> Earning a degree has nothing to do with class. Anyone can get into college. Can't afford it? Join the military

*shudder*

Try to be born in Europe where it's cheap or free?
A nice example of why GDP is a somewhat poor indicator of life quality

Evidence please?

http://www.google.com/finance?q=CURRENCY:CHF

Until 2008 it basically tracked the Euro and mostly climbed since against the USD, EUR etc but had a couple of big wobbles due to govt. policy. Before the Euro's existence it closely tracked the major currencies that made up the Euro. If/When Europe settles down it'll adjust downwards very quickly as people move out of the 'safe-haven'. Do you want to bet exactly when?

It's quite something isn't it, how so few people on even slashdot seem to get this. Old habits die hard I guess.
Years ago a clever friend of mine clued me into how functional was going to be important.

He was so right and the real solutions to concurrency (note, not parallelism which is easy enough in imperative) are in the world of FP or at least mostly FP.

My personal favourite so far is Clojure which has the most comprehensive and realistic approach to concurrency I've seen yet in a language ready for real world work.
The key thing to learn from it is how differently you need to approach your problem to take advantage of a mutli-core world.

Clojure itself may never become a top-5 language but they way it approaches the problem surely will be seen in other future FP langs.

"It is sheer folly to think that an advance race went through all the trouble to cross many, many light-years of intergalactic space just to say "Hi"."

Yeah cause like we'd never go to great lengths just to cross new boundaries. ;)

"It is only expensive because of the NIMBY crowd and the ear of government that they have."

This isn't true. Construction costs are by far the greatest costs. See this actually quite good summary

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants#Capital_costs

I'm not against nuclear power per-se but every time I read about the economics of it I remain unconvinced.

The only people who estimate figures we could live with are the people who build them. Then the costs of every single real world project blow up. There are, as of yet, no good arguments to believe this will change.

My personal favourite being Clojure
http://clojure.org/

It has excellent Java interop.

Sadly, we removed the constitutional guarantee of citizenship for people born in Ireland. It now only applies to children born to at least one Irish national.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_of_the_Constitution_of_Ireland

I don't mean to antagonise the parent, but I have to remark how it's fascinating to watch the parent post go from +5 Insightful to +5 Interesting and all the while I and other posters have provided citations showing that the parent post is, in fact, neither Insightful nor Interesting.

I'd love to see time series graphs of mod points for these posts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_by_country

Country Total network length (km) and Average speed of fastest scheduled train

China 6552 km and 313 km/h
Japan 2459 km and 256 km/h ;)

M: I came here for a good argument.
A: No you didn't; no, you came here for an argument.
M: An argument isn't just contradiction.
A: It can be.
M: No it can't. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
A: No it isn't.
M: Yes it is! It's not just contradiction.
A: Look, if I argue with you, I must take up a contrary position.
M: Yes, but that's not just saying 'No it isn't.'
A: Yes it is!
M: No it isn't!

Blurring often isn't enough to remove the information.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/01/how_to_recover.html