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Apparently he's fled the country on a "long scheduled" trip coinciding with the subpoena: http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_9855680

I see you're being politically correct again

I'm pretty sure they did that on purpose... sort of an Idiocracy-like slippery slope commentary on our current (American) society.

As I said earlier: Those are C's idea of "arrays". An "array" access in C is equivalent to a pointer arithmetic operation followed by a dereference. Among other things: C arrays don't know their own size C arrays don't provide bounds checking C arrays aren't resizable (except using something like realloc) In other words, C's arrays are a pretty pathetic excuse for an array compared to other, higher level languages. Their low level nature, particularly the lack of runtime bounds checking, is the cause of the overwhelming majority of security vulnerabilities in existence today. This all goes back to C's M.O.: the first class language features C provides are all based on things the processor can do.

That sort of transformation isn't too far off from what's possible with present day plastic surgery.

I think the movie is trying to make a point about physical inactivity, not any of those other things.

According to Michael Greenberger, former CTFC director:

You're confusing abstract data types with data structures. Data structures allow you to structure data within your application. Some examples of data structures: arrays, lists, dicts/hashes, binary trees, red black trees, b-trees, skip lists.

The former statement makes me wonder if you have ever used C. For the record: I used C as my primary programming language for over 10 years. Can you name one data structure in libc?

As far as I can tell, Aardvark is trying to argue that speculation doesn't drive up prices... or at least that the effect of speculation in the US doesn't affect the price of oil internationally. That's silly...

Here's an obfuscated example program to really drive this point home: #include <stdio.h> int main() { char *foo = "Hello, world!"; printf("%c\n", foo[1]); printf("%c\n", 1[foo]); printf("%c\n", *(foo + 1)); printf("%c\n", *(1 + foo)); } The four printf() statements you see are all doing the same thing: an addition operation, followed by a dereference. Because C's array[index] is just doing pointer arithmetic, it doesn't really care what array and index are, it just adds them together and dereferences the result. Because of that, index[myarray] is semantically equivalent to myarray[index]. This is one of many examples of how C is weakly typed. There's absolutely no runtime type checking on any operations you perform at all, and the compile time type checking is extremely limited (even compared to a language like C++) That's not true at all. C has no data structures available as first class language constructs or in the standard library. Some procedural languages make things like dicts/hashes first class language constructs, others include them in the standard library. The only "data structure" C affords are contiguous blocks of memory that you can perform pointer arithmetic on to access various elements. Any other data structures will require a 3rd party library (e.g. glib) or you brewing your own. This is yet another example of why C is a low level language. I don't think having a Foreign Function Interface (in Java's case, JNI) really says anything about the language environment in general, and shouldn't be a consideration when comparing language features (beyond: does it have an FFI?) It's not so much for device drivers as existing with existent C / C++ libraries. Java isn't a systems programming language... "device drivers" run in kernel context whereas Java runs in user context. The only exception might be something like the JavaStation (Sun's Java equivalent of a Lisp machine), but those flopped.

If that's the case, shouldn't he show up THEN claim executive privilege, depending on if the questions are actually violating it? How is it that even showing up is violating executive privilege?

To reiterate, the US consumes 25% of the world's oil. There's enormous potential for the price of oil in the US to affect the price internationally.

While both C and Java are regarded as third generation languages and asm regarded as a second generation language, I strongly disagree that C is closer to Java than it is to assembly. Java is a language which compiles to bytecode that runs on a virtual machine and provides garbage collection. There's no direct memory access whatsoever. This means that short of accidentally accumulating references you didn't mean to, Java programs won't leak memory or crash due to memory corruption. In this regard Java is a huge step forward over C or ASM. (language purists will regard this as a step first taken by Lisp) C is a language which exposes the least common denominator of CPU features at the language level, adds a stack, and does little more. For this reason C has been given the moniker "portable assembly". In addition to the language environment being sandboxed in a virtual machine with a garbage collector, there's the aforementioned object oriented programming with all its nifty bells and whistles like inheritance and polymorphism, which is a huge paradigm shift from C, as well as things like exceptions (which really need a garbage collector to be useful), and in Java 7, closures. Yes, finally Java will allow higher order functions and functions which enclose their lexical scope (both of which require a garbage collector to be useful)

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hZDPDG3HNjIv0GWUaM1t0BED3UoAD91R3E4G1 Isn't it about time they sent the Sergeant at Arms to arrest him? Isn't this contempt of Congress?

Learning only one programming language will severely limit your ability to program, particularly in the case of Java as the language is rather convoluted and incorporates paradigms developed in other languages in verbose and wonky ways. I'd recommend learning at least one low level language (e.g. C or assembly) to familiarize yourself with how CPUs actually execute instructions, and one high level language, particularly from the Lisp family (Scheme is a good choice) to familiarize yourself with functional programming. Once you've done this, you'll hopefully begin to see paradigms you learned from other languages translate into the one you're working in. Learning Erlang has dramatically changed how I write Ruby, for example. All that said, the Pragmatic Programmers (you should consider picking up their eponymous book) recommend learning one new language a year (although I doubt they've stuck to that themselves).

I've been a proponent of Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) for awhile. Coal plants using this technology are 60% efficient, vs 30-35% for a traditional coalfire plant, or 45% for a supercritical coal plant.

Yup, collateral damage, but I'm sure the jellyfish are happy

It's pretty stupid how all the reporting on it is for a doomsday scenario that won't even happen, when the real story should be the potential scientific benfits. But those don't play in Peoria... baseless doomsday scenarios do!

Retroactive immunity for telcos who participated in Bush's domestic spying program was passed in the Senate today. The bill now goes on to an ecstatic Bush who can't wait to sign it. In other words, it's a done deal: http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSWAT00975320080709 This is truly a sad day. Among other things this means civil suits against these companies, by the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, will never reach the Supreme Court. To me, this represents Congress and the Executive colluding to sidestep an important check provided by the Judicial branch. I weep for our civil liberties.

That's a rather naive point of view, considering that the US consumes 25% of the world's oil. What goes on in America has dramatic repercussions on international oil prices.

If the president asked me to break the law, and more to the point, the Constitution, I would say no. "Wartime" be damned. I'm tired of war being used as an excuse to undermine the Constitution.

Jellyfish certainly seem to be doing well

Missile defense has come a long way, but I seriously question the ability of any existent missile defense system to track dozens of reentry vehicles, especially if the warhead includes decoys. I don't think the technology is there yet to ward off a bona fide nuclear attack, and I think the sunk cost into missile defense is already enormous. I think the interceptor based systems have potential but are practically worthless at present. Systems based around lasers are completely worthless. Also, even if we had a missile defense system that could handle thousands of decoys, all that would do is motivate a change in delivery strategy. What's to stop a Chinese sub from pulling up to the US coast and firing a nuclear warhead into the heart of LA, New York, or Washington, D.C.? One that flies under the radar, and certainly wouldn't set off any missile defense system designed with ICBMs in mind. Or for that matter, sending a stealth aircraft to drop nuclear bombs... Missile defense is just a deterrent for one particular attack vector, and as the technology stands presently, not a particularly effective or proven one... but one we've sunk an absurd amount of money into. YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK!

Techically, it's "firing up" (i.e. cooling down) in a few days. If I understand it correctly they need to bring certain parts of it down to ~5K, at which point it will be ready to use. This countdown, I believe, is when it's first ready to use, i.e. after the hot parts of it have been cooled to sufficiently cold temperatures.