But im sure you are otherwise a wonderful caring person....

Lots to discuss, but to point out your consistent failing in all your responses is that you seem determined to understand things within the context of your own knowledge. But i suspect your mind is big enough to understand its own limits (like every human mind). That is what i was alluding to when i stated that "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". For a mind to grow it has to consider things it is not presently capable of understanding.

Yes one word can describe many different things, and many different words can also be required to describe one thing. Language is not supposed to be a science, and the human brain is not a scientific instrument. The right meaning is usually interpreted from context, its supposed to be fuzzy.

When Heraclitus said (paraphrased) "You can never step into the same river twice" he was using two meanings of the word river (as a flowing body of water, and as a path) to make a statement is moronic on the surface and yet on another level is profound. Some statement are profound not because of its meaning, but because of thought process it promotes in the reader. You could persuade yourself of almost anything, but the path you choose is your choice, a choice you can learn from.

You look for complex answers and ignore the simple ones, something exists subjectively if they think it exists. And for all sciences advancements from objective truths, what a person thinks subjectively will always be of immediate importance. You cannot measure love, security or happiness of a Human objectively, with good is your m-theory or spacetime static waves theory of existence then.

One of the greatest failings in the field of physics is the failure to understand that time is just a concept, stuff exists and that stuff changes. The fact that stuff changes doesnt make time (a measure of relative change) real.

"Science is not done by straw poll, so the views of most (uneducated, I might add) people is unimportant. What matters is that physicists and mathematicians ..."

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Regarding your simplistic definition of existence, ask yourself, does a person exist after they die ?

Troll (-1) = Insightful (+1) * CounterIntuitive (0).

Clearly moderation is broken.

I think most people would say the most likely statment to be false is "this universe is a simulation"

Also, define exist please.

analogizing Michael Lind' as a real place leads to an inability to think logically about laws, rules, ....

Nobody thinks cyberspace is a real space, its unreal space, nothing there is real, its all just patterns, a place where geography doesnt matter.

Stupid people ask stupid questions.

"I really hope you don't mind some faceless organization dealing with your bouts of dementia and incontinence."

People spend much of their life planning and working so they can have a happy and graceful death, they dont try to have a happy life.

4) Addict subconsciously believes any argument that might help satisfy the addiction.

Dont be so superficial, its not about the structures, its about the people.

Im sure we could all make a big mess in a cathedral if it was useful.

C has an advantage in corner cases due to the flexibility of its lower level.

So if there is a need to use two separate abstraction layers, then a 'hand rolled' version might be able to find savings that a compiler wouldn't look for as its treating them separately for external reasons.

But like i said initially, the benefits only get less meaningful with time.

Programmer/team preference is way more important than any real technical difference between C and C++

I say C++ is slower than C because; as more abstraction is placed between the programmer and the hardware, it gets more difficult for the compiler to achieve the same quality of code.

C++ is Object Oriented, to do OO requires more abstraction, OO is used to make problems easier for Humans to understand, not to make it easier for hardware.

C is and will always will be more efficient with hardware than C++ (for equally skilled programmers). Its also true that hardware resources will only become cheaper, so that advantage becomes less and less meaningful.

A lot of older programmers value hardware efficiency more the programmer efficiency, and younger programmers dont see the value in that.

I believe you are correct, the story states, 'In a post earlier this month, popular tech blogger Anil Dash lamented ''the web we lost''.'

Software is real now ?

Descartes would be rolling in his grave.

Prisoners are allowed to own a business while in prison.

Are you sure the intent of a corporation can be used to ban their operation in the US ?

e.g Would someone associated with the mafia (but not charged) be banned from running a legitimate buisness ?

"None of the major parties are going to give high preferences to this new party"

Do you remember the ALP (center left) preferencing Family First, a right wing christian fundamentalist party before the greens. Parties do really weird things with preferences.

Its very naive to think you can predict who will win the last senate seat, DLP won a senate seat with a 1.9% primary vote.