It's slightly better than the USUK system, in that it offer a bit more diversity of choice, but in the end it gives the same result: conservative/authoritarian types can get a parliamentary majority with less of 40% of the population voting for them, which means that they get to rule over 3/4 of the time even though they never get much more than 50% of the vote.

- It has idiosyncracies, but several orders of magnitude fewer than PHP.

- It is standardized and has multiple, F/OSS implementations

- Its syntax has much less line noise

- It probably has the fastest implementations of all scripting languages; last time I checked (might have changed) the only contender was LUA-jit or something.

- The various implementations are thoroughly stress tested in browsers by something like a billion users.

- Similarly the high stakes in browser securities guarantee that there is a strong incentive for security and more generally code quality compared to other scripting languages.

First-past-the-post voting systems are a parody of democracy, and that's how conservative, or more accurately fascists like Sarkozy get their "majority."

Primality of n numbers?

This is a real world example I've seen a dozen times. Given a spec that requires a parser, the CS type will come up with a complicated (to outsiders) solution that few people can understand but works perfectly. The IT type will not recognize that it is a parser, does not know what a parser is, and will implement a very buggy "solution" with regexps (cf. the MySpace XSS fiasco from a few years back).

Oh who am I kidding; there is no such thing as a spec. I've never seen an actual one in the enterprise.

It might not really make much of a difference actually; what if P=NP resulted in the routing problem you mention being solvable in O(n^1000), while a probabilistic algorithm giving an acceptable result was O(n^4)?

Work on what became the metric system began before the Revolution; there was at the time dozens of regional definitions of common units in France (which you can still witness in such mind boggling vestiges such as "Troy ounce" or "avoirdupois ounce"). Starting over with an entirely new, rational base avoided having to pick a favorite.

Fahrenheit degrees are another story; they're just a fucking stupid unit. Using the human body's temperature as a reference point .. that's just retarded.

"Digestible" isn't a boolean value. For instance, as we all know, most adults can't digest lactose. Most white adults can, because they have the right enzyme. However the range of the amount of enzyme available from individual to individual must be quite large. I doubt that those in the lower end of the range get as much energy from drinking the same large amount of milk as those on the higher end.

The fucking article is about fructose. You know why it's spelled with F-R-U-C-T and not G-L-U-C? Because it's not fucking glucose, irrespective of Dr. Lustig's claims validity.

It's not like most of them cared about it changing!

To exercise the non-compete clause, they have to pay a significant portion of the former employee's former salary for the length of the clause (1y max if I'm not mistaken). They then have to pay no matter what, even if the employee didn't really intent to work for the competition, and they can only prevent him from working for the direct competition, no vague "same area" bullshit. So the end result is that it's rarely ever used.

... that's why he chose a Cæsar cipher instead.

... a country whose main language is English, or a country where an Indo-European tongue is spoken?

Also, are most people in the U.S. not illiterate, or can most Americans read?

Is roughly 50% of the population female, or has half of it a Y chromosome?

Is there freedom of speech in the U.S., or is Congress prohibited from passing laws restricting the press?

Finally, is it a Republic OR a Democracy?

Remember, in every case, you have to pick ONE case, they're all obviously(*) mutually exclusive!

(*) if you're a Republican

The question is as insightful as "democracy or republic" — i.e. not at all, because the answer is very obvious: it's both, and there's absolutely no contradiction despite what a poorly educated mind might think.

They look like toys compare to the iPad — very buggy toys. And none of them even compares to the iPad in the one feature at made me buy one: 10h battery life. And that's not even mentioning the touchscreen quality.