Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't that break the fact that in Lisp everything is supposed to be a list?

Plenty of LISPs break that "rule", and usually for the better. Clojure wouldn't be the tremendously practical and useful language it is if it didn't have vectors, maps, queues, and the like.

What's important is that the language retains isomorphism (and thus, LISP's full measure of metaprogramming power) -- as long as your parse tree and your code map 1:1, adding some additional types does no harm and a world of good.

There are also places where Perl is supposedly compatible, but an utter bitch to build.

Think about anything small enough you can't host your compiler there. The compilation process depends on being able to build and run miniperl, and a bunch of other tiny little test programs locally. If the system you're doing the compilation on can't run the target's binaries... well, it's an interesting day.

What does it say about society that if you advocate legalizing almost everything you'll be called a conservative?

${DEITY}, I wish that were true.

Where I live, the fundies (want to outlaw anything their brand of religious morals disapproves of) largely own the "conservative" label, and have no interest in letting true Libertarians into their club.

What, like government regulation/licences don't restrict competition in those industries?

There's a reason that licenses are required to run utility lines on public land. Once upon a time they weren't. You're welcome to do a little research into the consequences.

The "natural" monopoly is so rare that discussion is a waste of time, except in graduate school.

Yup. Never mind those power lines, water lines, and other physical infrastructure...

Do you actually think about the things you say?

He spoke of competition and innovation, not honest brokers. The beauty of capitalism is that it doesnt matter if youre honest or not, if you provide crappy service you will be out competed.

That's the case when you're the little guy, sure.

Once you start to get monopoly power, things get more interesting. In the absence of contrary regulation, you can prevent resellers or middlemen from handling competing products, preventing them from reaching market. You can get exclusive contracts on materials or infrastructure your competitors would need, driving up their costs and thus their prices; you can drive standards and make the creation of interchangeable or interoperable widgets unnecessarily expensive or complex... etc.

"The beauty of capitalism" works fine when the startup and infrastructure costs are small, the inputs widely available, the output truly fungible, and customers and suppliers unhindered in their ability to select the product they wish to carry or purchase. Here in the real world, we need regulation to ensure that the free market keeps working outside those ideal conditions.

Newsflash - most shells have had vi and emacs style line editing commands built in for decades.

But they don't capture output, so you couldn't use them for the exact example the parent gave that you were supposedly refuting.

Ah, no. Security is an engineering objective, not a history from legacy systems.

It's both.

If software you want to be backwards-compatible with assumes that it's going to have the rights to write to the area of disk where its executables are stored? That's a security issue. (End users are accustomed to granting business software written with the above assumptions escalated privileges on a regular basis? The end-user training to evade security that provides is definitely a security issue).

If you have a large selection of 3rd-party drivers written to an API which assumes that they run with kernel-level privileges (rather than keeping them sandboxed in userland, as with a decent microkernel)? That's also a security issue.

This is where I've said that Microsoft is changing (for at least one of these examples, has changed) its API and user expectations to allow them to fix longstanding, large security holes -- but for someone with as much to lose by breaking compatibility as they have, it's a slow process.

Maybe, maybe not.

Windows is still trying to be backwards-compatible with an API and end-user experience that was designed around single-user systems, whereas the UNIXy legacy is from large university systems where users were expected to be hostile (and, frequently, were).

Security on Windows has been getting a lot better over the last decade and a half, and it's going to continue to get better as Microsoft stops supporting legacy APIs and continues to modify workflows to adjust user expectations, but I'm still not much inclined to accept the assertion that there's no remaining difference that isn't directly and exclusively caused by the delta in marketshare.

If your phone costs $50, $250, $450, $650, it's about 5-15% of the total cost of ownership.

Seen T-Mobile's Monthly 4G plan? $30/month for unlimited data and 100 minutes.

And talking about "total cost of ownership" is silly. First, a smartphone plan isn't part of legitimate TCO -- I gave my mother my old smartphone, and she doesn't have any plan for it at all -- she uses it around her house with her local wifi. Second, it makes unnecessary and useless assumptions about aligning the phone-buying cycle with the plan-renewal cycle.

If you use TCO arguments to convince yourself to pay too much for a phone simply because you're paying too much for a service -- you, sir, are an idiot.

The bulk of the cost of owning a smart phone is the cellular service.

The cost of service is part of the cost of owning a phone, but it's not part of the cost of the phone!

If we're talking about new phone manufacturers trying to get into the market, it's the cost of phones that matters for purposes of determining if they're competitive with other makers of phones. Discussing cost-of-service is an irrelevant distraction.

Some of us buy our hardware and our plans separately.

If you do differently, well, that's your own problem.

Thanks for the explanation -- it's good to know. That said -- to determine the extent to which the splitter was contributing to the issue, I tried using hers standalone, and could only barely make out sound (had to cup my hands around my ears to reduce the ambient airplane noise).

Some earbuds are definitely awful at isolation.

Used a splitter on a recent airplane trip to try to listen to music with my fiancee -- me with good earbuds, her with the ones that came with her iDevice.

She couldn't hear anything at all at the maximum volume I was comfortable with -- and her hearing is far, far better than mine.

The loans which governments forced on the banks were an infinitesimal part of the subprime bubble.

There were no loans forced on the banks.

The banks were "forced" only to use the same lending standards for everyone. If their standards weren't stringent enough, they were free to make them more strict -- so long as they did so across the board.

That they didn't do so, and instead focused on repackaging questionable (but profitable) loans is their on their heads alone.