I don't recall their compilers and tools ever being more than mediocre.
Microsoft BASIC was hands down the best BASIC to program a PC with in the early 1980s. It had real string arrays, and important string functions like left, mid, and right, that other Basic implementations simply lacked.
Yes, TurboPascal and TurboC definitely stole the lead in tools from them, but the original TurboPascal has no linker and TurboC would be eclipsed with Visual C++, and after that the Visual Studio chain would gain a lead and remain the best all around IDE. Even now, the combination of Resharper + Visual C# is the best general purpose development story out there.
I will say though, that Microsoft's obsession with C# does open them up. The Linux C++ story is getting to be pretty darned good. I'm having a rather dandy time with Eclipse on Ubuntu 9, and Linux has always had the lead for 64 bit C++ programming, and always will have it simply because they have a better mix of integer, long and pointer sizes than Windows, and the calling convention is faster.
We can't afford all the police. Time to just decriminalize some stuff, have speedy death sentences for other stuff, and just have a cheaper justice system. And, if someone shoots a burglar or a would be home invader, don't give them a bunch of crap.
This is not just a "dumb regulation", it is a federal law with implications on securites fraud and insider trading. Your opinion, sir, is moronic.
This moron seems to think that if ALL of the communications from a broker were public, then there could not be insider trading now, could there? For that matter, if there was fraud, there would be a much larger body of data for -everyone- to examine to see if a broker was up and up.
You are only trying to preserve a means of keeping secrets without actually admitting that having any secrets at all is essentially what screws markets up. It's pretty cut and dry, and this is a black and white issue. Either you have full disclosure, or you aren't honest.
This rule is exactly backwards. We should be encouraging brokers and trading houses to open up their secrets so we can have a more transparent marketplace. Ideally, every trading comment and every piece of investment advice ought to be more public and more open source than not.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that it's 'the end of world'. I was referring to the characterisations that seem popular in today's media where the effect is extreme
Oh, no offense taken. I didn't see that implication at all in your post. I was basically commenting for readers that, may buy into the message that having an autistic child is the end of the world, when its really not.
. At some point someone will find a person who simply will increase the attacks and if you keep inrceasing your attacks eventually someone will get killed and that is a lose-lose situation.
And calling the principal in that case is going to help you, how?
When I was in 9th grade I got bullied a lot. I have to admit, a lot of it was because I was a dick. Our high schools overriding principal was that everyone should be socialized and honestly, I was just coming down with a depression that lasts to this day, didn't know how to deal with it, and I just wanted to get in there, do my work, and get out, and be left utterly alone.
Still, there were jokers always trying to get me.
There was this one guy who was always pushing me around and trying to take my lunch money and other stuff. So, I bought a pretzel and stuffed it full of razor blades and gave it to him. He got it, discovered that I tried to kill him, and reported me to the principal, saying that he was only playing around. I said, well, I wasn't. Needless to say, he could have kicked my ass but the whole thing was so weird to him that he never even spoke to me again. Excellent.
Another time, some kid poured a bunch of stuff on my drawing paper in art class. So, I dumped a bunch of soap into his eyes and burned him up. He later jumped me in the bathroom and tried to flush my head, so I strangled him and bashed his head into the wall as hard as I could. He never bothered me again. Excellent.
Finally, a lot of other people picked on me for a whole bunch of random reasons, so I got pissed off and set out to kill everyone in the entire high school. I figured I would glue the doors shut with epoxy and then model rocket the place with a sort of a home brew napalm and burn everybody alive. I got caught, and luckily this was pre-columbine so not much really happened and I was able to worm my way out of the whole thing, but you know what, word got around, I took some crap, but, really, nobody ever bothered me again.
Bottom line is, if someone is picking on you, if you fuck them up, they will probably not fuck with you again.
There is nothing more scary to a parent than the possibility of something as debilitating as autism being inflicted on their child when they could have done something about it
I actually have an autistic child. I would say that its not the end of the world and actually has its own blessings. My bigger beef, actually, is with a society that has so little tolerance for neurodiversity. If my little boy were a hunter gatherer, or a farmer, he'd be fine.
It is, but it would be stupid to throw out the whole USA to spite the stupdity of one dumb generation. Boomers smoked too much pot and wrecked the country, and now we have to put it back together. But, at least they made a lot of cool movies and music.
1. Decreased tax revenues due to massive unemployment caused by the Great Recession
The biggest reason that tax revenues fell off is because the US Tax Code is actually way too progressive. Wage earners essentially pay little taxes, leaving the bulk to taxes on investments and taxes on corporate profits. When the bottom fell out of the stock market, those revenues evaporated and you can see a drop off of about 300 billion from that.
Bush tax cuts, which were entirely financed by the deficits
Quite clearly, Bush's income tax revenues were HIGHER in 2007 than they were pre-tax cut. At the end of Bush's economic runup, federal tax revenues where 25pc higher than they were at the beginning. Indeed, the increase from 2T to 2.5T was easily enough to actually finance both wars with change. The question is, what else actually went up?
Well, have a look at Medicare alone. Medicare went from 150B to nearly 450B during that time frame. And, we have enormous SSI payouts kicking in. Entitlements are like 5 wars, every year. And, having the DoD go from 300B to 750B is a kick in the rear as well.
I don't think elderly people even want to go to nursing homes. I'm planning to take my mother in once she is too old to live on her own.
There's some bills in that scenario still, and they are all related by not having enough children. First, and most obvious, the elderly person might have outlived their kid. Granted, it was this sort of scenario that social security was originally for, but now everyone claims it. No matter where your mother lives, she'll be getting a social security check and really, it will probably be for more and for longer than what she paid into it.
Medicare is its own disaster. Dying of old age really means a mountain of medical bills for all the little things that go wrong. I can't even begin to calculate the tens of thousands of dollars that were spent on even silly things for my grandmother in law in the last year of her life. It's easy to say, just let her go, but when it is ultimately your grandmother or mother in front of you, its actually easier to do what it reasonably takes to give her a chance.
Bottom line is, the population is old, there's not enough kids to care for them, there's a ton of medical and other bills with them, and so both the absolute and the per capita costs of keeping old people alive is going to skyrocket, and it has. WE can either pay sufficiently to keep grandmother alive in increased taxes, or, we can instead bankrupt our children before they even get started, through massive debt, and I'd rather have the former.
First, the problem with statistics is that they deal in huge quantities to be accurate, and, the human body is sufficiently complex that lurking behind any "outlier" might exist a causal relationship for just that person.
Second, the medical establishment has made some spectacular mistakes through the years and people simply do not trust them.
By anyone's admission, the number of medical mistakes and fatalities from them are so enormous that literally every family has a story where the doctor screwed up. Advice given out by the medical community has changed, as well.
At one point in time, the medical establishment advocated a diet of four food groups, one of which would turn out to be loaded in cholesterol. At one point in time, antibiotics were hailed as the end of bacterial infections, and now medicine is essentially backpedalling against a resurgance in diseases once thought "cured".
Most damningly though, is, the whole question of whether or not medical science is actually worth the expense. Some studies have shown that once you factor out hygeine and nutrition, the lifespan of humans has not actually changed in 100 years. Essentially, if you get a virus, you will either recover or not, and bacterial infections are actually not common enough to really effect the larger course of affairs.
Finally, the politicization of science has happened even in medicine. The whole concept of the university, and by extension, the doctor was of someone who earned a decent living but was removed from the field of genuine wealth in order to be free from not only its temptations, but its distractions. Now, we have very real cases where doctors are rigging double blind studies in order to try and sell stock in their biotech company, manipulating the lives of real patients solely to cash in.
Who do you trust in medicine these days? Who do you trust in science? As soon as universities started amassing huge patent warchests and enormous funds, as soon as science got -expensive-, it became political, and because it is political, it cannot be trusted, as much as nothing else political can be trusted.
The money money I give them should cover that with $5,000 to spare. How is it reasonable to say that they need more? Where will it end if we keep giving them more? It most certainly is an addiction.
How should it? Seriously? How should it? I mean, we've already had the Republicans essentially say that they were against the government offering Medicare to all citizens because, ahem, private insurers would not be able to compete because Medicare's costs are so low.
Like, you keep saying you give up all this money, but, I mean, how does 20k pay for a nursing home visit. It's not even close.
Like, should all the elderly be in concentration camps?
I can hardly imagine that giving them even more would solve the problem, whatever it is. You shouldn't enable an addict.
It's not a function of addiction. It's a function of the number of people who are old. At issue is the failure of the baby boomer generation to have enough children to pay for their old age, and honestly, the same as ours. It's really that simple.
Your living expenses are maybe 10k a year, for sure, but, if you've got two parents on the gov't dole, paying the exact same as you, that's 20k, and that's pretty much where the country is it right now.
Is that this whole space privatization thing is anything more than a kill NASA move. Like, come on, we're supposed to believe that a political party that seems to think people should not be allowed to own rifles should be allowed to develop ICBMs? Would Democrats really ever let me own my own rocketship, when, the mere possession of the energy required to get into myself orbit makes for a hugely powerful weapon?
Come on, Democrats banned mercury and lead, and they are going to let us have our own rockets?
Ah, so what. They don't like me. Launch away. I'm breaking Hitler's record for most people killed in twenty minutes. Junior can hide in the bunker and be proud of daddy's high score.
You assume too much rationality in people, and missile defense is pretty cheap. I'd take even a ten percent chance against a nuclear attack, then none.
Being a cynic, this unabashed spending has got to stop
The spending is going crazy because entitlements are out of control. The feds promise that everyone who is this or that is entitled to a federal zennie, and now there's more of them as baby boomers get old. What was supposed to happen was that entitlements would be pretty cheap and there would be lots of kids to share the costs of the old people. Now, neither has happened.
Bottom line is, if you want the spending to stop, you have to withhold care for the elderly and handicapped on some level and let them die. If you don't want to do that, then you to pay more in taxes to stem the budget bleeding. In all reality, the only political thing that could happen is that some old people will get cut out and some people will pay more in taxes. But all of the discretionary spending doesn't matter one whit, compared to the mandatory entitlement spending.
As I've heard said before, it's not NASA's job to put a man on Mars (or the moon). It's NASA's job to make it possible for National Geographic to put a man on Mars.
That's insane. National Geographic's great expeditions followed in the footsteps of many gov't funded expeditions, particularly, all these expeditions were descended from the British sending out the likes of Cook, and geez, Darwin.
The NMD was probably sabotaged by leftists in league with the Obama administration. They want the USA to be a giant and defenseless nuclear target so all the third world people can take their revenge upon the evil Americans. There would be nothing that would make the leftists happier than a bunch of white cities in ruins.
I think his point is that threat of being attacked by ICBM is realistically much more likely to be contained by MAD than by any fancy missile interception system (which may or may not work, anyway)
If was a dictator, I'd launch when I got old. Who cares. MAD doesn't matter if you are not sane.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't recall their compilers and tools ever being more than mediocre.
Microsoft BASIC was hands down the best BASIC to program a PC with in the early 1980s. It had real string arrays, and important string functions like left, mid, and right, that other Basic implementations simply lacked.
Yes, TurboPascal and TurboC definitely stole the lead in tools from them, but the original TurboPascal has no linker and TurboC would be eclipsed with Visual C++, and after that the Visual Studio chain would gain a lead and remain the best all around IDE. Even now, the combination of Resharper + Visual C# is the best general purpose development story out there.
I will say though, that Microsoft's obsession with C# does open them up. The Linux C++ story is getting to be pretty darned good. I'm having a rather dandy time with Eclipse on Ubuntu 9, and Linux has always had the lead for 64 bit C++ programming, and always will have it simply because they have a better mix of integer, long and pointer sizes than Windows, and the calling convention is faster.
We can't afford all the police. Time to just decriminalize some stuff, have speedy death sentences for other stuff, and just have a cheaper justice system. And, if someone shoots a burglar or a would be home invader, don't give them a bunch of crap.
Any Wall Street creature that complains
Blah blah blah. Congress pisses away more money in a year than Wall Street does even with its bailouts.
This is not just a "dumb regulation", it is a federal law with implications on securites fraud and insider trading. Your opinion, sir, is moronic.
This moron seems to think that if ALL of the communications from a broker were public, then there could not be insider trading now, could there? For that matter, if there was fraud, there would be a much larger body of data for -everyone- to examine to see if a broker was up and up.
You are only trying to preserve a means of keeping secrets without actually admitting that having any secrets at all is essentially what screws markets up. It's pretty cut and dry, and this is a black and white issue. Either you have full disclosure, or you aren't honest.
You wanted more "oversight". You're getting it.
I didn't ask for it.
This rule is exactly backwards. We should be encouraging brokers and trading houses to open up their secrets so we can have a more transparent marketplace. Ideally, every trading comment and every piece of investment advice ought to be more public and more open source than not.
It's just a dumb regulation.
I love how the first few words of a slashdot post these days are:
"some_easy_to_say_title SOME PERSON'S NAME"
I would almost condemn the guy for being a self promoting cretin, but, since I'll probably put out a press release for myself, I probably won't.
Rorschach, is that you?
It's funny that I'm actually even appalled by mild violence now. Like, the WWF and Ultimate Fighting stuff disgusts me...
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that it's 'the end of world'. I was referring to the characterisations that seem popular in today's media where the effect is extreme
Oh, no offense taken. I didn't see that implication at all in your post. I was basically commenting for readers that, may buy into the message that having an autistic child is the end of the world, when its really not.
. At some point someone will find a person who simply will increase the attacks and if you keep inrceasing your attacks eventually someone will get killed and that is a lose-lose situation.
And calling the principal in that case is going to help you, how?
. The punishment system doesn't work.
When I was in 9th grade I got bullied a lot. I have to admit, a lot of it was because I was a dick. Our high schools overriding principal was that everyone should be socialized and honestly, I was just coming down with a depression that lasts to this day, didn't know how to deal with it, and I just wanted to get in there, do my work, and get out, and be left utterly alone.
Still, there were jokers always trying to get me.
There was this one guy who was always pushing me around and trying to take my lunch money and other stuff. So, I bought a pretzel and stuffed it full of razor blades and gave it to him. He got it, discovered that I tried to kill him, and reported me to the principal, saying that he was only playing around. I said, well, I wasn't. Needless to say, he could have kicked my ass but the whole thing was so weird to him that he never even spoke to me again. Excellent.
Another time, some kid poured a bunch of stuff on my drawing paper in art class. So, I dumped a bunch of soap into his eyes and burned him up. He later jumped me in the bathroom and tried to flush my head, so I strangled him and bashed his head into the wall as hard as I could. He never bothered me again. Excellent.
Finally, a lot of other people picked on me for a whole bunch of random reasons, so I got pissed off and set out to kill everyone in the entire high school. I figured I would glue the doors shut with epoxy and then model rocket the place with a sort of a home brew napalm and burn everybody alive. I got caught, and luckily this was pre-columbine so not much really happened and I was able to worm my way out of the whole thing, but you know what, word got around, I took some crap, but, really, nobody ever bothered me again.
Bottom line is, if someone is picking on you, if you fuck them up, they will probably not fuck with you again.
There is nothing more scary to a parent than the possibility of something as debilitating as autism being inflicted on their child when they could have done something about it
I actually have an autistic child. I would say that its not the end of the world and actually has its own blessings. My bigger beef, actually, is with a society that has so little tolerance for neurodiversity. If my little boy were a hunter gatherer, or a farmer, he'd be fine.
This is bad planing.
It is, but it would be stupid to throw out the whole USA to spite the stupdity of one dumb generation. Boomers smoked too much pot and wrecked the country, and now we have to put it back together. But, at least they made a lot of cool movies and music.
Your facts are all wrong.
Historic Tax Revenues
1. Decreased tax revenues due to massive unemployment caused by the Great Recession
The biggest reason that tax revenues fell off is because the US Tax Code is actually way too progressive. Wage earners essentially pay little taxes, leaving the bulk to taxes on investments and taxes on corporate profits. When the bottom fell out of the stock market, those revenues evaporated and you can see a drop off of about 300 billion from that.
Bush tax cuts, which were entirely financed by the deficits
Quite clearly, Bush's income tax revenues were HIGHER in 2007 than they were pre-tax cut. At the end of Bush's economic runup, federal tax revenues where 25pc higher than they were at the beginning.
Indeed, the increase from 2T to 2.5T was easily enough to actually finance both wars with change. The question is, what else actually went up?
Well, have a look at Medicare alone. Medicare went from 150B to nearly 450B during that time frame. And, we have enormous SSI payouts kicking in. Entitlements are like 5 wars, every year.
And, having the DoD go from 300B to 750B is a kick in the rear as well.
I don't think elderly people even want to go to nursing homes. I'm planning to take my mother in once she is too old to live on her own.
There's some bills in that scenario still, and they are all related by not having enough children. First, and most obvious, the elderly person might have outlived their kid. Granted, it was this sort of scenario that social security was originally for, but now everyone claims it. No matter where your mother lives, she'll be getting a social security check and really, it will probably be for more and for longer than what she paid into it.
Medicare is its own disaster. Dying of old age really means a mountain of medical bills for all the little things that go wrong. I can't even begin to calculate the tens of thousands of dollars that were spent on even silly things for my grandmother in law in the last year of her life. It's easy to say, just let her go, but when it is ultimately your grandmother or mother in front of you, its actually easier to do what it reasonably takes to give her a chance.
Bottom line is, the population is old, there's not enough kids to care for them, there's a ton of medical and other bills with them, and so both the absolute and the per capita costs of keeping old people alive is going to skyrocket, and it has. WE can either pay sufficiently to keep grandmother alive in increased taxes, or, we can instead bankrupt our children before they even get started, through massive debt, and I'd rather have the former.
First, the problem with statistics is that they deal in huge quantities to be accurate, and, the human body is sufficiently complex that lurking behind any "outlier" might exist a causal relationship for just that person.
Second, the medical establishment has made some spectacular mistakes through the years and people simply do not trust them.
By anyone's admission, the number of medical mistakes and fatalities from them are so enormous that literally every family has a story where the doctor screwed up. Advice given out by the medical community has changed, as well.
At one point in time, the medical establishment advocated a diet of four food groups, one of which would turn out to be loaded in cholesterol. At one point in time, antibiotics were hailed as the end of bacterial infections, and now medicine is essentially backpedalling against a resurgance in diseases once thought "cured".
Most damningly though, is, the whole question of whether or not medical science is actually worth the expense. Some studies have shown that once you factor out hygeine and nutrition, the lifespan of humans has not actually changed in 100 years. Essentially, if you get a virus, you will either recover or not, and bacterial infections are actually not common enough to really effect the larger course of affairs.
Finally, the politicization of science has happened even in medicine. The whole concept of the university, and by extension, the doctor was of someone who earned a decent living but was removed from the field of genuine wealth in order to be free from not only its temptations, but its distractions. Now, we have very real cases where doctors are rigging double blind studies in order to try and sell stock in their biotech company, manipulating the lives of real patients solely to cash in.
Who do you trust in medicine these days? Who do you trust in science? As soon as universities started amassing huge patent warchests and enormous funds, as soon as science got -expensive-, it became political, and because it is political, it cannot be trusted, as much as nothing else political can be trusted.
The money money I give them should cover that with $5,000 to spare. How is it reasonable to say that they need more? Where will it end if we keep giving them more? It most certainly is an addiction.
How should it? Seriously? How should it? I mean, we've already had the Republicans essentially say that they were against the government offering Medicare to all citizens because, ahem, private insurers would not be able to compete because Medicare's costs are so low.
Like, you keep saying you give up all this money, but, I mean, how does 20k pay for a nursing home visit. It's not even close.
Like, should all the elderly be in concentration camps?
What do they do with all that money I give them?
Pay for old people to get medical care.
I can hardly imagine that giving them even more would solve the problem, whatever it is. You shouldn't enable an addict.
It's not a function of addiction. It's a function of the number of people who are old. At issue is the failure of the baby boomer generation to have enough children to pay for their old age, and honestly, the same as ours. It's really that simple.
Your living expenses are maybe 10k a year, for sure, but, if you've got two parents on the gov't dole, paying the exact same as you, that's 20k, and that's pretty much where the country is it right now.
We need to raise taxes, cut benefits, and slash defense spending
I agree completely.
Is that this whole space privatization thing is anything more than a kill NASA move. Like, come on, we're supposed to believe that a political party that seems to think people should not be allowed to own rifles should be allowed to develop ICBMs? Would Democrats really ever let me own my own rocketship, when, the mere possession of the energy required to get into myself orbit makes for a hugely powerful weapon?
Come on, Democrats banned mercury and lead, and they are going to let us have our own rockets?
What a joke.
Your kids would? Even Kim Jong-Il got some.
Ah, so what. They don't like me. Launch away. I'm breaking Hitler's record for most people killed in twenty minutes. Junior can hide in the bunker and be proud of daddy's high score.
You assume too much rationality in people, and missile defense is pretty cheap. I'd take even a ten percent chance against a nuclear attack, then none.
Quit rationalizing being defenseless.
Being a cynic, this unabashed spending has got to stop
The spending is going crazy because entitlements are out of control. The feds promise that everyone who is this or that is entitled to a federal zennie, and now there's more of them as baby boomers get old. What was supposed to happen was that entitlements would be pretty cheap and there would be lots of kids to share the costs of the old people. Now, neither has happened.
Bottom line is, if you want the spending to stop, you have to withhold care for the elderly and handicapped on some level and let them die. If you don't want to do that, then you to pay more in taxes to stem the budget bleeding. In all reality, the only political thing that could happen is that some old people will get cut out and some people will pay more in taxes. But all of the discretionary spending doesn't matter one whit, compared to the mandatory entitlement spending.
As I've heard said before, it's not NASA's job to put a man on Mars (or the moon). It's NASA's job to make it possible for National Geographic to put a man on Mars.
That's insane. National Geographic's great expeditions followed in the footsteps of many gov't funded expeditions, particularly, all these expeditions were descended from the British sending out the likes of Cook, and geez, Darwin.
The NMD was probably sabotaged by leftists in league with the Obama administration. They want the USA to be a giant and defenseless nuclear target so all the third world people can take their revenge upon the evil Americans. There would be nothing that would make the leftists happier than a bunch of white cities in ruins.
I think his point is that threat of being attacked by ICBM is realistically much more likely to be contained by MAD than by any fancy missile interception system (which may or may not work, anyway)
If was a dictator, I'd launch when I got old. Who cares. MAD doesn't matter if you are not sane.