Where will you go when the trade war between US and Mexico shuts down travel between the two countries?

I think it will be far more than 5 years and far less than 5 decades.

What is this TTP thing that you are mentioning? This thread is about TPP isn't it? As a resident of New Zealand, one of the countries heavily involved in the creation of the TPP, I have to say that I hope and pray that the TPP does not see the light of day. It imposes American corporate will on us little guys in a most ugly way. Unnecessarily heavy-handed IP laws combined with hideously expensive drugs combined with the right of multinational corporations to overturn our local regulations make it intolerable. I do not want to live with it in place.

I have understood that difference likely since before you were born. I spent a good piece of my career creating code to run embedded on small devices (and some not so small). No, I don't think "dinkypoo" is on the money. I was trying to compliment/encourage "slowdeath", who I think has a really good understanding of the issue. I find your rudeness to be really quite intolerable.

Thank you for shedding some useful light on this discussion. It is in danger of sliding off the rails. Education of "modern" coders seems to have omitted teaching programming history and the evolution of programming technology.

Counter-intuitive? Maybe, but what you are saying here is largely the argument used 50+ years ago in developing RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computers), the technology which led to the first so-called supercomputers capable of sustained operation at megaflop+ speeds. Although I have not kept up with today's chip architectures all that carefully, I am sure that many of the characteristics of RISC continue to be present.

I always thought SNOBOL was that language where every string meant something to the compiler. When I was writing code in Perl, I did not feel as though that were true of Perl.

Everyone must have a different story, here's a bit of mine: In 1960 I went off to college, and had a chance to register for the first undergraduate course in programming that had ever been offered there. Computers were not a big part of everyday life then, and the idea of programming was very exotic and enticing to a young lad. I dove right in with only the fuzziest notion of what I was getting into. I was really really lucky to have Alan J Perlis (later the first recipient of the Turing Award) as my instructor for that class. He was simply amazing, and the most friendly teacher I had that freshman year.

We started learning to program in assembly language, and did a fair number of puzzle-solving problems, many having to do with moving pieces on a chess board. That really makes one have to think about data structures and abstractions of physical reality without beating you up. Also, we had all-time access to the computer (IBM 650) and wound up spending a lot of evenings feeding cards into its maw. That class showed me what I wanted to do with my career. I wanted to make computers be able to do things that had not been done before.

The undergraduate programming class went on for two semesters. After that everything I learned was self-taught, and sometimes quite a struggle as techniques and technologies continued to evolve.

In those days, computer science and programming were really new, and had not found their place in academia quite yet. I was mostly advised to continue studing a more traditional subject, though I really wanted to pursue programming. I finished my student career with a PhD in theoretical chemistry, but it was really a sneaky way to do more programming and play with computers.

I am still of the opinion that coding should be learnt first from assembly language level, and then get progressively more abstract. When you are coding at the machine instruction level, you really have to learn what the machine can and cannot do, and I think that informs programming for the rest of your career.

New Zealand, too. GST is applied to pretty much everything. My pet peeve is the GST that is applied to "rates", the (non) tax that property owners pay to local councils. Since they are not called "tax" they must not be "tax", but it sure feels like a tax on tax to me.

If his accomplishments were so unimportant, then why is the preeminent award in computing named for him? And why are his papers used as the foundation for much of Computer Science?

And if you think the British were little active in the early days of computing, I suggest you go and study your history better.

No doubt, this is a substantial reason why the government does not do the bill.

Another big reason is that in many (most?) other countries the number of exceptions (deductions, exemptions, etc.) is much smaller, so it is much easier for the government to figure your taxes based on your income reported from the employer. I live in NZ, and I would say the average guy does not file a return. If every scrap of income he made was from a job, or bank interest, or pension payments, or dividends lodged with a broker, then the government has already taxed those things at source and there is nothing more to be said.

On the other hand, there are some items which can be claimed to reduce tax that the government may not know about. This leads to an entire industry in NZ which helps people figure out if they have a refund coming that they did not know about. Most people do not.

And I have been very satisfied every year using Turbotax to prepare my US returns from NZ. The ability to link to financial institutions and automatically download the data is a real plus. For several years Intuit did not allow one to efile with a foreign address, but now they do, and that is icing on the cake.

For weight and space reasons I travel with only my wifi-only tablet. Generally that works well for me.

Every now and then I encounter a hotel with only wired access provided in rooms. (Often they have wifi in public areas.) Is there an answer to using the wifi-only device in such a circumstance. For sake of argument, let's assume I am an international traveller whose cellphone never works in the countries I visit. (True) That means the hotspot method mentioned will not work.

I find this confusing.

If at 23:59:59 the clock actually changes to 23:59:60 (= 00:00:00), then a second has been taken away, not added. The second denoted 23:59:59 did not happen.

I would think that to "add" a leap second, at 00:00:00 the clock should read 23:59:59.

Can someone clarify?

I live in a non-US country. My family is all in the US. For years, before I left the US, it was my habit to purchase Netflix Gift Subscriptions for family members. I used to do this online, and was no trouble at all.

Now, because I connect from a foreign location, Netflix will not talk to me at all. Even though I am trying to buy a gift for someone in the US using a US$ credit card based at a US address, I have no hope. Neflix simply refuses to do any business with me because I come in from a foreign address.

I find that to be really absurd.

I fear that the forthcoming TPPA agreemwnt will do this and a host of other nasty tweaks to how we live our lives. The fact that it is being done in secrecy is chilling. I just hope we can keep big pharma's clutches off our drug purchasing services.