It's worse than that... The spent fuel usually contains enough Cs-137 to give you a fatal dose of gamma rays within minutes. This means you can't take it out of its 100 ton canisters, and just try stealing one of those from the DOE guards. You can't really fit that in a suitcase.:-)
The comparison isn't even close, that's why. Coal power plants are at least 100 times worse than nuclear, even assuming you add in all the old DOE weapons facilities and consider them "civilian nuclear power" which is a preposterous over estimate.
Perhaps cleaner plants have reduced the pollution/health impact imbalance to a multiple of "only" 40x or so, but it's still huge. Coal will never be clean enough to compete with nuclear power, no matter how much we try to clean it up.
I don't know about that. My computer monitor is vastly better than my TV (which I don't have). I have one of these converters (the cheaper $199 one), and it works great. You tell me where I can get a 17 inch TV + Tivo + DVD burner for $200, praytell.
In addition, the little tiny box takes up much less space than a TV + TIVO + DVD player/burner.
In addition, being able to use the space on my hard drives (about 400 GB now) for either computer stuff, or TV stuff is also quite an edge. And I can share out the TV shows over FTP or windows sharing, or whatever. It's just nice to have everything in one place.
Slight misstatement. If you assume that the density is about the same (fairly reasonable), then the mass is proportional to the volume. A heavier planet has a larger volume (once again, since earth and mars are both rocky planets), and thus a lower surface area to volume ratio.
So the surface area to volume ratio is...
S/V = 3/r
but (if the densities are the same) (4/3)[pi]r^3 = M
and thus r = ((3/4[pi])M)^1/3
And thus S/V = 1 / (M/4[pi])^1/3
and this decreases with increasing mass, though not that quickly.
The magnetic field doesn't stop UV, which is what gives you skin cancer. It will have no effect on people living on the surface. Electronics on the surface however, could be a little more prone to general nastiness.
The primary difference is in the masses. The Earth is much more massive, so it has more gravity. That allows it to keep more gasses in its atmosphere. O2 for instance would easily get escape velocity on mars and leak out. So mars's atmosphere leaked out due to low gravity, this is the first step in the problem.
Secondly, the earth (by virtue of being heavier) has a lower surface area to volume ratio. So it loses heat slower with time. That is why our core is still molten. Mars probably had a molten core at one time, but it cooled off, and that was the end.
In addition, because the earth was heavier it got more heat from collisions (due to greater gravity) to begin with. So we not only keep heat more efficiently, we also started with more heat per unit of volume.
Also, much of the earth's heat is believed to be produced by the decay of radioactive elements, once again the lower surface are to volume (mass actually) ratio helps to keep that heat in, which keeps our core molten.
The liquid core that the earth still has (Venus has one too) produces the magnetic field. Our gravity is greater so most of the atmosphere can't escape, and thus we're relatively radiation hardened. In addition, the oxygen in the atmosphere (formed by primitive life) efficiently captures hydrogen (to form water) and thus keeps the hydrogen from leaking out. The solar winds deliver additional hydrogen (nicely funnelled into the poles) that replaces anything that was lost.
There really is a lot to it, but the basic factors are...
1) The earth is larger, so the core is still hot and we keep our atmosphere. Hot core generates magnetic shielding.
2) The earth has lots of oxygen (due to life), which traps hydrogen and keeps the surface cool because it is not a greenhouse gas. Oxygen also produces ozone that adds extra shielding. Mars is too light to keep oxygen even if we did generate it to begin with.
I'd also like to say that anyone who sues the girlscouts for singnig has so fully placed themselves outside the bounds of civilized society that I'm not sure they should be afforded the protections of any of our laws.
That may be, but then they shouldn't bring up the "we're losing money" angle. If they're going to try to claim that they're losing money (and that's why they need protection) and then actually lie about it while their profits are extraordinary, then they deserve whatever raping comes their way.
Stealing (using the term loosly, infringement isn't stealing) from a liar and a cheat isn't exactly the same as stealing from an honest person. Most people realize this, so when the RIAA and MPAA act like the mob (as they often do) then people think it's ok to infringe on their IP, which it is. If you could rob Gotti and not get shot, do you think anyone would tell you not to? Of course not. When scoundrels fall out it is a wise man's delight.
XCode is cool, but the problem is that it's non-standard. This is the same complaint I have about Visual Studio BTW. I have a mac at home, and linux and windows boxes at work. I really only want to learn one IDE. That means it's down to pretty much Netbeans or Eclipse.
I wish Apple would just adopt one of these (I personally am partial to netbeans) and try to improve it. Do what they did for Unix to one of these.
I know I'm going to get flamed for this, but a non-cross platform app is fairly useless for me. I just don't want to learn three different apps that all do the same thing.
Speaking of which, they really need to adopt Open Office and get it up to spec. Apple's primary goal should be to take opensource/free apps from the world at large, make them the Mac standard and then try to get them to be the worldwide standard. This eliminates most of the barrier to owning a mac, and makes everyone's lives much easier.
just overloadd the.Equals(object) method to take any type of object you reasonably expect it to be compared to. == is kept around because you often want a quicker means, like this...
This is quick in one of the common cases. Helps with string interning and such as well. I've seen == operators overloaded so they throw null pointer exceptions when compared with null. This puts you in the damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.
Operator overloading is one of those good ideas that is only useful in the hands of the experienced and competent, by whome it's used rarely. It is however often used by the foolish and incompetent, as "It's really cool!!" and that's where you get into trouble.
I think on the whole it's better that it's been left out. It causes nothing but problems in C#, from my experience.
also the fact that everyone uses native code where they have no business using it. In the modern era, you need a REALLY good excuse to use native code, otherwise use something VM based. That may be mono,.NET, java, or god help us, even VB.
The VM systems have security built in from the beginning. Anything that will be open to attack should be based on a VM that is carefully sandboxed. This includes web browsers, most types of servers, email clients, and most everything else.
It's a disgrace that Mozilla is still based on C and uses all that STL nastiness. They basically had to build themselves a new OS in order to make it cross platform. They really should have just picked one of the options available at the time (probably java, but anything portable would do) and used it. It would have cut their work in half, given them free portability, and radically improved the security of their product.
Same goes for servers. Tomcat and Jboss are fairly young, so maybe they're not completely trustworthy yet, but it's worth looking into. It's much harder to compromise a Tomcat box than an IIS or Apache installation, though admittedly the edge over Apache isn't that big.
Funny, looks to me like you're comparing current java with microsoft's vapor. Is there an actual reason for doing this?
If sun claims tha their next version of java will make you breakfast in the morning, can we compare.Net 1.0 against that?
Delegates are a waste of time, and they nastify the code. There is no (not one) reason to use delegates instead of interfaces. Send in an interface and get all your delegates neatly bundled up into one package. Makes life MUCH easier. Or pass them individually if you feel like a masochist. Basically, it's a solution in search of a problem.
Value types have some validity, but not a whole lot. If you're convinced that they have value, then put escape analasys into the code, and get value types wherever it's possible to have them, automatically, without confusing the programmer. It's just one more avenue for bugs to creep in when a = b does two totally different things depending on whether a and b are value types. No thank you.
Here's another example, operator overloading. Operator overloading is a horrible idea in general. Here's a hint, when does if(null == a) throw an exception? When the designer of the a object overrides the == operator incorrectly. WOW, THANKS MICROSOFT!!!! Now it's impossible to use that class without throwing a null pointer exception. How about this, what's the result of (++a)--? Is it the same as (--a)++? Depends on the implementation of the operators, and it can get confusing fast. Operators like that have certain expected properties (+ and - should commute, etc...) and you can get into a lot of trouble if you start messing with them. This is one of the primary problems with C++, in my opinion.
There's a lot more, but I'll leave it at that for now. Basically, software engineering is ENTIRELY an exercise in managing chaos. You want your tool to be just expressive enough to get the job done, but no more so. An iron fisted programming language will save you so much grief it's almost impossible to put into words. That's why I don't like C#, it's not strict at all. You can do all these "nifty" things that have no purpose, and materially decrease the readability and (in my opinion) quality of the code. Add features that make better programs, don't add features that you think are "neat", that's what microsoft does, and that's why their software mostly sucks.
oh come on. Your primary argument seems to be that distributions don't ship with JAVA. Grow up. The natural solution to that would be for them to ship with java, now wouldn't it. But no, that would be too logical. Instead we have to piss and moan that not everything is perfect, and then design yet another development environment that is essentially an exact clone of java, only missing some of the nifty features. Then we need to hand complete control of this whole mess over to microsoft, and get it half working, and claim that we've somehow solved this mythical problem that redhat doesn't ship a java binary.
Their economy is already dependant on foreign oil, and hydro power won't stop that. We get basically none of our electricity from oil (just like china) and yet we depend on middle eastern oil.
In any case, china is also pondering nuclear, which is by far the smartest choice around, if you ask me.
don't be a troll. It's simply a cost thing. The cost per joule of oil today is about the same as the cost per joule of electricity. It has been proven time and again that your average consumer shops on nothing other than sticker price. For insance, clean coal would raise the price of coal power from $.04/KWh to $.05/KWh, while reducing the external costs from $.07/KWh to about $.02/KWh. So clean coal would have a total cost of $.07/KWh, whereas normal coal today has a cost of $.11/KWh.
The ratepayers aren't willing to pay one single red cent in order to have cleaner air, even when that would save them more money in the long run. Likewise, the average consumer will buy SUVs getting 2 miles to the gallon right up until the day when gasoline gets expensive, and then they'll go bankrupt. God forbid anybody might pay one red cent in advance to either help the planet or insulate them from future problems.
That is why we have cars that still run on oil, and we'll have them until oil becomes more expensive than electricity, at which point we'll have cars that run on electricity. Case closed.
Here's a good one everyone.... When does
if(null == blah) { return true;}
throw an exception?
When the guy writing a class has decided to override == and not really considered nulls. Wow, isn't that grand. Now we can get a null pointer exception when we're trying to prevent a null pointer exception. So now there's no possible way to avoid throwing the exception, and the exceptions in C# are slow too. THANKS MICROSOFT!!!!!
Operator overloading should be strictly forbidden.
Here's another question for all you operator overloaders....
Does your + operator commute with your - operator? Does you * or / operator distribute over + or -?
If you don't know the answers to these questions, you should never overload operators.
That still seems a little weak. Most of the things you are trying to solve are either vacuous, or simply problems that should be solved at the VM layer without causing the users any additional pain.
Multi-Language: Please, they're all the same language designed to look like other languages. Java has multi language support to (Jython). This is not a fundamental reason.
Value Types: Use escape analysis and a better GC. This is a hack so programmers can give hints to a stupid GC.
Generics: Where are the C# generics? The version we're using at work doesn't have them. Java Generics will arrive first, but be worse off in the beginnnig. C# will arrive later, and initially have a better implementation. Java should fix their implementation in a future revision of the VM and bytecode standard.
Bindings: Spin the wheel and see which function gets called today. Not much needs to be said here, but there's something to be said for the precision of the java bindings as opposed to the pattern matching of the C# bindings.
ECMA: And patented by Microsoft. Fact it, Microsoft will embrace and extend it, or threaten lawsuit to keep their monopoly. The ECMA won't do jack about that.
C# language: The only even marginally valid claim. However, the lack of checked exceptions and sub-standard stack traces are pretty nasty. I don't think C# is a step up in any meaningful way, unless of course you like writing crappy code and just can't bear to know which exceptions you should be worried about. If that's the case, VB6 will always be waiting.
I'm not saying that the C# people are stupid, or anything like that. But this whole endeavor seems to demonstrate a monumental lack of foresight. Why fragment the world even further rather than uniting behind a standard the Microsoft doesn't own?
The republicans get votes from the uneducated alright, but they give them absolutely nothing in return. The majority of the money in Bush's tax cuts went to the ultra wealthy, however, if you throw out the richest 1% (who got something like half the tax cut) then I'd virtually guarantee that most of the rest went to democrats, who tend to occupy that middle ground.
People who are very poor tend to be replublican if they're white. Many people claim that this is due to ignorance, and it's hard to not agree. The republicans piss on these people every chance they get.
People who are extremely rich tend to be republicans, and these are the people the Republican party tends to cater to. They got most of the tax cuts, they're benefiting the most from the war in iraq, whereas the republican poor are the ones actually dying for it.
People who are in the middle tend to be Democrats. This is partially because Democratic regions tend to have a higher average standard (and cost) of living, not coincidentally. For instance, the average income of a New Yorker is way above the average income of an Idahoan. Having lived in both places, let me tell you that I make 3 times as mucn in NYC as I did in Boise, even though in Boise I was the best around, and in NYC I'm fairly average.
The one problem the Democrats have however, is that they tend to forget where they get their strength. It is the party of the working people, and they should protect the environment (among other things) primarily because that's good for the people. Once you start claiming that the environment comes before people, you start sounding like a fool. That's how so many of the poor got pushed into the Republican camps where they don't belong.
This is all completely true. The US media has been lying for years. Recently, after installing bush, they have absolutely gone to amazing lengths to avoid covering anything that could be damaging to him. If clinton lied abotu war, it'd be front page news for years, bush lies and it's a footnote on page 23A if its mentioned at all.
The media are simply trying to appoint presidents who will give them the most free stuff, and it's got to stop. Everyone I ever respected claimed this would happen once most of the media is controled by a half a dozen huge corporations, and here it is. Right on time.
For instance, if you didn't know that Florida disenfranchized 50,000 black people in the most shameful way possible, then you are an idiot and the media is trying to keep it that way. Also, if you didn't know that Gore won most of the recounts (even not countnig the 50,000 people, who were overwhelmingly democratic, who were illegally disenfranchized) then you're also an idiot.
What is wrong with people. The republicans may not have the monopoly on corruption, but they surely prefected it.
I agree totally. Portability isn't about capturing that extra 5% of the market. It's about having code robust enough that it isn't broken by every little thing.
If you have good portable code, it'll still work in 5 years, and it might still work in 10 years with little effort. If you don't, it won't.
Portability is always thought of as spatial portability (port to different platforms today), it should be thought of as temporal portability, the ability to have it work on platforms in the future.
Software doesn't rot out like an old buick, do you really want to rebuild it every couple of years? No, then do it right the first time, and get that extra 5% as pure gravy.
Re:Somebody explain this to me?
on
Amorphous Steel
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
That should be more or less correct. If it's like other amorphous things though it should be harder, right up until you reach the point of catastrophic failure where it will shatter.
If you can't ever download anything, then why would you pay Verizon for DSL? That's why they support it. They don't want to have to become the gestapo for the RIAA and alienate their customers.
Slashdot Mirror
It's worse than that... The spent fuel usually contains enough Cs-137 to give you a fatal dose of gamma rays within minutes. This means you can't take it out of its 100 ton canisters, and just try stealing one of those from the DOE guards. You can't really fit that in a suitcase.
The comparison isn't even close, that's why. Coal power plants are at least 100 times worse than nuclear, even assuming you add in all the old DOE weapons facilities and consider them "civilian nuclear power" which is a preposterous over estimate. Perhaps cleaner plants have reduced the pollution/health impact imbalance to a multiple of "only" 40x or so, but it's still huge. Coal will never be clean enough to compete with nuclear power, no matter how much we try to clean it up.
I don't know about that. My computer monitor is vastly better than my TV (which I don't have). I have one of these converters (the cheaper $199 one), and it works great. You tell me where I can get a 17 inch TV + Tivo + DVD burner for $200, praytell.
In addition, the little tiny box takes up much less space than a TV + TIVO + DVD player/burner.
In addition, being able to use the space on my hard drives (about 400 GB now) for either computer stuff, or TV stuff is also quite an edge. And I can share out the TV shows over FTP or windows sharing, or whatever. It's just nice to have everything in one place.
there is the thing they tell you in grade school...
"I before E, except after C or when sounding like A as in neighbor or weigh."
Slight misstatement. If you assume that the density is about the same (fairly reasonable), then the mass is proportional to the volume. A heavier planet has a larger volume (once again, since earth and mars are both rocky planets), and thus a lower surface area to volume ratio.
So the surface area to volume ratio is...
S/V = 3/r
but (if the densities are the same) (4/3)[pi]r^3 = M
and thus r = ((3/4[pi])M)^1/3
And thus S/V = 1 / (M/4[pi])^1/3
and this decreases with increasing mass, though not that quickly.
The magnetic field doesn't stop UV, which is what gives you skin cancer. It will have no effect on people living on the surface. Electronics on the surface however, could be a little more prone to general nastiness.
There's more too it than that...
The primary difference is in the masses. The Earth is much more massive, so it has more gravity. That allows it to keep more gasses in its atmosphere. O2 for instance would easily get escape velocity on mars and leak out. So mars's atmosphere leaked out due to low gravity, this is the first step in the problem.
Secondly, the earth (by virtue of being heavier) has a lower surface area to volume ratio. So it loses heat slower with time. That is why our core is still molten. Mars probably had a molten core at one time, but it cooled off, and that was the end.
In addition, because the earth was heavier it got more heat from collisions (due to greater gravity) to begin with. So we not only keep heat more efficiently, we also started with more heat per unit of volume.
Also, much of the earth's heat is believed to be produced by the decay of radioactive elements, once again the lower surface are to volume (mass actually) ratio helps to keep that heat in, which keeps our core molten.
The liquid core that the earth still has (Venus has one too) produces the magnetic field. Our gravity is greater so most of the atmosphere can't escape, and thus we're relatively radiation hardened. In addition, the oxygen in the atmosphere (formed by primitive life) efficiently captures hydrogen (to form water) and thus keeps the hydrogen from leaking out. The solar winds deliver additional hydrogen (nicely funnelled into the poles) that replaces anything that was lost.
There really is a lot to it, but the basic factors are...
1) The earth is larger, so the core is still hot and we keep our atmosphere. Hot core generates magnetic shielding.
2) The earth has lots of oxygen (due to life), which traps hydrogen and keeps the surface cool because it is not a greenhouse gas. Oxygen also produces ozone that adds extra shielding. Mars is too light to keep oxygen even if we did generate it to begin with.
I'd also like to say that anyone who sues the girlscouts for singnig has so fully placed themselves outside the bounds of civilized society that I'm not sure they should be afforded the protections of any of our laws.
That may be, but then they shouldn't bring up the "we're losing money" angle. If they're going to try to claim that they're losing money (and that's why they need protection) and then actually lie about it while their profits are extraordinary, then they deserve whatever raping comes their way.
Stealing (using the term loosly, infringement isn't stealing) from a liar and a cheat isn't exactly the same as stealing from an honest person. Most people realize this, so when the RIAA and MPAA act like the mob (as they often do) then people think it's ok to infringe on their IP, which it is. If you could rob Gotti and not get shot, do you think anyone would tell you not to? Of course not. When scoundrels fall out it is a wise man's delight.
XCode is cool, but the problem is that it's non-standard. This is the same complaint I have about Visual Studio BTW. I have a mac at home, and linux and windows boxes at work. I really only want to learn one IDE. That means it's down to pretty much Netbeans or Eclipse.
I wish Apple would just adopt one of these (I personally am partial to netbeans) and try to improve it. Do what they did for Unix to one of these.
I know I'm going to get flamed for this, but a non-cross platform app is fairly useless for me. I just don't want to learn three different apps that all do the same thing.
Speaking of which, they really need to adopt Open Office and get it up to spec. Apple's primary goal should be to take opensource/free apps from the world at large, make them the Mac standard and then try to get them to be the worldwide standard. This eliminates most of the barrier to owning a mac, and makes everyone's lives much easier.
just overloadd the
public boolean Equals(object o)
{
if(this == o)
{ return true;}
}
This is quick in one of the common cases. Helps with string interning and such as well. I've seen == operators overloaded so they throw null pointer exceptions when compared with null. This puts you in the damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.
Operator overloading is one of those good ideas that is only useful in the hands of the experienced and competent, by whome it's used rarely. It is however often used by the foolish and incompetent, as "It's really cool!!" and that's where you get into trouble.
I think on the whole it's better that it's been left out. It causes nothing but problems in C#, from my experience.
You didn't properly begin your tag. The web standards police have been notified, please get a real HTML editor, thank you.
also the fact that everyone uses native code where they have no business using it. In the modern era, you need a REALLY good excuse to use native code, otherwise use something VM based. That may be mono,
The VM systems have security built in from the beginning. Anything that will be open to attack should be based on a VM that is carefully sandboxed. This includes web browsers, most types of servers, email clients, and most everything else.
It's a disgrace that Mozilla is still based on C and uses all that STL nastiness. They basically had to build themselves a new OS in order to make it cross platform. They really should have just picked one of the options available at the time (probably java, but anything portable would do) and used it. It would have cut their work in half, given them free portability, and radically improved the security of their product.
Same goes for servers. Tomcat and Jboss are fairly young, so maybe they're not completely trustworthy yet, but it's worth looking into. It's much harder to compromise a Tomcat box than an IIS or Apache installation, though admittedly the edge over Apache isn't that big.
Funny, looks to me like you're comparing current java with microsoft's vapor. Is there an actual reason for doing this?
If sun claims tha their next version of java will make you breakfast in the morning, can we compare
Delegates are a waste of time, and they nastify the code. There is no (not one) reason to use delegates instead of interfaces. Send in an interface and get all your delegates neatly bundled up into one package. Makes life MUCH easier. Or pass them individually if you feel like a masochist. Basically, it's a solution in search of a problem.
Value types have some validity, but not a whole lot. If you're convinced that they have value, then put escape analasys into the code, and get value types wherever it's possible to have them, automatically, without confusing the programmer. It's just one more avenue for bugs to creep in when a = b does two totally different things depending on whether a and b are value types. No thank you.
Here's another example, operator overloading. Operator overloading is a horrible idea in general. Here's a hint, when does if(null == a) throw an exception? When the designer of the a object overrides the == operator incorrectly. WOW, THANKS MICROSOFT!!!! Now it's impossible to use that class without throwing a null pointer exception. How about this, what's the result of (++a)--? Is it the same as (--a)++? Depends on the implementation of the operators, and it can get confusing fast. Operators like that have certain expected properties (+ and - should commute, etc...) and you can get into a lot of trouble if you start messing with them. This is one of the primary problems with C++, in my opinion.
There's a lot more, but I'll leave it at that for now. Basically, software engineering is ENTIRELY an exercise in managing chaos. You want your tool to be just expressive enough to get the job done, but no more so. An iron fisted programming language will save you so much grief it's almost impossible to put into words. That's why I don't like C#, it's not strict at all. You can do all these "nifty" things that have no purpose, and materially decrease the readability and (in my opinion) quality of the code. Add features that make better programs, don't add features that you think are "neat", that's what microsoft does, and that's why their software mostly sucks.
Europe has 450 million people the US has 290 million people. They're more than 50% more populous.
oh come on. Your primary argument seems to be that distributions don't ship with JAVA. Grow up. The natural solution to that would be for them to ship with java, now wouldn't it. But no, that would be too logical. Instead we have to piss and moan that not everything is perfect, and then design yet another development environment that is essentially an exact clone of java, only missing some of the nifty features. Then we need to hand complete control of this whole mess over to microsoft, and get it half working, and claim that we've somehow solved this mythical problem that redhat doesn't ship a java binary.
come again?
Their economy is already dependant on foreign oil, and hydro power won't stop that. We get basically none of our electricity from oil (just like china) and yet we depend on middle eastern oil.
In any case, china is also pondering nuclear, which is by far the smartest choice around, if you ask me.
don't be a troll. It's simply a cost thing. The cost per joule of oil today is about the same as the cost per joule of electricity. It has been proven time and again that your average consumer shops on nothing other than sticker price. For insance, clean coal would raise the price of coal power from $.04/KWh to $.05/KWh, while reducing the external costs from $.07/KWh to about $.02/KWh. So clean coal would have a total cost of $.07/KWh, whereas normal coal today has a cost of $.11/KWh.
The ratepayers aren't willing to pay one single red cent in order to have cleaner air, even when that would save them more money in the long run. Likewise, the average consumer will buy SUVs getting 2 miles to the gallon right up until the day when gasoline gets expensive, and then they'll go bankrupt. God forbid anybody might pay one red cent in advance to either help the planet or insulate them from future problems.
That is why we have cars that still run on oil, and we'll have them until oil becomes more expensive than electricity, at which point we'll have cars that run on electricity. Case closed.
Here's a good one everyone.... When does if(null == blah) { return true;} throw an exception? When the guy writing a class has decided to override == and not really considered nulls. Wow, isn't that grand. Now we can get a null pointer exception when we're trying to prevent a null pointer exception. So now there's no possible way to avoid throwing the exception, and the exceptions in C# are slow too. THANKS MICROSOFT!!!!! Operator overloading should be strictly forbidden. Here's another question for all you operator overloaders.... Does your + operator commute with your - operator? Does you * or / operator distribute over + or -? If you don't know the answers to these questions, you should never overload operators.
That still seems a little weak. Most of the things you are trying to solve are either vacuous, or simply problems that should be solved at the VM layer without causing the users any additional pain.
Multi-Language: Please, they're all the same language designed to look like other languages. Java has multi language support to (Jython). This is not a fundamental reason.
Value Types: Use escape analysis and a better GC. This is a hack so programmers can give hints to a stupid GC.
Generics: Where are the C# generics? The version we're using at work doesn't have them. Java Generics will arrive first, but be worse off in the beginnnig. C# will arrive later, and initially have a better implementation. Java should fix their implementation in a future revision of the VM and bytecode standard.
Bindings: Spin the wheel and see which function gets called today. Not much needs to be said here, but there's something to be said for the precision of the java bindings as opposed to the pattern matching of the C# bindings.
ECMA: And patented by Microsoft. Fact it, Microsoft will embrace and extend it, or threaten lawsuit to keep their monopoly. The ECMA won't do jack about that.
C# language: The only even marginally valid claim. However, the lack of checked exceptions and sub-standard stack traces are pretty nasty. I don't think C# is a step up in any meaningful way, unless of course you like writing crappy code and just can't bear to know which exceptions you should be worried about. If that's the case, VB6 will always be waiting.
I'm not saying that the C# people are stupid, or anything like that. But this whole endeavor seems to demonstrate a monumental lack of foresight. Why fragment the world even further rather than uniting behind a standard the Microsoft doesn't own?
This is not at all true.
The republicans get votes from the uneducated alright, but they give them absolutely nothing in return. The majority of the money in Bush's tax cuts went to the ultra wealthy, however, if you throw out the richest 1% (who got something like half the tax cut) then I'd virtually guarantee that most of the rest went to democrats, who tend to occupy that middle ground.
People who are very poor tend to be replublican if they're white. Many people claim that this is due to ignorance, and it's hard to not agree. The republicans piss on these people every chance they get.
People who are extremely rich tend to be republicans, and these are the people the Republican party tends to cater to. They got most of the tax cuts, they're benefiting the most from the war in iraq, whereas the republican poor are the ones actually dying for it.
People who are in the middle tend to be Democrats. This is partially because Democratic regions tend to have a higher average standard (and cost) of living, not coincidentally. For instance, the average income of a New Yorker is way above the average income of an Idahoan. Having lived in both places, let me tell you that I make 3 times as mucn in NYC as I did in Boise, even though in Boise I was the best around, and in NYC I'm fairly average.
The one problem the Democrats have however, is that they tend to forget where they get their strength. It is the party of the working people, and they should protect the environment (among other things) primarily because that's good for the people. Once you start claiming that the environment comes before people, you start sounding like a fool. That's how so many of the poor got pushed into the Republican camps where they don't belong.
This is all completely true. The US media has been lying for years. Recently, after installing bush, they have absolutely gone to amazing lengths to avoid covering anything that could be damaging to him. If clinton lied abotu war, it'd be front page news for years, bush lies and it's a footnote on page 23A if its mentioned at all.
The media are simply trying to appoint presidents who will give them the most free stuff, and it's got to stop. Everyone I ever respected claimed this would happen once most of the media is controled by a half a dozen huge corporations, and here it is. Right on time.
For instance, if you didn't know that Florida disenfranchized 50,000 black people in the most shameful way possible, then you are an idiot and the media is trying to keep it that way. Also, if you didn't know that Gore won most of the recounts (even not countnig the 50,000 people, who were overwhelmingly democratic, who were illegally disenfranchized) then you're also an idiot.
What is wrong with people. The republicans may not have the monopoly on corruption, but they surely prefected it.
I agree totally. Portability isn't about capturing that extra 5% of the market. It's about having code robust enough that it isn't broken by every little thing.
If you have good portable code, it'll still work in 5 years, and it might still work in 10 years with little effort. If you don't, it won't.
Portability is always thought of as spatial portability (port to different platforms today), it should be thought of as temporal portability, the ability to have it work on platforms in the future.
Software doesn't rot out like an old buick, do you really want to rebuild it every couple of years? No, then do it right the first time, and get that extra 5% as pure gravy.
That should be more or less correct. If it's like other amorphous things though it should be harder, right up until you reach the point of catastrophic failure where it will shatter.
If you can't ever download anything, then why would you pay Verizon for DSL? That's why they support it. They don't want to have to become the gestapo for the RIAA and alienate their customers.