You dont seem to understand what I am saying at all.

I can look at it from multiple points of view, and it seems to me everyone else is basically pursuing their own interests from their point of view, as I expect. Then we come to the USA, which so often seems to do the opposite. Constantly inserting themselves into situation after situation where there is no national interest, always doing favours for all these foreign 'friends' no matter what it costs us to do so.

As a US citizen and taxpayer, I would prefer that my supposed representatives behave more rationally.

"Yes and no. Vietnam cuddled up to the U.S., not the other way around. They felt threatened by China. Can you imagine that?"

I understand exactly what the Vietnamese were doing - pursuing their national interest. But what have US leaders been up to? What possible national interest do we have in fighting China on behalf of Vietnam? Or anyone else?

Err, dont look now, but this is *exactly* the internal logic in China that is leading them to assert themselves like this. Only they see the US as the aggressive power that's been appeased for too long already, and that case actually seems a bit stronger than the reverse. It's not like China allied with Mexico and started supplying them with weapons and encouraging them to stir up old border disputes - but that's exactly what the US is doing in e.g. the Philippines, Vietnam, Japan, etc.

Yes, and let's not forget to fine mechanics schools that fail to recruit "enough" females and cosmetology schools that fail to recruit 'enough' males as well.

For that matter why not just make it law that whenever people gather, for any reason, at any place, at any time, there must be exact parity between the genders.

It's even more basic than that. According to TFA the design goal was: "creating a cutting-edge website that would use the latest technologies to dazzle consumers with its many features. "

In other words, even if they had gotten this thing up and working as they wanted, right on time, it would have been an accessibility nightmare that would never work unless you have a brand new computer configured with no security anyway.

I dont know about Germany; I have lived in Sweden and while it's a two-edged sword I will grant it works better than what we have now in the USA. What we have now, of course, being nothing like a free market at all, but a bastard mixed-economy mode designed at every point to ensure the profits of the well-connected insurance companies.

An old-school bank note, backable in something intrinsically valuable, is one thing. Pure fiat currency is another.

Have you ever pondered the concept of counterfeiting? What exactly is the difference between the 'real' dollar and the 'fake' dollar made from the same paper and the same ink using a plate that is for all intents and purposes identical?

With real money, counterfeiting meant adulterating the value - mixing lesser metals so that each coin contained less gold or silver. Since there is nothing intrinsically valuable in fiat money, this sort of counterfeiting cannot occur. But in effect, the official state press has a license to counterfeit - they can effectively adulterate the currency supply - inflate it - at will.

A currency's primary value is indeed as a medium of exchange - but if it's too easy to 'counterfeit' or adulterate then that value is compromised. Gold and silver are not perfect, but in comparison to printed paper? Supplies of gold and silver are limited, and adulteration is detectable and thus refusable.

I am pointing out the consequences that follow the acceptance of the authoritarian principle. You can deny it all you want but history shows it to be true. "That's almost as big a leap as saying a sip of alcohol will lead to becoming a meth abuser since they are both technically drugs." Not quite. More like saying that once you accept the use of alcohol as a crutch, it's easier to accept using other drugs as crutches as well - and I think that's true. Of course I can see why you liked yours better, since it's obviously wrong.

"If you don't like the concept at all, you can turn it off."

Hm really? I am not using google, but you are. Can I 'turn it off' so that I will know if I get a message from you, you actually wrote it, you didnt just click ok on the bots suggestions? Can I 'turn it off' so it will quit snooping on me in anticipation of offering you a 'suggestion?'

And if not, just how am I supposed to effectively turn this off, short of blocking all communications that are touched through google and refusing delivery?

"Honestly given the number of drunk idiots on the road, combined with the number of people who can't even drive properly when they are sober let alone inebriated (anyone who claims they aren't impaired at 0.08 is kidding themselves), I'm surprised people don't support this measure more."

And the worst part is, I always stay sober and drive, I've driven for years and never done anything wrong, but I will probably die in a head on collision with some drunk idiot who could not be avoided eh?

No, I get where you are coming from. There is something very basic in human consciousness that screams for a strong man to find the miscreants and spank them with inhuman(e) force. And this is the appeal of fascism...

But if you have any historical understanding you will know it does not, ultimately, work out as a good deal.

I think you are missing his point here.

A critical element for any just set of laws is that the people who are subject to them get fair warning of what those laws are. When the law grows so enormous that even the law makers and the law arguers cannot possibly know and understand them all, it is no longer a system of justice and demands reform.

"The only rational explanation is that they don't exist. It's pure fiction"

Eh, not *pure* fiction.

But Al Qaeda certainly appear to have "shot their load" and exhausted their capabilities to carry out sophisticated long range attacks in 2001 and done virtually nothing concrete since. Instead you have the rise of local "affiliates" focused on local issues. The groups in Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and Mali come to mind specifically. All are formidable in their own territory, but none seem likely to have the capability or even the will to pull off sophisticated attacks very far outside their own homelands.

But the more worrisome aspect is to what a large degree they appear to be the creation of US policy that supposedly is aimed at improving, not eroding, our security. It's been understood for years that the drone strikes in Yemen are the major recruitment tool for AQ there, yet the strikes continue relentlessly.

KDE is just nuts. Why do I need to install their broken email/PIM app in order to get a desktop clock widget again?

Oh, right, I dont. Uninstall KDE and install WindowMaker. Nice clock.

Chess is of course a slightly different situation.

The chess algorithm cannot literally be 'smarter' than the people that wrote it (they are perfectly capable of doing the same thing it does) but a computer can still execute that algorithm faster - it can do calculations that would take the human days to accomplish in seconds. In time to actually use those calculations to choose a move.

Similarly, a compiler can produce reasonably optimised output MUCH faster than a human programmer. Never denied it.

"The compilers, for the most part, are smarter than people at optimizing code."

No, they emphatically are not. No computer algorithm is any smarter than the people that wrote it (in fact it's always going to be dumber.) If the compiler is better than YOU are at optimizing code, that may well be true and understandable - presumably optimising assembler is not your specialty, after all.

But a competent assembler specialist (someone in the same league, skillwise, with the guys that write the compiler) will beat the hell out of any compiler ever made. There just is no question. He knows every technique the compiler knows, but he is better equipped to know when and where to use them.

Compilers serve many valid purposes. They allow less skilled programmers to still produce a usable product. They allow more skilled programmers to produce a usable product more quickly. They facilitate portability. Plenty of good reasons for them to exist and be used. But beating a competent human at optimisation tasks is not one of them.

"Java has the added advantage that it uses Just-In-Time compiling, so there's a lot of cases where Java, or .Net or any other language that uses an intermediate byte-code and actually outperform C."

I know a lot of people think this, but it's nonsense, as a moments reflection should make clear.

I have no doubt that a poor coder might find JIT improves the performance of his code, but that really doesnt justify the assertion. You would need to show that JIT can actually beat a well written C program, and it wont. It cannot. Absolute worst case, if he has to, the C coder could simply implement a VM and JIT in his program and achieve the same results - and that is a tie. C cannot possibly lose that comparison, the worst it could possibly do is tie.