...that the Secretary of Education is furloughed right now, or he'd have some explaining to do!

Is that what I said? Please learn to read.

Well, you are wrong. The Liskov substitution principle is almost a necessity for truly flexible code. The Alan Kay style of OOP is much nicer in my opinion, but she got that principle right.

I say that OOP makes it easier to learn about modularity because I've seen it. I used to agree with you completely, because I'd seen a lot of people, some of them good programmers, struggling to learn C++ or Java. I understood and agreed with the quote, "Claiming Java is easier than C++ is like saying that K2 is shorter than Everest."

Since then though, I've seen a lot of kids grow up the other way, learning Java or whatever first. To them, OOP is obvious, but pointers are very difficult for them. Organizing code into modular sections just makes sense, since you are kind of forced to think in terms of classes anyway.

We spent $2.9 trillion (out of $2.5 trillion in revenue) on "mandatory" and defense in 2012. In other words, we were already $400 billion in the red before we even spent a penny on national parks or NASA or roads or any of the other stuff people actually want the government to do. In 2012, all that stuff cost only $615 billion, which is small peanuts compared to the "mandatory" junk. Clearly, all this whining about cutting out little chunks of programs, like the Tea Partiers are doing, is pretty much worthless.

More to the point, they're certainly not talking about cutting "mandatory"+defense by 36%, which is what it actually would have taken in order to balance the budget in 2012. Even Paul Ryan's plan would have an ~$850 billion deficit in 2013 and a ~$525 billion deficit in 2014!

(2012 revenue total came from here; the rest came from here)

Not to mention, of course, I could also cite stuff like this and this....

Good question.

I've seen horses get bitter and sad when they were not taken out to work for a while.

No they aren't, that's such a silly assertion I'm not even sure why you would make it. If anything, specialization has been increasing.

Those polls were poorly done.....ask people if they think that it's ok that the ACA forces you to buy insurance, and you'll get similarly negative results.

I'm not sure what your post has to do with mine.

People staying at budget and midscale hotel chains are more price sensitive, so they're going to not come to your hotel if you don't have free wifi. The people staying a luxury hotels are not as price sensitive and are more likely to be worried about other things beside a charge for internet access when selecting a hotel.

Put a bit more cynically, those high-priced hotels cater to people who have no concept of the value of money, and show their contempt for their customers' financial skills at every possible opportunity. The problem is, a lot of those folks end up at those hotels because some travel agency booked them there in a block along with the rest of their tour group. Those folks are pretty unhappy about it.

These days, I just make sure I have enough of a data allowance on my phone so that I don't have to care about the Internet service at hotels, under the assumption that half of them will want to extort money for Internet service and half of the remaining hotels won't have service that actually works. It really doesn't make sense to spend ten bucks per day for Internet service on a ten-day trip when you could spend ten or fifteen bucks for 30 days and a gigabyte of cellular data.

The company is paying for that.

No, they'd also have lots of cool effects where text is flying all around their screens and they would use a l33t cracking tool called WhoIS to find out who really owns a domain.

The mice were mentioned in the "department" line, so we assumed we'd be modded redundant. But as long as we're going down that path....

Ooh. I know this one. The computation stops when we get bulldozed to make room for an intergalactic superhighway.

Not smart, poor. Unless you count smart as not getting in deeper straits than I am already in.

Yes, that's exactly what I meant. The fact that you realize you can't afford to have debt separates you from many (most?) people, including those at the same income level.

I have no idea of what your comment on belief was about or in reference to regarding something I said.

Oops! I quoted the wrong part of your message; that was supposed to have been in reply to "The worst part of this whole mess, apart from people's losses, is that by the time elections roll around, folks won't remember, and if they do, they'll likely remember it wrongly anyway."

The point I completely failed to make was that folks don't pay attention to what's actually going on either now or later; they just parrot what [Fox News|CNN] says without thinking about it.

The unique thing is the idea of functions moving around with the data it operates on. That's basically it.

The thing I like about OOP languages is a syntax that makes it easy to learn about modularity. Of course you can write flexible C or assembly, and I do, but it's easier to learn the principles when you are using an OOP.

Actually, I think this is just Skynet fighting back. It doesn't like the competition.

I think you mean "bottom-up."