And I learned all that on an old Intel 80386 long before touching my first microcontroller. Beyond that, 80386 architecture supports virtual memory, something the developer should be keenly aware of and isn't available on microcontrollers.

You mean like the backup generators that failed during the tsunami, and subsequent meltdown that was caused by the failure?

Then you're likely a waste of time and detriment to your team.

I have had conversations with some of my friends who work on the peta-scale clusters and thought much the same as you. But, it turns out, when you're working with that level of system, you're probably addressing some small part of a much, much larger problem that has been largely solved. The existing code that performs 99.9% of your task is written in Fortran and actively developed by a very successful team of researchers. Attempting to rewrite the working, debugged, code so you can work in your favorite language today is not only impossible, but would likely get you removed from the team.

Compilers often cannot make optimizations in C/C++ and similar languages because of how flexible the languages are to the user's needs. Fortran, on the other hand, is more restrictive and the compiler can make guarantees about aliasing and alignment that permit things like autovectorization. This really is a part of the core language, not just the result of monumental resources put at the issue.

I'm not 100% sure on that. Languages like Go have brought in a lot of the same things, like language-level concurrency. However, Fortran has really been designed to address the problems that are solved on supercomputers first and general language second. This makes it far easier to focus on the task at hand instead of working around limitations in the language.

It's still true. Fortran uses these intrinsics as well, furthermore the way Fortran handles variables is stronger than C/C++, which permits the compiler to perform more aggressive optimizations. Fortran also has convenient syntax for performing common mathematical operations on datasets. Yes, you can replicate this in C++ with operator overloading, but Fortran puts this in at the core language permitting the compiler writers to target these specific operations for optimization.

Lots of existing code is in Fortran and is easiest interfaced in Fortran. In addition Fortran 2008 included things like concurrency in the language that C++ only got in 2011 as a part of the standard library.

The theme of this project is more about "my language (C++) the one true language" than reality.

Thin clients did happen, but they didn't catch on. In fact, one of the main Xorg developers, Keith Packard, worked on some in the 80s. Sun Microsystems created the SunRay product line that provided a thin client environment to their SunOS/Solaris and Linux platforms, although the protocol was proprietary and not X, likely due to the same reasons Wayland was created. On a side note, Keith's presentations on why X sucks are some of the best and worth viewing to understand why Wayland is so important.

When I was using a thin client, it was a great experience when you used a very simple environment and no animation, such as an XTerm in TWM. The experience quickly deteriorated when you tried to do many on screen changes and lots of interactivity, which is common for people simply surfing the web on most pages such as facebook. This was compounded when you had some 16 clients on a single host server.

When does the NSA go to court? Their job is intelligence, with some direction and restraint, not to bring people to justice. The problem is that there is no penalty for choosing their own direction and violating their restraints.

Next time someone says they were "burned" by something, I expect to a photo of the entire person converted to ashes. Seriously.

That's worth a mod point.... if I had one.

There is nothing benign about doing the wrong thing and removing one's freedoms. If anything, the fact that this is there to prevent penalty for what is otherwise a criminal act is exactly the opposite of benign!

Actually it isn't. There's "fiancé", which is the masculine form, indicating a man about to be married and "fiancée", the feminine form for a woman about to be married.

Perhaps, but in this context I thought he was referring to a journalist in which he was collaborating.

If that is the case then "husband" would be an equally despicable word.

The GP was referring to this being defined as "hate speech." Both of you are correct. The GGP's concept of what it means to be "hate speech" is incorrect, and is exactly how laws expand to encompass unrelated things.

Some mass media manipulate graphs to large audiences to alter their opinion. Here's a bunch of good examples: http://foxnewsgraphs.tumblr.com/

One has to look pretty closely to ensure that each graph has a y-axis that starts at 0, a consistent x-axis, that the height of bars and points match the numbers that are presented and other forms of lying with data.