Um, huh? Most places want me to use their websites. My bank wants me to use it because it's cheaper for them than teller time. The government wants me to use their websites. Amazon is not going to want to put any sort of barrier between themselves and my credit card.

The only use for this, or anything similar, is to control content delivered through the browser. It's absolutely pointless for anything else. We already have ways for me to connect securely (well, more or less) to sites, authenticate myself, and pay for stuff. All of this works well with any modern browser on any platform. Amazon likes that, since it's easy for me to buy stuff from them. If Amazon were to tell me I had to download their plugin to buy anything, and, oh, it doesn't work on my main (Fedora) box, I might well buy less from them, and would be very unlikely to buy more.

The problem here is that research for this particular field is being used for justification for public spending and behavior modification....

The problem here is that the politics is irrelevant to the science, and anti-AGW people frequently diss the science because they don't like some politicians.

It's perfectly reasonable to say "This proposed course of action is worse than just continuing what we're doing." You may be wrong, of course, but anybody can be. It's not reasonable to say "I don't like the consequences of this scientific study, so it's false."

The planet is warming up very quickly, the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere is going up very quickly, and it's almost certainly the result of human action and will continue if we continue doing what we have been doing. What to do about this, and what measures are justified, is an open debate.

Alternatively, Reid may think that Obamacare is better than what we have now, and that most of the talk about dire consequences is politically-motivated hyperbole. It wouldn't be the first time that people had made unsupported statements to suit their political views.

Living like that, I wouldn't be able to suggest having a makeout session with my wife, let alone anything PG-rated. I wouldn't be able to discuss certain political and religious opinions with anybody. I could never get really close to anybody.

Going through life without trusting anybody is a real bad idea.

That's the first time they did this, and what they changed from the 5 was the outer case. The 4S is still available. There's no basis for the statement that they're only available for 12 months.

First, the Presidential election is not won by popular vote. It is won in the Electoral College, where each state has one vote for each Senator and Representative. Second, the Constitution is very specific that the electors are chosen as their state decides. In practice, each state has slates of electors chosen by who wins the popular vote in the states. This is how the Constitution was written, with the intention that the states would select intelligent electors who would (probably) fail to get a majority, but provide a short slate of candidates for the House of Representatives to choose from. That intention didn't last three Presidential elections.

Therefore there is no single Presidential Ballot, but rather fifty of the things. Changing this (and I really think it should change) would require Constitutional amendments that never come close to passing when proposed. Large states tend to think that they benefit from having large blocks of electoral votes, and small states tend to think they're overrepresented in the Electoral College and like it. There aren't nearly enough intermediate-sized states to amend the Constitution.

In addition, the primaries (and not all states have primaries) select delegates to the big party conventions, where a candidate will be voted in. Changing that would mean the Federal government would be dictating how a political party operates, which lots of people (including me) think undesirable.

What I'd really like to see is some sort of ranked preference voting, like we have in my city, although it doesn't seem to allow candidates to stand out as much. With the old primary system, most of the 35 candidates for mayor would be eliminated, allowing us to take a more careful look at the remaining ones.

Nothing is necessarily wrong with a gender-dominated profession, but I do want to know why it's gender-dominated. There's all sorts of reasons why it could happen, and we've found discrimination in a lot of fields. In this one, I've seen a lot of credible reports from women about hostile workplaces and the like, so I have reason to suspect discrimination.

I don't know, but Microsoft is sure acting like its future is in question.

We have Microsoft's thrashing around in the smartphone and tablet markets, for which they're willing to compromise the Windows cash cow. We have Ballmer trying to make Microsoft into a "devices and services" company, which is an awfully big change for a company that big - particularly when it's still quite profitable. In doing this, Microsoft is souring relations with its resellers. We have the internal reorg. In all this turmoil, we've got Ballmer leaving and somebody else taking over, and somebody who just presided over a company crash is supposed to be a front-runner for replacing him. We also saw the Xbone change features drastically between announcement.

In other words, Microsoft is acting like they can't live with just monopolies in extremely lucrative markets, and arrays of other business products they're making very large amounts of money on. I'd have thought they could remain a successful business for a long time doing that, and jeopardizing those monopolies to move into other markets would be a bad idea.

I don't understand. Supposed I have ciphers A and B. I have plaintext, encipher it with A, and encipher it with B using a different key. Why would the cipher be any weaker than the strongest of A and B? If that's the case, if I use AES and Twofish sequentially, I should be safe if either AES or Twofish is safe. ("Safe" in this case means the NSA can't break it in under, say, 2^100 operations.)

If I'm wrong, could somebody explain that in an understandable manner? (The answer to that could well be "no", of course.)

Typically, when iPhone version N is introduced, N-1 is available for about $100 off, and N-2 is available for about $200 off (normally "free with contract" in the US). This iteration, they replaced the 5 with the easier-to-produce 5c in the rotation. That means any iPhone is typically available for three years.

Last I checked the Apple store, they were selling 5s (although they won't deliver it immediately), 5c, and 4s.

While I generally think much like you do, this wasn't an error. A basketball player that steps out of bounds will continue to play. A basketball player that pulls out a club and beats another player bloody is likely to be banned for life.

Assuming he did what he was accused of, he repeatedly attempted to blackmail young women into acts that they would likely be revolted by. This isn't an error, and it wasn't caused by hormones. If he'd broken in for nude photos for his own private enjoyment, I might think of it as a hormone-driven error, but it went far beyond that. He was very willing to ruin the lives of dozens of other people; if we have to ruin his to protect their lives, that's a net win. He acted out of what might be hate or might be utter indifference, either of which we can't permit to flourish.

Was he a "vibrant and curious and creative soul?" I know nobody like him, but I suspect that that is not a good description of him, and he was far, far worse than out of bounds.

Those aren't going to be problems because supply missions are pointless for a colony. It is so expensive and takes so long to send something to Mars that there's no point in building a colony that relies on resupplying from earth; a colony would need to be self-sustaining from near its beginning to be viable at all.

Do you have any idea how difficult it will be to make a self-sustaining Martian colony? The colony will need the ability to produce literally everything they use from Martian raw materials. They need redundant capabilities, Mars being the hostile environment it is. Think, for example, what is needed to set up a modern chip fab, what is needed to build one, etc.

Sure, pioneers managed to maintain most of a low-tech economy without such sophistication. They didn't have to worry about oxygen, didn't have to worry about pressure domes and suits, didn't have to worry about the radiation Mars has neither the atmosphere nor magnetic field to fend off, and had ready-made materials for growing plants and animals to satisfy their needs.

Not to mention that an economy that large is going to require a whole lot of people to support the number of specialists needed (and, again, redundancy is vital). I'd estimate it would require hundreds of thousands to millions of people. That's a lot more than we're going to be able to send by any practical known way, so the colony will take generations to get self-sustaining.

Those who don't like it seem blissfully unaware of the things that make it great like it's refactoring tools, extremely smart and efficient intellisense, excellent debugging tools and decent testing functionality etc.

Speaking as a guy who's done professional Visual C++ development for nearly six years now, I'm still unaware of those things. Some of them would be nice. (To give the debugger some credit, it's a touch easier to use than gdb.)

With the current Microsoft "going native" push, you'd think we'd get something significantly better than xterms with vi/emacs, g++, and gdb.

I'm not familiar with Ada generics. I've been looking at Java and C#. C++ templates seem to do what those generics do about as easily as the generics, while being capable of much more. They do have the disadvantage that you have to be careful of bloat.

I don't see why smart pointers can't release nets of data. They can certainly cascade, since each delete triggers another destructor, which can delete more stuff. C and C++ can be garbage-collected. You have to use a conservative collector, which can retain more memory than necessary, but in practice that doesn't seem to be much of a problem. (Basically, search all the data space for things that could be pointers, since you can't figure out what the actual pointers are. That apparently doesn't retain much extra memory. It does rely on people keeping pointer values in a way that isn't undefined behavior.) The conceptual problem with garbage collection is that it only collects memory, while the RAII C++ approach collects everything that's no longer used.

On the one hand, I think you're being a bit short-sighted on practicality. On the other, the desire not to maintain a fork seems to be getting lots of people to kick BSD-licensed changes back upstream.