I've got news for them. If an economy the size of spain's goes down the toilet it'll take the rest of europe with it in a domino effect.

I'm not ignorant of them at all - they're a one issue party that pays lip service to the issues adults actually care about. They're a joke.

It might come as news to this guy , who knows, but anyone over the age of 18 - ie people who can vote - have more pressing concerns in europe right now that whether they can download pirated media. You know, minor things like over 50% youth unemployement in spain, the collapse of the greek economy and its knock on effects, mass immigration, enviromental degradation...

But hey, I'm sure compaigning for being able to download crap for free is the golden ticket.

Not.

"a cancer that might very well have been treatable, had he not been absolutely mental and gone for "natural" cure."

Yeah, its ironic isn't it that the man who ran such a high tech company reliant on cutting edge science would head off down the hippy bullshit road to cure himself of cancer instead of taking advantage of 50 years of medical research. It just shows that having a high IQ doesn't necessarily prevent someone from being a complete imbecile.

It means only a tiny fraction of the worlds population can ever possess any. What fucking use is that if its to be taken seriously as an online currency?

Making the whole thing nothing more than an interesting academic exercise. Anyone who thinks bitcoin is the new gold or even frankly a replacement for ordinary money transactions is utterly deluded.

.... who has never used the %n formatter? I'd heard of it but I had to go and google it to find out what it did because I couldn't even remember.

The only use I can see for it is for figuring out single line formatting lentghs after you've printed some string but thats pushing it a bit since surely any half decent coder would preformat a string before outputting it?

Are there any "killer app" uses for %n that anyone can think of?

Yeah , right.

That attitude is why american "sports" cars like the corvette , camaro or mustang use huge gas guzzling V8 engines because its cheaper to just chuck in something off the shelf than spend time optimising it and ending up with something more efficient and powefull.

Seems like a clever idea to me even if there was too much enviromental variability for it to succeed. Pressure mats and other affordable 80s style security devices weren't exactly reliable or hard to foil either.

Presumably you had a far better solution so why not fill us in about it?

"our hardware can handle "bloat"."

Your average modern car could probably handle carrying half a ton of lead in the back and still out accelerate the equivalent from the 60s. Does that make it sensible to carry the lead around when you could quite easily take it out - ie make the car much more efficient and even faster?

"During that time I've seen friends from undergraduate days and graduate school days move steadily up the ladder"

Why care? Management is for a dead end "career" for losers who weren't up to their original roles and greasy pole climbers.

Programming is a profession. You wouldn't ask a top surgeon why he hasn't been "promoted" to a management position so why would ask a programmer the same question?

French is "oui" , not "si". "Si" in french means "if".

If its so obvious how come the words for "yes" differ a lot more? Try and explain that since you seem to be an expert liguist. Or just an arrogant cretin desperate to post anything to score points.