The main problem is the banks. The solution is simple:

- If you are a bank that offers "essential" services, such as bank accounts, home loans, etc, you are not allowed to also participate in "risky" financial speculation practices (derivatives, shares, etc).

Forcing the separation of essential banking services from speculative practices is simple, and is not really that far from existing or previous legislation in various countries. It prevents the ridiculous situation where a government says they will underwrite the speculation of a private company, which is essentially the same thing as the government saying "Sure, have a great time at the casino. If you win you can keep the money, if you lose, we've got you covered."

Even better: start a government-owned organisation for essential banking services. The postal service is halfway there anyway, and goodness knows they could use the extra revenue.

Mod parent down. This is completely wrong. You clearly haven't looked at Fortran for about 30 years. Fortran has had modularity since Fortran 90, and modern Fortran has object orientation, inheritance and polymorphism. In terms of numerical performance the Fortran compiler will still leave the C++ compiler laying on the ground, weeping.

So what exactly is the high-level programming feature that C++ has that Fortran doesn't? Is the write-once, read-never quality that a lot of C++ code has, because I am happy to live without that particular "feature".

You're right, there is a lesson to be learned from this. And that is you shouldn't compare oranges to apples.

Dance is a performance art. So copyright has very little meaning because the cost of reproduction is very high - you have to be able to perform. While your argument may have some validity in the music industry, which IMO will certainly survive without copyright, I don't think dance's success by analogy can be applied to the book or film industry purely because they are such different creatures.

The book or film industry would be very different without copyright - I'm not saying they wouldn't survive or thrive but I think your analogy is misleading.

I looked at the graph that you wished ... this one. As a scientist (a theoretical physicist... FWIW) I do not understand how anyone can look at this graph and not be convinced that something is different this time around. I mean c'mon ... Forget the "hockey stick", the important part is the whole graph. Current CO2 levels are approaching 400ppm, i.e. 133% of the previous maximum of 300 ppm for the past 400,000 years. Surely that strongly suggests that we are contributing to the problem.

However, you can't ignore the fact that Nehalem in fact can run physics.

Physicists in my field (Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics) have been harnessing the computing power of existing GPUs to get teraflop performance on a desktop - handy if you don't have access to a supercomputer.

Just cause something is a GPU doesn't mean you can't get your hands dirty and make it do some real work.

Hangon ... That sounds more like "Enslaving the GPU"