Untrue. The deficit was reduced during Carter's presidency. Even if it were true, you don't explain why you believe the rate of change of debt is more important. But anyway, it's not true, at least according to what I was taught, and the internet sources I've just checked.

Does anyone know whether students have to complete the exams under timed conditions?

Just like the army right? By your logic that's a national organisation and so is left-wing in and of itself and attracts predominantly left-wing recruits.

In any case, the somehow still surviving notion of a 1-dimensional all-encompassing left-right continuum is redundant and pretty tiresome.

That's a fair point, and one that hadn't occurred to me before so thanks. It does appear a hopelessly inefficient method of taxation. I guess the reason for the survival of the anachronism is that TV licenses are paid per property. Off-hand I can't think of any national taxes associated with property except for those associated with buying and selling it.

Libraries aren't funded from general taxation - they're currently (under-)funded by councils, and reportedly being closed en masse. If there are such things as subsidised martial arts classes for the over-60s, I imagine they too are locally funded, and likewise about to end. So perhaps the cost of instantiating a new per-property means of general taxation is prohibitive. How would it cater for tenants of rented accommodation not on the electoral roll? Policing such a system would likely be pretty expensive itself.

Perhaps the reason that alternative means of taxation haven't been pursued is that people of influence would prefer to avoid as far as possible substantial debate around the level of funding for a public broadcaster. It wasn't so long ago that James Murdoch was met with obsequious applause upon concluding a BBC-bashing speech with the words "the only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit."

Private Eye (satirical mag published in UK) used to joke that "the jury found the defendant famous."

But I think in this instance, that's not case. Monkhouse was arrested for conspiracy to defraud film companies. He was the little guy. He lost most of his collection anyway because it was seized at the outset and he would have had to establish in court his right to each film individually, at least according to his obituary in the Independent.

The TV license is not broken in the sense that it exists to fund the BBC and the BBC is well-funded. Thus we have either the finest broadcaster in the world or something close to it. It's pretty sad that papers like the Daily Mail have gone to war with it because of a supposed left wing bias. It was sad that the Murdochs were so vehemently anti-BBC, but given their disgrace their opposition might now be a blessing.

But you are right in the sense that if TV becomes predominantly consumed via a pc, then it will be broken.

Is that really true? TV entertainer Bob Monkhouse obsessively recorded television shows and built up an enormous library. After lending a tape to the son of a celebrity friend, one of our charmless tabloids I think decided to 'expose' him for violating copyright. After a lengthy trial at the Old Bailey in 1979 he was acquitted.

Given that Monkhouse had tens of thousands of recordings, and was found innocent of all charges, it doesn't sound likely that building up a library is illegal, unless the law has since changed.

I wonder if these desperate-sounding recruiters would chase you so hard if they knew how much of your working day you spend on slashdot. Which is not to say that I'm not grateful for it - I am.

Mod parent up: +1 insightful

Someone mod parent down please. How did he ever get modded up? Whether it's trolling or ignorance I need some catharsis so here's a reply.

Javascript is not an environment. You're off to a bad start.

The language was developed to allow scripting in the Netscape browser. The rest of the industry then adopted it. So you're arguing that the industry should apologise to Eich for adopting his language?

Are you referring to Seppuku - i.e. ritual suicide by disembowelment? This was practised by Samurai to avoid the shame or torture that would ensue from falling into the hands of the enemy in order to restore the honour lost in defeat. It was also sometimes offered as an alternative to capital punishment. I don't think either case applies here. In spite of your half-baked objections, javascript isn't facing imminent defeat. Quite the reverse.

Except for numbers, strings, booleans, arrays, and prototypal inheritance.

WTF? Are you suggesting that 1+2 returns 12 in javascript? It doesn't. "1"+2 and "2"+1 both return "12". That's because in both cases the numbers are implicitly converted to strings - you know, one of those types you don't think are worth speaking of.

Except for lexical scope. My guess is you get confused by what "this" refers to in places, e.g. event handlers. I suggest you learn about Function.apply and Function.call.

There's a reason it looks object-oriented - because it is. You believe that classes are a pre-requisite of an object-oriented language. They are not. There absolutely is inheritance, it's prototypal inheritance. I suspect what you mean by "it looks object oriented" is that it looks a little bit like Java. If you think Javascript lacks inheritance you are in no position whatsoever to comment on the language.

You've put the words "safer" and "easier" in quotes but given no indication of what you been to imply by their use. The two are often in opposition to each other. Javascript is weakly and dynamically typed. That helps makes it pretty damn easy (for me at least) to get a lot done in it very quickly. There's no type-safety, but there's ease. It has closures, higher-order functions so you can code functionally as well as imperatively. You can use prototypes or ignore them completely. It's rammed full of "features"! What is it lacking that you think it should have?

It's really not. It's ugly, not concise, and the way it works counters efforts to write concise code. Meaning it's less readable. For example, whereas in javascript and (other) c-like languages you've got the ternary/conditional ?: operator, in VB you've got IIF. Except that with IIF, all expressions get evaluated. That's absurd. Likewise in JS and other c-clike languages you can have: if (anObj != null && anObj.isReady > n) anObj.doSomething(), with theVB equivalent anObj.isRead would get executed regardless of whether or not anObj was Nothing (null). How is that, or any other aspect of VB, better than Javascript?

But why you're mentioning VB I don't know.

I wish I could too.

It really is not an unpleasant situation.

First as someone who develops web applications used by for the financial sector, I'll be extremely grateful when the operating system with which Internet Explorer 6 is bundled becomes officially obsolete. Perhaps at last these firms will face up to the inevitable and upgrade, and we can stop spending a significant proportion of every development cycle dealing with this terrible browser.

Secondly, supporting XP requires resources. I would much rather MS used those resources (presumably these days derived from selling Windows 7) to innovate and support their modern products, rather than support a legacy operating system loved by very few, and loathed by many who have to work with it and its corollaries.

Even though I still much prefer my linux boxes, there's no denying that in Windows 7, Microsoft have finally built a decent operating system. Let's close the door on a bad memory.

From what I can tell you're not joking. Edison didn't invent the lightbulb. Humphry Davey invented the lightbulb in 1809.