Ironically the utility of fortran has only grown with time. Modern fortrans embrace parallel computing by having constructs that are inherently parallel; for example loops which announce they are parallel and can be done out of order and matrix operations as language primitives. One great innovation is the combination of python and fortran. You do things with precisely defined memory boundaries that are compiled to maximum efficiency using the simple clean fortran, and you do the messy stuff of memory allocations and references and exotic libraries and user interfaces in the python. No need to extend the fortran language and make is slower-- just put the non-speed critical stuff in the python part. With the rise of GPUs and their rigidly defined memory limits fortran is a nice fit. You actually want a constrained language for that. It's really an ideal combination. Fortran compiles so fast its even possible to have python write the fortran on the fly and then call it.

No it's not. Almost every major retailer insists on the lowest price. Walmart does, Amazon does.

It's even amazing that the "fixed" prices are not essentially different than Amazon or Alibris or BN. Very clever price fixing indeed.

BS they weren't 'different'. They were SIGNIFICANTLY higher. At least $3 to $5 higher under the 'agency' model, which on a book that was $9.99 is a 30 to 50% price hike.

Are you some Apple fanboi or something?

Your pulling monkeys out of your butt. Here's an actual price comparison:

http://paidcontent.org/2012/09/11/apple-is-already-fighting-amazon-in-the-ebook-price-wars/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/cheapest-ebooks-amazon-ibooks-google-barnes-noble_n_1952736.html

Yes sometimes Amazon is cheaper. But mostly not. Sometimes apple is cheaper.

No that is not price fixing. Walmart and Amazon and everyone else with clout signs contracts that say they must always be given the lowest price. And nearly all goods makers have contracts with sellers that fix the lowest price a good can be advertised at. (that's why you see those signs on web pages that say "add to cart to see price"-- cause they can't advertise it.

It's even amazing that the "fixed" prices are not essentially different than Amazon or Alibris or BN. Very clever price fixing indeed.

I keep reading a third of the internet is porn, a third is bit torrent, 2/3 is spam, and now 1/3 is Netflix.

Where do you stand to measure this traffic. If it doesn't cross a peer is it traffic? Do I count each leg of a path?

At least perl has punctuation. Hebrew would be hard to read.

If an ATM starts spitting out double money, I don't think I'm entitled to keep it even though "I was just playing by it's rules". Now in this case it's a bit different I suppose since it is a game where I can win or lose. But the part that they are winning here is not really in the game but an artifact of the the way credits are miscounted. SO it's really analogous to the double-money ATM issue.

In comparison to updating android on your carrier's cell phone, windows updates are a snap! Moreover windows updates even exist whereas once you buy a low-brand tablet or get a carrier locked phone no update may ever even get made for your device.

Am I missing something in Gates comment? is he saying the apple is bad because it lacks a keyboard when you buy it? well there's lots of KBs for ipads. they are cheap.

Uh... because they did mention that???
The bill of rights was passed after the constitution was passed. If you want to understand the terminology used int he bill of rights you need to read the constitution first (as well as the discussion of intents).

Article 1, clearly designates the power to suppress foreign attacks via a federally managed army, and the need to suppress domestic insurrection via a state-managed militia. Thus the militia was there NOT to defend the states against the fed gov, but to actually suppress insurrections by other states--that's article 1 of the constitution. Maybe the fact that it's #1 should give it some weight in the discussion.

    The 2nd amendment uses the word Militia in this specific context and it's spelling out the right of states to have armed citizens without federal consent, combined with the explicit regulation of gun control by states--"well regulated militia".

Right it's zero sum. pay for it up front or pay for it on the electric bill. It only makes sense when either
1) there's a scam to be had (e.g. the landlord or company is paying your utility bill)
2) you can use the heat the electricy is producing for some purpose you needed anyway. That is to say if your computer is sitting next to a space heater then you might as well turn off the space heater and turn on the bit coin engine.
3) you want to donate your cycles to charity and the charity would be better off with the cycles than a cash donation. (e.g the charity is doing some big calaculation but doesn't want to bother with the hassle of buying and maintaining or admining rented servers.)

Zero is obtained by homomorhopically subtracting a record form itself.

There's a lot of gotcha's here but let me give you the gist. When you do a search something like this happens (encrypted or not), your query gets hashed into some feature vector of ones and zero. You can imagine the bits of this feature vectors like 20 questions (first bit: is it alive...) etc. The search company then AND this feature vector against every feature vector of the web pages it has scanned. The ones with a good match are returned to you. That's of course a naive version of searching.

If we could do that encoding operation on the client or by a trusted third party then encrypt the feature vector, you can send this to the data base holder to do all the AND operations for you and return all the scores. You could then decrypt that and pick the records you want to fetch.

Naively that works. But it has a lot of holes in it. For example, you'd have to have the database encrypted differently for every client and not tell the server company the key to do that. But that's a detail that can be fixed in other ways that are not so hard.

The point is you can search your data stored in the cloud without the server knowing what you searched for in the database.

Well no.
here's just one possible way to deal with that. For each string you form two different strings by XOR the string with a random string and the complement of that random string. Now You encrypt each String in the pair with a different key in a homomorphic way.

A third party can now do whatever albelian operations they want on either of these strings but they have no way to combine the two results since the keys are different.

However you are able to do this by doing the operations on both strings then at the very end decrypting them and Xoring the result.

Voila.

Works for voting systems where one person gets to have the keys, and one person gets to maintain the database of encrypted votes. As long as they don't collude, then the data base holder can sum all the ballots up but not know what any ballot is. The key holder can determine the sum but never get access to the individual ballots.