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See that's the thing. We always hear "well, people clamour for politicians to do something". However, I don't actually think that people do. The media makes a big deal out of disruptive events, however actual people on the streets? When was the last time you saw people staging a rally about cancer? More people are affected by cancer than are by terrorism. How about heart disease, which is the biggest killer in the US? How about car accidents?

I posit that it is government machinations that CLAIM that actions like implementing national security reforms are in response to populist demand for action, when in reality these policies are just the hammer falls of classic Hegelian dialectic methods.

Well, clearly if this much surveillance didn't let them stop the attack, the solution is more surveillance!

Really? How many people have you ever met who have refused to use a Google service (e.g. gmail) because of the international reputation of the US? I realise anecdotes are not data, but I hadn't met any until a couple of weeks ago, and now I've met several...

Yup, sounds like BS to me as well. If I spent $1000 on the kinds of things that they're talking about in a year then I'd consider that pretty excessive. I think that the study is not assuming that all of these things are used by a singly house though, it's assuming that the printer is running almost non-stop year-round printing things that someone wants. That sounds a lot more plausible: these devices tend to do quite well in MakerSpace-type places, and probably print enough stuff to offset their capital cost within a year or so. Having one at home is still not a good investment though.

Debt is not all alike. Most people who 'own' houses are in debt, but having the debt lowers their overall costs. When I bought my house, it took about 9 months before the amount I'd saved due to my mortgage payments being less then my rent to be greater than the total cost of moving, including all of the legal fees and so on associated with buying the house. Was living in debt a bad financial choice for me?

That's ignoring the indirect subsidies. For example, how much has the government spent on diplomatic, military, and economic pressure on the middle east to try to keep oil prices stable? How much was spent on subsidising the federal highway system, which promoted demand in petrol? How much was spent on the tax system that incentivised US car manufacturers to produce fuel-inefficient vehicles by treating SUVs as trucks and giving them a lower tax rate?

GFLOPS by themselves are a pretty meaningless way of assessing any processor. If it's bottlenecked by memory bandwidth in common usage, then it's no good. For example, the PowerPC G4 beat any Intel chips at launch in terms of FPU throughput numbers and Apple was happy to shout about this, neglecting to mention that it was only really true if your workload was almost 100% fused multiply adds and your data fitted into L2 cache. In a modern GPU, the performance of the compiler, the threading model and the memory controller can more difference than the raw floating point throughput on the optimal path. Of course, that's not to say that the Tegra 4 GPU doesn't suck at these as well, just be careful when comparing a complex system by a single value.

They're only useful if you can guarantee that there will never be any frames on the stack that were not written by you (and therefore may contain __attribute__((cleanup)) in C, or exception catch / finally blocks in other languages), and if this is the case then there are far cleaner mechanisms for achieving the same thing.

You're missing the point. Developers may pick the language, but if you've only hired a tenth as many programmers for language A than as for language B (because those who use language A are ten times more productive), then when you come to start a new project you'll have ten times as many advocates for language B as you do for language A. Which language will your development team pick?

The designers or Ruby wanted Smalltalk with Perl syntax. I find it amazing that anyone could look at Smalltalk and think 'the one thing this needs to make it better is Perl syntax'. And you can substitute pretty much any language for Smalltalk in the last sentence.

You have to invent your own strings with C++ too. Qt, WebKit, LLVM, and ICU, for example, all have their own string classes. And they don't interoperate in any clean way because (for performance, in that special C++ sense that means microbenchmarks only) they don't use virtual functions and so you can't use an adaptor to turn one into the other, you must copy the data (yay, O(n) operations) at the boundaries between libraries.

As long as you don't nest them and you never need to do any cleanup (e.g. release locks) on the stack frames in between the longjmp and setjmp...