Why can't I be free to not pay anything when I'm young and starting out?
Because if you think that is a wise course of action, you need a nanny state to take care of you, because you are not mature enough to take care of yourself. If you think you can do without health care you are insane, and therefore by definition in need of health care.
Now, I would not mind if only you were to pay the consequences. But no man is an isle, and if you develop a serious condition and end up in the ER, other people will have to foot the bill (people who where smart enough to pay for health care). Your spouse will have her/his economy wrecked trying to save your myopic ass. If it's not your spouse it will be someone else in your family. Your children may miss out college (let alone the psychological scars), which may confine a few generations of your descendants to the proletariat.
My father was a similar brand of idiot. He had his insurance alright, he was even an insurance agent. Yet he did not fasten his seatbelt, in the name of "freedom": no shit, that's what he says when I try to get him to buckle up in my car. No, seat belts are actually compulsory where I live. Well, I was almost made an orphan by your brand of "freedom". He crashed into a truck and was hurled into a corn field after a stupid attempt to overtake a car at a highway junction. His right talus bone was shattered in literally a thousand little pieces, and he has been unable to run ever since. It could have turned out much worse: my mother was a housewife, and my dad the only breadwinner. Had he gone, I have no idea what would have been of us (well, yes, he did have life insurance too, but still).
On the other hand, I think the fair system would be paying $0 in direct insurance and paying everything through a share of your income tax.
You're so pathetic I can't even bring myself to be angry at you.
You don't seriously believe you can move the entire nuclear arsenal of a country in two weeks? And you don't seriously believe Syria would be so stupid as to take in that kind of cargo, with a quarter million military from the world's only superpower just waiting for an excuse to invade? And about all these caravans, which proof do you have, some Ann Coulter book?
Also, last time I checked the UN says they want guarantees that Iran is not going to develop WMD. If there were proof they did, they would be screwed already.
Anyway, I would not mind Iran having a few nukes. Might just stabilise the region, as Israel finds out they are cannot use their nukes with impunity any more. Iran is not guided by madmen, Fox propaganda notwithstanding, it is guided by assholes. And assholes are very good at looking out for themselves. There is no way they would use nukes in a first strike.
Don't even come close to the other argument of a "dirty bomb": every nuclear fuel has a specific isotopic signature one cannot get rid of. If they gave material for a DIY nuke to some terrorists, the isotopic signature would be pointing to Natanz very clearly.
Finally: the US brag about their latest weapons on a daily basis. There are countless magazines dedicated to defence technology. There is an inordinate disproportion of research that is financed by the armed forces. Maybe it's so common it entered the background noise and you cannot hear it.
I heard from a guy who was in a similar situation at a julebord a few years ago. He (a researcher at NTNU) had to go to a conference, and when entering the US he was asked whether he had previous convictions. He had, for "civil disobedience" (he did not specify, but I suppose it was bad enough to worry about). Realising that, had he answered "yes", he would have been denied admission and would have missed the conference, he managed to contact the Norwegian embassy or a consulate, and asked whether he really had to mention that. The embassy told him (not sure how explicitly) that he could say he had not, with the understanding that had the US border authorities checked with the embassy they would have backed him.
So, congratulations US border authorities: you are being so much of a pain in the ass that even the institutions of satellite countries tell their citizens to lie to you. I suppose this will help catching whomever you are looking for.
if I were independently wealthy, no, I'd NEVER work again.
I know nothing of your economic or political opinions, but you are turning classical liberalism on its head. The theory fundamentally rests on people being motivated by money to work more; you just stated you are motivated only by lack thereof. Carrying this over to its logical consequences, higher taxes result in higher productivity.
You fail reading skills. There is a lot more water in the atmosphere than CO2. CO2 and water are produced by hydrocarbon combustion in the same order of magnitude. Anthropogenic CO2 has an effect on the natural equilibrium, anthropogenic water from HC combustion has not. That's because it can rain to the oceans (your point) and because even if it didn't it would be too little to matter anyway, since the oceans produce much larger quantities by evaporation alone (my point).
My country (Italy) switched back and forth between proportional and first-past-the-post systems over the past 20 years, and still has a varied mix of electoral laws at different levels: French system for municipalities, English system for regions, German system for nation-wide elections, and I'll be damned if I remember what provinces are using. Result? We have different assholes, but always the same shit.
I think what we learnt is that corrupt politicians will be corrupt politicians, no matter the system. You lament the problems with two-party rule, but let me assure you that 5-party rule is no better, if they are all corrupt. Proportional representation causes fragmentation, volatile alliances, and lots of backstabbing. Small parties end up wielding inordinate amounts of power because they have that 0.5% needed to get over 50%. Guess how the other blocks try to convince them?
If I may suggest, I think the problem is completely orthogonal to what you think: the problem is advertisement. Political advertisement (as TV spots, bill boards, flyers) should be completely forbidden, and all electoral communication should run through regulated channels. Every candidate should have the same amount of bandwidth to communicate with voters, the exact amount not being particularly important, and each candidate should be forced to participate to debates and answer question from opponents and public, lest they are disqualified.
Political advertisement is very restricted e.g. in Norway: they had a long discussion about allowing political TV ads, and the general opinion is that they should stay forbidden; and Norway is a well functioning democracy if I ever saw one. I think it is a good idea because politics is about reasoning, not catchy slogans; also, when a campaign gets expensive, only the established parties can campaign. That puts any new movement to a disadvantage.
Also, water vapor isn't relevant because it has a short lifetime in the atmosphere and isn't well-mixed to the top of the atmosphere.
That may be true, but I think the main issue about dihydrogen monoxide is that there are oceans of it that release by evaporation amounts much larger than anything the human race could produce—therefore it is well-nigh impossible to disrupt its equilibrium the way we can disrupt carbon dioxide's.
there isn't actually anything that you need to get your head around
Yup, that's why Haskell newsgroups are flooded with questions on monads and all Haskell books have multiple chapters. Because they don't exist. Anyway, nice try—that's an original escape route.
Because the I/O system is associated with some fancy name from category theory [...]
Who was talking about the IO monad? I was talking of monad in general. That includes State, Maybe and lists.
Do you complain about fundamental mathematical functions using "x" as a parameter name? Or loops using "i" and "j" as loop counters? What would you use instead?
There is this thing called "semantics". Good variable names can be address, customer, server, sum, widget or something that tells the reader what the variable is, not a random placeholder. If you cannot find a good name, you do not know what you are doing.
What makes infix appropriate for the handful of operators which C defines but inappropriate for any other diadic function?
The fact that +, -, *, / are widely recognized and any 3rd grader knows what they mean. R-e-a-d-a-b-i-l-i-t-y.
[...] and eliminate the piled-up parentheses at the end [with the $ operator]
Well done, if you left them there people could actually have understood something of the code.
(even a novice who thinks that 10 years experience of C means that they get to skip the stage of being a novice when it comes to learning a new language)
I never had the problems I had with Haskell when I learnt C++. Or Python, which I am learning now. Or Modelica (which is really different from procedural programming), which I use at work. That's got to stand for something.
[Haskell] it has its roots in algebra, which has a couple of centuries' head start on most programming languages, [...]
You can think of monads in general as a way to formally define types of computation that may have a context in which they operate.
See, you are part of the problem. Is that supposed to be an explanation? If you cannot explain it in plain English, you do not really understand it yourself (I think I am quoting Feynman). Your explanation is also wrong (as most "explanations" about monads): Maybe has no context, and neither do lists. The general definition of monad has nothing to do with context, only with chaining.
Try reading Real World Haskell? The text is available online.
Read, until chapter 15 where I gave up around the Reader monad. I read the Thompson before. See below for horror example.
OK. Let's take the simple example of map:
f becomes function, efirst, esrest.
However map is pretty easy to grasp. For the promised RWH horror code, here is one from chapter 14:
bindSt:: (SimpleState s a) -> (a -> SimpleState s b) -> SimpleState s b
bindSt m k = \s -> let (a, s') = m s
in (k a) s'
There are multiple issues: the SimpleState is not a state (problem common to the State monad), but a state processor, a function. I really would like to inflict pain on whomever decided the name. The authors use m presumably for a monad, then (the gods knows for which reason) k for a function. They also use a single apostrophe (the smallest character they could find, arguably) to distinguish the new state from the old. Funny thing, they actually try to follow up with a more "readable" version, in which they make a sorry attempt at readability, which fails hopelessly (step seems a noun, but is actually meant as a verb).
[...] helps keep the code using the combinators reasonably short [...]
Argh, no, you must not keep the damn code short! The alpha and omega is keeping it readable. Ideally good code should read almost as plain English. Operators are not English, and should be used sparingly (I once thought it was silly to limit the operators in C++... now I see the wisdom). Surely you can be too verbose, but at a minimum the code must be self-explanatory. Well that's the professional coding world, where Haskell does not belong, and never will.
Funny thing, I discovered that "terse" has a different meaning in English from what I expected. In my language (from which the word comes) it means clean, transparent, so I extrapolated "readable". Guess what, it took people praising Haskell for being "terse" for me to figure out that something was amiss.
A good example for a language that has certain things in place to prevent bad coding, is Haskell.
I have been studying some Haskell in the past few months, and while I am in awe at Haskell's type system, and how you can write a language without for and while, and lazy evaluation, and functional purity, and partial application, and so on, there are two things that made me give up:
Functional purity makes I/O a major mess. Monads are complex, unintuitive and unwieldy. I think I spent over one month only trying to warp my mind around that. It does not help that Haskellers keep repeating that "monads are really simple", there is a reason why they are the most asked-about topic in newsgroups.
The worst thing is the Haskell community's coding standards. Single-letter variables are common, and I actually read some delirious rant about this being necessary "because it's so abstract you cannot name it". If it's so abstract you cannot name it, you abstracted too much, or you don't understand what you are doing. There seems to be a proliferation of operators, since Haskell foolishly allows to define new ones, even completely useless ones like $. Coding function with undocumented one-liners seems to be considered a virtue.
Haskell has many good ideas, but it will never be a successful language because it's just too damn difficult, and no one in the Haskell community seems to care about it. I gave up when I thought that, even if I learned it, it would be utterly useless because few other people will bother to learn it. It also weighed in that there are so few software projects based on Haskell.
Haskell is a great language to calculate factorials, but very little else.
One, the complexities of a GUI makes codes many times more intricate [...]
Here's the rest of your problem. A GUI must never bump into a difficult or mission-critical algorithm. That's supposed to be its own library, which is accessed by the GUI through a clean and solid software interface. This is a major architectural fault: a Big Ball of Mud, and some languages encourage that more than others.
My suggestion would be: get a language with a lower density of script kiddies, sufficiently popular and object-oriented (Python, C++, Java,...), get some good programmers with proven track record, and rewrite the client. Specify that you want all functions and variables documented, and test suites; if they say "that will cost you more", show them the door. If they say "we do it anyway", that's a good sign.
As an Italian, I can tell you have avoided the crimes-ridden areas (though you were savvy enough to dodge the tourist traps). Naples, for example, is not Bogotá, but is proceeding in that direction; in fact, the local mafia (camorra) is routinely dumping toxic waste in landfills for a business, much similarly to what the 'ndrangheta did in this case.
There are differences between the main mafias: the Sicilian one (the "original" mafia) is structured and hierarchical. In a Sicilian village you can leave the keys in your car, and no one will steal it. However, sometimes when you turn the key the car may explode, if you irritated the wrong person or asked the wrong questions.
'Ndrangheta, in Calabria, is family-based (meaning blood-tied). Small groups with internal hierarchy, but no comprehensive power structure.
The one most dangerous for your immediate safety is camorra (Campania), clan-based and very violent. There was recently a nice film about it. Being pickpocketed in Naples is almost part of the tourist experience, but recently drive-by's have appeared.
You know, it's a red flag to me and many people when someone quotes numbers like this. "you have only a 0.7% margin in which they respond with a 10-second lag".
I actually happen to have a PhD in applied control, and before my defence, as customary in the country I was working, I had to deliver a "trial lecture", i.e. I was given two weeks' time to scramble, research and present the state of the art in (in my case) control of nuclear power plants.
You can verify my claims in "Nuclear Physics—Principles and Applications", by John Lilley, Wiley 2001, ISBN 0-471-97936-8, section 10.5.2; look especially close at equation 10.41 and subsequent commentary. This issue is nothing new and appeared even in the first book about control of nuclear power plants, "Control of Nuclear Reactors and Power Plants", by M. A. Schultz, McGraw Hill 1955.
Apart from the fact there's no way to verify the numbers given, this ignores the fact obvious to even amateur engineers that NOT ALL NUCLEAR PLANTS ARE ENGINEERED THE SAME.
And you are ignoring the fact obvious to more experienced engineers that physics cannot be changed by how you design the reactor. The numbers I gave have nothing to do with engineering and all to do with the neutron-driven fission of U-235.
[W]hat quoting exact numbers that spell doom and gloom and then claiming they apply across all instances of something as complex as power plants says to anyone reading it: "I don't know what I'm talking about, but I memorized these numbers because they agree with my beliefs and I can use them as 'proof' that I'm right."
It feels like I'm hearing a ID proponent claiming that "life is too complex to be understood". FYI not only I do know what I am talking about, I also memorised those numbers because they are actually fundamental to understanding the control issues of a nuclear power plant. I happen to be a scientist and I form my opinions from my data, not the other way around.
Actually Python is pretty slow, about 50 times slower than C++, but that's usually ok since you can put the bottleneck into a C++ module. However, if all the server software is in Python, things will be significantly slower.
Perl is actually horrible: it is the slowest language in the survey I linked, except for Ruby, plus we all know what the code looks like.
As for Erlang, it fares relatively well (though still 15 times slower than C++), but its main competitor would probably be Haskell, which also is faster.
France delivers a lot of cheap electricity to its neighbours because, having a mainly nuclear-based power system, they can only provide the base load. This means they have to produce more than what they need and sell the excess, even if the prices are not advantageous and would not justify the sale economically.
Nuclear plants are difficult to control. The reaction's dynamics are nonlinear and unstable, and you have only a 0.7% margin in which they respond with a 10-second lag (and are controllable). Should you get out of that zone, the reaction starts moving with a time constant in the range of milliseconds. Add to the mix that neutron radiation sensors (which are essential in feedback control) are slower at low reaction rates, and you get why nobody likes to run a nuclear power plant at part load. Yes, running a nuclear plant at low power is actually more dangerous than at full power. That's why starting up a plant is such a critical operation.
All this means you cannot have a 100%-nuclear power system unless you can sell your excess power to/buy your peak power from someone (like France does), or are willing to produce peak power at all times and burn any excess. If Germany were to go 100% nuclear, who's left in Europe to buy their power?
I read they used the engine of a 127 in the early seventies. Those engines were awfully inefficient: I remember that only in the eighties car commercials started bragging "This car satisfies the American efficiency requirements, the strictest in the world!" (they don't say that anymore), so I assume that engine was way less efficient than any US gas guzzler. No surprise it did not pan out. Now, if you try that with a modern VW, the result may be better.
Ammonium nitrate [is] a product which uses natural gas as a major catalyst to produce.
Here come the chemistry Nazis: natural gas is a reactant, not a catalyst, and not to produce ammonium nitrate. It is used to produce hydrogen, which is then combined with nitrogen to get ammonia, with which you actually get the ammonium nitrate when you combine it with nitric acid.
Though you're right that the price of NG has a large influence on that of ammonium nitrate.
Slashdot Mirror
True enough, but that's heat transfer, not thermodynamics. Mind the gap.
Because if you think that is a wise course of action, you need a nanny state to take care of you, because you are not mature enough to take care of yourself. If you think you can do without health care you are insane, and therefore by definition in need of health care.
Now, I would not mind if only you were to pay the consequences. But no man is an isle, and if you develop a serious condition and end up in the ER, other people will have to foot the bill (people who where smart enough to pay for health care). Your spouse will have her/his economy wrecked trying to save your myopic ass. If it's not your spouse it will be someone else in your family. Your children may miss out college (let alone the psychological scars), which may confine a few generations of your descendants to the proletariat.
My father was a similar brand of idiot. He had his insurance alright, he was even an insurance agent. Yet he did not fasten his seatbelt, in the name of "freedom": no shit, that's what he says when I try to get him to buckle up in my car. No, seat belts are actually compulsory where I live. Well, I was almost made an orphan by your brand of "freedom". He crashed into a truck and was hurled into a corn field after a stupid attempt to overtake a car at a highway junction. His right talus bone was shattered in literally a thousand little pieces, and he has been unable to run ever since. It could have turned out much worse: my mother was a housewife, and my dad the only breadwinner. Had he gone, I have no idea what would have been of us (well, yes, he did have life insurance too, but still).
On the other hand, I think the fair system would be paying $0 in direct insurance and paying everything through a share of your income tax.
You're so pathetic I can't even bring myself to be angry at you.
You don't seriously believe you can move the entire nuclear arsenal of a country in two weeks? And you don't seriously believe Syria would be so stupid as to take in that kind of cargo, with a quarter million military from the world's only superpower just waiting for an excuse to invade? And about all these caravans, which proof do you have, some Ann Coulter book?
Also, last time I checked the UN says they want guarantees that Iran is not going to develop WMD. If there were proof they did, they would be screwed already.
Anyway, I would not mind Iran having a few nukes. Might just stabilise the region, as Israel finds out they are cannot use their nukes with impunity any more. Iran is not guided by madmen, Fox propaganda notwithstanding, it is guided by assholes. And assholes are very good at looking out for themselves. There is no way they would use nukes in a first strike.
Don't even come close to the other argument of a "dirty bomb": every nuclear fuel has a specific isotopic signature one cannot get rid of. If they gave material for a DIY nuke to some terrorists, the isotopic signature would be pointing to Natanz very clearly.
Finally: the US brag about their latest weapons on a daily basis. There are countless magazines dedicated to defence technology. There is an inordinate disproportion of research that is financed by the armed forces. Maybe it's so common it entered the background noise and you cannot hear it.
Not much more than Americans going to the moon with the help of a Nazi.
And another part yet was gathering data of the effects of nuclear weapons on humans, which would have been difficult in peacetime.
This is not his second term and terms do not have to be consecutive, so chances are not exactly zero. Cleveland did that.
Heisann, en av dine nye landsmenn her.
I heard from a guy who was in a similar situation at a julebord a few years ago. He (a researcher at NTNU) had to go to a conference, and when entering the US he was asked whether he had previous convictions. He had, for "civil disobedience" (he did not specify, but I suppose it was bad enough to worry about). Realising that, had he answered "yes", he would have been denied admission and would have missed the conference, he managed to contact the Norwegian embassy or a consulate, and asked whether he really had to mention that. The embassy told him (not sure how explicitly) that he could say he had not, with the understanding that had the US border authorities checked with the embassy they would have backed him.
So, congratulations US border authorities: you are being so much of a pain in the ass that even the institutions of satellite countries tell their citizens to lie to you. I suppose this will help catching whomever you are looking for.
I know nothing of your economic or political opinions, but you are turning classical liberalism on its head. The theory fundamentally rests on people being motivated by money to work more; you just stated you are motivated only by lack thereof. Carrying this over to its logical consequences, higher taxes result in higher productivity.
* ducks *
Yeah, how can they dare to steal from us the canal we enslaved them to build!
How many wars has Iran started since the Islamic revolution? Zero.
How many wars has Israel started since its foundation? Suez war, Six-Day war, Lebanon 1982, and Lebanon 2006.
You fail reading skills. There is a lot more water in the atmosphere than CO2. CO2 and water are produced by hydrocarbon combustion in the same order of magnitude. Anthropogenic CO2 has an effect on the natural equilibrium, anthropogenic water from HC combustion has not. That's because it can rain to the oceans (your point) and because even if it didn't it would be too little to matter anyway, since the oceans produce much larger quantities by evaporation alone (my point).
My country (Italy) switched back and forth between proportional and first-past-the-post systems over the past 20 years, and still has a varied mix of electoral laws at different levels: French system for municipalities, English system for regions, German system for nation-wide elections, and I'll be damned if I remember what provinces are using. Result? We have different assholes, but always the same shit.
I think what we learnt is that corrupt politicians will be corrupt politicians, no matter the system. You lament the problems with two-party rule, but let me assure you that 5-party rule is no better, if they are all corrupt. Proportional representation causes fragmentation, volatile alliances, and lots of backstabbing. Small parties end up wielding inordinate amounts of power because they have that 0.5% needed to get over 50%. Guess how the other blocks try to convince them?
If I may suggest, I think the problem is completely orthogonal to what you think: the problem is advertisement. Political advertisement (as TV spots, bill boards, flyers) should be completely forbidden, and all electoral communication should run through regulated channels. Every candidate should have the same amount of bandwidth to communicate with voters, the exact amount not being particularly important, and each candidate should be forced to participate to debates and answer question from opponents and public, lest they are disqualified.
Political advertisement is very restricted e.g. in Norway: they had a long discussion about allowing political TV ads, and the general opinion is that they should stay forbidden; and Norway is a well functioning democracy if I ever saw one. I think it is a good idea because politics is about reasoning, not catchy slogans; also, when a campaign gets expensive, only the established parties can campaign. That puts any new movement to a disadvantage.
That may be true, but I think the main issue about dihydrogen monoxide is that there are oceans of it that release by evaporation amounts much larger than anything the human race could produce—therefore it is well-nigh impossible to disrupt its equilibrium the way we can disrupt carbon dioxide's.
Hitler was the only one to shoot. Eva Braun killed herself with a poison pill.
Yup, that's why Haskell newsgroups are flooded with questions on monads and all Haskell books have multiple chapters. Because they don't exist. Anyway, nice try—that's an original escape route.
Who was talking about the IO monad? I was talking of monad in general. That includes State, Maybe and lists.
There is this thing called "semantics". Good variable names can be address, customer, server, sum, widget or something that tells the reader what the variable is, not a random placeholder. If you cannot find a good name, you do not know what you are doing.
The fact that +, -, *, / are widely recognized and any 3rd grader knows what they mean. R-e-a-d-a-b-i-l-i-t-y.
Well done, if you left them there people could actually have understood something of the code.
I never had the problems I had with Haskell when I learnt C++. Or Python, which I am learning now. Or Modelica (which is really different from procedural programming), which I use at work. That's got to stand for something.
Heads up: algebra is not a programming language.
See, you are part of the problem. Is that supposed to be an explanation? If you cannot explain it in plain English, you do not really understand it yourself (I think I am quoting Feynman). Your explanation is also wrong (as most "explanations" about monads): Maybe has no context, and neither do lists. The general definition of monad has nothing to do with context, only with chaining.
Read, until chapter 15 where I gave up around the Reader monad. I read the Thompson before. See below for horror example.
f becomes function, e first, es rest.
However map is pretty easy to grasp. For the promised RWH horror code, here is one from chapter 14:
bindSt :: (SimpleState s a) -> (a -> SimpleState s b) -> SimpleState s b
bindSt m k = \s -> let (a, s') = m s
in (k a) s'
There are multiple issues: the SimpleState is not a state (problem common to the State monad), but a state processor, a function. I really would like to inflict pain on whomever decided the name. The authors use m presumably for a monad, then (the gods knows for which reason) k for a function. They also use a single apostrophe (the smallest character they could find, arguably) to distinguish the new state from the old. Funny thing, they actually try to follow up with a more "readable" version, in which they make a sorry attempt at readability, which fails hopelessly (step seems a noun, but is actually meant as a verb).
Argh, no, you must not keep the damn code short! The alpha and omega is keeping it readable. Ideally good code should read almost as plain English. Operators are not English, and should be used sparingly (I once thought it was silly to limit the operators in C++... now I see the wisdom). Surely you can be too verbose, but at a minimum the code must be self-explanatory. Well that's the professional coding world, where Haskell does not belong, and never will.
Funny thing, I discovered that "terse" has a different meaning in English from what I expected. In my language (from which the word comes) it means clean, transparent, so I extrapolated "readable". Guess what, it took people praising Haskell for being "terse" for me to figure out that something was amiss.
I have been studying some Haskell in the past few months, and while I am in awe at Haskell's type system, and how you can write a language without for and while, and lazy evaluation, and functional purity, and partial application, and so on, there are two things that made me give up:
Haskell has many good ideas, but it will never be a successful language because it's just too damn difficult, and no one in the Haskell community seems to care about it. I gave up when I thought that, even if I learned it, it would be utterly useless because few other people will bother to learn it. It also weighed in that there are so few software projects based on Haskell.
Haskell is a great language to calculate factorials, but very little else.
I think I see your problem here...
Here's the rest of your problem. A GUI must never bump into a difficult or mission-critical algorithm. That's supposed to be its own library, which is accessed by the GUI through a clean and solid software interface. This is a major architectural fault: a Big Ball of Mud, and some languages encourage that more than others.
My suggestion would be: get a language with a lower density of script kiddies, sufficiently popular and object-oriented (Python, C++, Java, ...), get some good programmers with proven track record, and rewrite the client. Specify that you want all functions and variables documented, and test suites; if they say "that will cost you more", show them the door. If they say "we do it anyway", that's a good sign.
As an Italian, I can tell you have avoided the crimes-ridden areas (though you were savvy enough to dodge the tourist traps). Naples, for example, is not Bogotá, but is proceeding in that direction; in fact, the local mafia (camorra) is routinely dumping toxic waste in landfills for a business, much similarly to what the 'ndrangheta did in this case.
There are differences between the main mafias: the Sicilian one (the "original" mafia) is structured and hierarchical. In a Sicilian village you can leave the keys in your car, and no one will steal it. However, sometimes when you turn the key the car may explode, if you irritated the wrong person or asked the wrong questions.
'Ndrangheta, in Calabria, is family-based (meaning blood-tied). Small groups with internal hierarchy, but no comprehensive power structure.
The one most dangerous for your immediate safety is camorra (Campania), clan-based and very violent. There was recently a nice film about it. Being pickpocketed in Naples is almost part of the tourist experience, but recently drive-by's have appeared.
I actually happen to have a PhD in applied control, and before my defence, as customary in the country I was working, I had to deliver a "trial lecture", i.e. I was given two weeks' time to scramble, research and present the state of the art in (in my case) control of nuclear power plants.
You can verify my claims in "Nuclear Physics—Principles and Applications", by John Lilley, Wiley 2001, ISBN 0-471-97936-8, section 10.5.2; look especially close at equation 10.41 and subsequent commentary. This issue is nothing new and appeared even in the first book about control of nuclear power plants, "Control of Nuclear Reactors and Power Plants", by M. A. Schultz, McGraw Hill 1955.
And you are ignoring the fact obvious to more experienced engineers that physics cannot be changed by how you design the reactor. The numbers I gave have nothing to do with engineering and all to do with the neutron-driven fission of U-235.
It feels like I'm hearing a ID proponent claiming that "life is too complex to be understood". FYI not only I do know what I am talking about, I also memorised those numbers because they are actually fundamental to understanding the control issues of a nuclear power plant. I happen to be a scientist and I form my opinions from my data, not the other way around.
If you bothered to follow the link I provided, there is a large Read-the-FAQ link answering your question and more.
Actually Python is pretty slow, about 50 times slower than C++, but that's usually ok since you can put the bottleneck into a C++ module. However, if all the server software is in Python, things will be significantly slower.
Perl is actually horrible: it is the slowest language in the survey I linked, except for Ruby, plus we all know what the code looks like.
As for Erlang, it fares relatively well (though still 15 times slower than C++), but its main competitor would probably be Haskell, which also is faster.
How is that addressing the point of the GP?
France delivers a lot of cheap electricity to its neighbours because, having a mainly nuclear-based power system, they can only provide the base load. This means they have to produce more than what they need and sell the excess, even if the prices are not advantageous and would not justify the sale economically.
Nuclear plants are difficult to control. The reaction's dynamics are nonlinear and unstable, and you have only a 0.7% margin in which they respond with a 10-second lag (and are controllable). Should you get out of that zone, the reaction starts moving with a time constant in the range of milliseconds. Add to the mix that neutron radiation sensors (which are essential in feedback control) are slower at low reaction rates, and you get why nobody likes to run a nuclear power plant at part load. Yes, running a nuclear plant at low power is actually more dangerous than at full power. That's why starting up a plant is such a critical operation.
All this means you cannot have a 100%-nuclear power system unless you can sell your excess power to/buy your peak power from someone (like France does), or are willing to produce peak power at all times and burn any excess. If Germany were to go 100% nuclear, who's left in Europe to buy their power?
I read they used the engine of a 127 in the early seventies. Those engines were awfully inefficient: I remember that only in the eighties car commercials started bragging "This car satisfies the American efficiency requirements, the strictest in the world!" (they don't say that anymore), so I assume that engine was way less efficient than any US gas guzzler. No surprise it did not pan out. Now, if you try that with a modern VW, the result may be better.
Here come the chemistry Nazis: natural gas is a reactant, not a catalyst, and not to produce ammonium nitrate. It is used to produce hydrogen, which is then combined with nitrogen to get ammonia, with which you actually get the ammonium nitrate when you combine it with nitric acid.
Though you're right that the price of NG has a large influence on that of ammonium nitrate.