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C++ is a clear indicator that it should. The enormous success of garbage collection is a clear indicator that many people doesn't agree with this position You should look at the actor model. Concurrent languages seem to be quite a bit different than you seem to think they are. About the simplest way I can describe the actor model is: imagine every object were also a thread.

This is accomplished by modeling changes in solar luminosity which occur regularly as part of the 11 year solar cycle. However in multi-decadal simulations the reconstruction must be adjusted to account for larger variances that have been observed in the two sunspot cycles we have been able to measure by satellite: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/306/5693/68

Apparently not. Interesting: http://www.google.com/search?q=1+us+pint+to+fluid+ounces 1 US pint = 16 US fluid ounces http://www.google.com/search?q=1+imperial+pint+to+fluid+ounces 1 Imperial pint = 19.2152067 US fluid ounces I believe therein lies the confusion. Wow. So when you go to a bar, and order a pint, do you really get 568 ml of beer? If so, that's insane. (And if this post isn't proof that we all need to switch to the metric system, I don't know what is)

I highly recommend Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming: Vol 1: Fundamental Algorithms for this sort of thing.

A person is a self-modeling entity that can also identify and communicate with other self-modeling entities. By that definition, my cat is a person. Wow.

Science does not allow for the supernatural by the very nature of methodological naturalism. The supernatural is inherently unscientific, as it defines itself such that it is outside the scope of scientific inquiry. As for whether or not those who purport the existence of supernatural entities do so to avoid scientific scrutiny, that's up to you to decide.

Unless I'm confused on the matter Bush appointed them all... as to whether Clinton did as well that's another point entirely, but unless I'm mistaken these people aren't exactly the result of Clinton's legacy, they have their positions presently thanks to Bush's appointments.

Perhaps because I didn't phrase my ideas in a language that was acceptable to him. Daniel Dennett responded the first time I approached him with the idea, although I had read several of his books and thus was able to phrase my ideas in his language. However, his response was brief and he only stated that he'd considered similar ideas from others but didn't plan on adopting any such ideas in the near future. I e-mailed Dennett this video. He didn't respond.

I think most of "the left" agrees a "war on terror" is not a practical idea. Wars are typically fought on fronts, where terror is decentralized but operates within the borders of soverign nations. We cannot get troops to the terrorists, first because they hide among ordinary people and thus everyone is a potential terrorist, and second because they are within the borders of soverign nations who don't exactly want a "world police" (pardon the phrase) going in to search for terrorists. It should be the responsibility of individual nations to locate and capture terrorists internally. As to whether there are "terrorist states" which are sponsoring terrorism domestically, the top names typically are doing a decent job of locating and capturing terrorists (by that I mean Iran, and prior to the US invasion, Iraq) How do you fight a war against the concept of decentralized, individual-oriented warfare which is not state-sponsored?

Cool My point is really that due diligence was not undertaken by Congress and the Federal Reserve in this specific instance. Someone else pointed out to me that the executives of many of these financial companies made quite a bit of money on this whole deal, and it's their shareholders who really lost out. So perhaps I wasn't apt in saying that everyone loses except people like me. It's more like everyone loses except people like me and executives of subprime mortgage lenders. As to whether the sold their stock before the crash, possibly with foreknowledge of the impending doom of their corporations, that's for the SEC to investigate and decide.

Duck typing is one particular form of dynamic typing. I would contrast static typing with dynamic typing. You can have stronger dynamic typing than duck typing. I'd still consider duck typing stronger than most statically typed languages, at least any that let you do typecasts, which provides a great way to violate type safety whenver you feel like it. Contrast with dynamic typing, where every object knows its own type. Well, I defer to my Java example from earlier. The complexity comes in describing things so all types are known at compile time. C++ templates provide a good example:

I wouldn't recommend C++ to a newbie due to the pitfalls of manual memory management, the complexity of a static typing system, and the overall oddness of many of the language features, most notably templates. (which provide an ineffective solution promoting compiler-driven code duplication in order to preserve C++'s strong, static typing) And as Pangloss mentioned, VB.NET is nothing like VB6. The .NET framework promotes shared constructs among multiple languages, meaning that what you use provides only a particular semantic flavor to a set of shared APIs.

The deregulation I'm talking about applies specifically to mortgage lenders. The Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Over the course of the past decade Hint: Not all types of deregulation are the same. No, they didn't: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/03/17/the_dangers_of_deregulation/ That's not what any financial analysis of this situation that I've read has said. Everyone is pinning the problem squarely on subprime loans. The predatory lenders saw a $1.3 trillion subprime lending industry collapse due to their collective action. Was that the "average citizen's" fault, or their fault for creating an unsustainable business model that ultimately blew up in their faces and in turn brought down the housing market as a whole? In this case, isn't regulation warranted? Can someone respond to this with something other than a slippery slope argument? Regulating the types of loans mortgage lenders can issue (e.g. limiting the number of subprime loans they're allowed to issue) is not some slippery slope towards the fixing of home prices by government or the abolition of freedom.

A home is typically a substantially safer investment than a craps table. For the past 30 years it's been one of the safest investments you could make. They needed to move, and the market happened to tank at the same time this happened. Bingo Yes So anything but Laissez-Faire capitalism means the country isn't free?

That liberal digital rag Salon claims that Rove and other such as Abramoff communicated via 3rd party GOP controlled e-mail addresses. The contents of that e-mail were just sent to Congress: http://ww1.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/03/29/attorney_firings/?source=whitelist

Then what is knowledge?

A lack of garbage collection is perhaps the most notable deficiency, so much so that its creator, Bjorne Stroustroup, has considered including one in future revisions of the C++ standard. There are several garbage collectors available for C++ but the lack of a definitive one hinders interoperability of code which uses one. This has been corrected in D, a highly C++-inspired language. There's further problems with C++ which are not addressed by the mere addition of a garbage collector. The issue of concurrency is perhaps the biggest one. My fear is that a concurrent OO language will never be realized, and we will be forced to move to an entirely Actor-based language.

Thank you for the cordial post Pangloss, and indeed, the way the story was reported was not accurate, and the bill that passed was not the one I reported passed, nor the one the media reported passed, at least when I posted it. Oh well.

Thank you In my case, I got a home for $120,000 less than what the seller bought it for. They're still paying an extra $120,000 for a mortgage on a home they no longer own because they bought a home for $120,000 more than they sold it for. In 15-20 years, sure, they'll have it paid off. No skin off your nose, no doubt. But for them, I can't imagine the situation is anything more than devastating. Their mortgage is as large as mine, but I got a home out of the deal, and they didn't. They owe $120,000 due to changes in the market caused entirely by external factors, in this case poorly thought out policy changes.

Again, this has nothing to do with regulating the prices of homes homes. It has to do with regulating mortgage lenders. Deregulating mortgage lenders (allowing subprime mortgages to be issued by corporations) resulted in: Hundreds of thousands of people losing their homes because they got subprime mortgages they couldn't afford Subprime mortgage lenders going bankrupt because their clients couldn't afford the exploitative loans they issued Your average citizen's home value decreasing because the stupidity of the people above

So you're saying faith in a religion and faith in science are synonymous?

I'd wager the problem was a lack of pro-administration bias

Let me approach this from two different angles. You're trying to lump two different things together here: If the administration weren't going after terrorism, no one would Yes, counterterrorism is left mostly to the president. Who else has the power to pursue it? If Republicans weren't going after terrorism, no one would I'd like to bring up Bill Clinton bombing Taliban training camps and "the right's" reaction: http://www.hanlonsrazor.org/2006/09/24/freepers-re-writing-history-on-clintonmonicabin-laden-criticism/ Here's a sample: More questioning of Clinton's counterterrorism efforts as "wag the dog": http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/SUDAN/sudan.html The problem was specifically that the Bush administration didn't care about counterterrorism prior to 9/11. Bush did nothing to pursue the Cole bombing. It happened on Clinton's watch, therefore it can be swept under the rug and ignored. The Bush administration received multiple warnings from the CIA about potential terrorist actions. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/02/AR2006100200187.html http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB116/testimony.htm The Bush administration has used the result of their own inaction to argue for the removal of civil liberties and action which has cost America hundreds of billions of dollars. The Iraq War has turned Iraq from a stable dictatorship into a terrorist haven. Now they're arguing we need to stay there specifically to counter the threat they created. My personal conclusion would be that Republicans were far more concerned with ousting Clinton than they were with terrorism prior to 9/11. After 9/11, Republicans started playing lip service to the problem of counterterrorism. Have they actually accomplished anything, or have they just thrown money at the problem, while substantially increasing it with the Iraq War?

Actually I approached him with the idea of metaconsciousness, that human collective action is resulting in structures which are increasingly similar to the human brain.

The point is they don't. They're also subject to market forces, which are monstrously bigger than any individual. Well, in this case, it's a "A bunch of idiots mean my home is worth half of what I bought it for, even though I did nothing wrong except being in the wrong place at the wrong time" So to repeat myself, YET AGAIN, what possible advantages were there to deregulating mortgage lending, beyond people like me being able to buy a home for half of what the person I bought it from got it for after the whole experiment blows up in everyone's face? Nobody can answer this question. I hear a lot of defense of the concept of deregulation but no defense of why it was applicable in this instance. I'm going to go ahead and say "This is why Laissez-Faire Capitalism doesn't work"