In the end, you get a choice between two candidates, while you may hold a variety of opinions on 20 subjects.

Also, after elections, the electee usually backpedals when he has to conduct actual business (as usual).

.. it might actually work.

For function f(x){ return array('x'=>$x); }

You can't even do the above in PHP because it was developed to make parsing easy (see $), not coding.

I guess the validity of $x='x';$$$$$$$$$$$$$x; makes up for that ;-)

It is also lacking a means to list variables in your scope, I think.

.. you end up in jail and the money isn't yours either.

Reading the DRACO description on Wikipedia, I cannot tell whether the cure is worse than the disease.

The only part in the Wikipedia article I liked was the cleavage.

That is, the previous post does not say that people putting money into the stock market are not investors but instead, speculators, because they are bad people or something.

The reason for the difference is that most of the shares traded are not issued as new stock by any company.

This means that when you buy the stock, you put money into the hands of another investor, not into the hands of the company.

Of course a company that is willing to issue new shares will profit from a good history, but since issuing new shares dilutes the share of the investors in the company, this is rarely done and usually only when the outlook for the company is bleak.

You can of course argue that the existence of the market helps the REAL investors who found new companies, but this does not invalidate the argument:

Next time you buy a share of a "old" company, don't think that you just helped that company.

By the way, does the current IE still assume a fixed width per letter when rendering buttons, so that buttons-with-very-long-texts-on-them render with extra space to the left and right?

Tell that joke to astronauts dispersing anti-shark dye in water, they might find it decidedly not funny.

http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?1365-Some-new-Pararescue-photos/page26#378

http://yuckylicious.blogspot.com/2011/11/moonpie.html

Sounds interesting, but I don't find anything about it on the wikipedia pages related to Dwolla and Bitcoin that I googled for.

It has been said, that once upon a time in China, you paid the doctor when he kept you healthy, not when you fell ill.

It might make sense to expel people from your practice in that setting.

-pkd

I'm particularly upset about the rise of "X, but with computers/internet/iWindows" patents.

Clearly, if something is done on paper, it is possible to do the same digitally, where is the innovation in implementing it?

Basically, Germany considered only two options:
- close all nuclear plants down as fast as possible
or
- keep all old nuclear plants running for as long as possible

Trying out completely new designs was not considered, especially since new experimental designs showed problems.

Also consider that Germany is densely populated compared to the USA, and not very large either. A nuclear accident would be a severe blow to Germany, as well as a failure to properly store nuclear waste.

Considering that IBM has initiated a global outsourcing program, starting in Germany, it is easy to see how automated judging of code quality can go wrong:

Outsourced coders tend to code much more to spec, not using their brain and being sensible, and if automated judging of code quality results in an increase of payments, they will add 10 lines of comments to a x+=1 if the automated judgement likes that.

In addition, when I'm finished finding some bug, very often the resulting code will be shorter than the offending code. This is consistent with the true and tried concept that lines of code are proportional to the number of bugs. I wonder whether automated analysis is smart enough to detect such activity.