There are a few things with question 1 that are not clear.
"A full coffee cup labeled with a 6 and the world whole"

Does this mean there are currently 6 pennies in the cup?
Does this mean that the capacity of the cup is 6 pennies?
Does this mean that the capacity of the cup is 6 pennies and there are 6 pennies in it and thus no more can be added to it?

What do pennies have do with coffee?
Does the cup hold 6 ounces of coffee?

Did the 5 pennies come from the cup, leaving 1 in the cup?
Do you have 5 pennies but the cup is empty?

What is missing from what?
Do I need to put the 5 pennies back into the cup to make it whole?
Are there only 5 pennies in existence, and therefore I am missing 1 to fill up the cup.
Were 5 pennies removed from the cup and therefore I am missing the penny in the cup.

What a terribly worded question.

Although of the 4 choices, 1 is the only thing that could possibly work.
Multiple choice is a really dumb idea here too.

Personally, I think plasmas look better in the dark and LEDs look better once any amount of room lighting is added. I think a lot of people do most of their watching with some lighting on.

Are they trying to say through this analysis that your potential maximum life span would be N years and that you are some percentage of the way there?

It seems to me that congress needs to revise the rules for obtaining and holding patents. I think that if the subject being patented can be recreated simply by having seen it in action or by a reading of the requirements, then it does not deserve a patent. So stuff like one-click or side to unlock would be excluded. There needs to be real hard work put forth on something before it should be considered an invention. We need to stop patenting mere ideas and obvious stuff. The hard work part should not be based on how hard the patent holder worked, but on how hard a challenger to the patent would have to work. I do think a good system of rules would be hard to develop. The system should not be easily gamed. If it proves too difficult to write such a set of rules, then it seems to me that having a patent system is bad idea. Furthermore, most all inventions are going to be incremental improvements. Most fields have lots of people working in them. So if the increment of improvement is small and there are many people in the field, then clearly it won't be much work for others to achieve the same result, and hence the first to file concept seems grossly unfair. So now you have to decide what is a significant enough increment for something to warrant a patent. Perhaps if you have a mind like Tesla one could truly invent something stunning, but even then I have my doubts, for every Tesla there seems to a Marconi.

I have often wondered if an insurance company is the perfect vehicle to get rich.
step1) Undercut competition with cheaper rates to attract customers.
step2) Pay yourself as CEO an exorbitant salary.
step3) Hope a big disaster never strikes and roll with 1) and 2) for as long as possible.
If disaster strikes file for bankruptcy or hope for federal bailout.

I have been using PySide and Qt 4.8 which works great. However, the last time I looked PySide does not work with Qt5. Javascript was also supposed to be a first class citizen, and I can't find any info on how to get started with Javascript and Qt5 or any recent working examples. Finally Qt5 brought with it a new method for building interfaces(Qt Quick) and put the old widgets into maintenance mode only. However Qt Quick didn't have any widgets. Qt5 so far has been a huge disappointment to me.

" you can use it to buy valuable assets that may appreciate or at least hold purchasing power"

What investments are these?

Do you trust the CPI as a measure of inflation? It seems to me that a lot of things I care about get more expensive all the time (concerts, movies, eating out, drinks, hotels, gas, food). It feels like there is significant inflation to me, but I'll grant you that I have not researched this. It is interesting that home prices are left out of the CPI as this is the most significant purchase for most people and dwarfs their other expenses. Analyzing home prices at this point though is crazy. They went up way too fast and without the bank bailouts they would have come down a whole lot more than they did. From the perspective of somebody interested in buying a home, I know they would have been much cheaper if the FED hadn't bailed out the banks, and thus this looks like huge inflation to me.

If the quantitative easing money is to firm up the banks reserves, then this makes it safer for the banks to lend again, thus increasing the potential for inflation.
That last thought of the potential for inflation makes my head hurt. If the economy is running along great in high gear, then there will be lots of new construction and construction work, but there will also be loans to fund the construction and thus inflation.
I should note that I find inflation bad as I don't think it is good to deplete the buying power of somebody's savings.
It seems natural to me that any kind of economic expansion will run its course once the new developments are complete. Now the debt has to be paid back and the construction workers laid off. The development will have to shift to something else if possible.
Ok, now I am just rambling, but the debt=money concept and the true workings of the economy is hard to get one's head around.

I have read that Debt = Money.
Where is the other 3%?
How do hard owned assets play into this?
If one has fully paid for a home worth say $500,000, is there $500,000 in debt owed by somebody else to compensate?
What if the home was initially $250,000 and inflation brought it up to $500,000?

Its a little hard to know what your asking for since the above makes no sense in Python. range is used to generate a list.

eg.

range(5) -> [0, 1, 2, 3, 4] # n numbers starting at 0

range(3, 7) -> [3, 4, 5, 6] # [start, end)

range(3, 15, 2) -> [3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13] # [start, end) with step increment

range(14, 2, -2) -> [14, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4] # using a negative increment

It goes upto but not including the last item.

If you were trying to compare lists, you can't compare characters and integers because they have different type. You could do

[ord('a'), ord('b'), ord('c')] == [97, 98, 99] -> True

One interesting thing here is that in LISP you are always taking the first and rest of a list and then recursing on the rest. This is not efficient with the Python list(dynamic array). You would need to use deque maybe or roll your own linked list. The linked list would not be efficient to pass to functions expecting a regular list.

The Python functions map, filter and reduce provided me a gentle introduction to the ideas of functional programming. I find the arguments for functional programming very compelling. I frequently use Python in a functional style. However, the reality is, Python is not really the best vehicle for this style of programming, and it appears that Python is going to remain at heart an imperative language. I really like the Python standard library though and this is one of the main things keeping me from switching to a functional language. What are your thoughts on porting a functional language to the Python virtual machine? Is there too much of an impedance mismatch to interface with the libraries. Historically the libraries often took lists(dynamic arrays), whereas functional programming usually works with linked lists. On the other hand Python is moving towards iterators for everything which would seem to solve this mismatch.

I have often wondered if it is possible to create a program that would automatically generate bindings to C/C++ libraries. The binding issue is a huge problem for all languages. It seems doable to me, but I fear I am missing something because it has not been done. There is SWIG, but it needs an IDL like description file. I frequently read comments like, oh it it so easy to call a 'C' function. However, when you look at something like the Windows API with over a million functions and a massive number of struct types, and millions of constants, writing an IDL file becomes prohibitive. I know of no language with a very thorough binding to the Windows API. As of right now PySide needs a binding to Qt5. The first problem is just getting any kind of binding, but one would prefer a Pythonic binding. For example in 'C' an array is often followed by a size parameter. A good binding would understand how to take a list and make the underlying call with the array and the size parameter. So this involves an IDL file again. However, I envision a tool that could highlight possible ambiguities like this and provide some sort of web interface to crowd source the answers to the ambiguities. I guess my question is, is this possible? or what makes this so hard that it has not been done? I can see C++ definitely being harder, but dealing with a 'C' header file doesn't seem so complicated.

I recently have used PySide with Qt 4.8 and find this to work very well. The only caveat is that Qt 5.0 is moving in a different direction trying to support more of a web based html .css approach and leaving the old widgets in support mode. The biggest problem here though is that PySide had not been updated for Qt 5. It looks like Digia only has the resources to pursue C++ development. Also disappointing is that Qt 5.0 did not have any widgets with the new model. Honestly, I don't know what they were thinking. I am not sure a full blown widget library is needed and would be a lot of work, but I think if the important lower level layers (primitive drawing, font drawing, font metrics, mouse, keyboard, and touch input) were added it would be a good thing. Perhaps even a next higher layer that provided for basic nested window support, tabbing, focus, selection, layout managers, and .css style themeing and an event pump. At this point I am sure the community would start adding widgets.

I wish the administration would focus on the cost breakdown of medical procedures. I have read articles that basically seem to show hospital costs are pulled out of thin air and that the costs have no basis in care provided, or in any kind of reality. I mean $400 for an aspirin type stuff. Why does 1 night in a hospital cost $10,000? Hospitals are supposed to be non-profit after all. Why is a short ambulance ride $1000? It seems completely nonsensical to me. Until this is well understood, there is no hope. I basically assume the reason for these costs are either 1) They make up for people getting treated for free or 2) fraud. If the case is 1), I want to see this makeup cost as an explicit line item. It is also odd that surgeons get a small part of the total bill, and that hospitals are broke. Where does the money really go?