Did Nintendo win the console wars? Sure they have the highest percentages of consoles, but Microsoft really isn't that far behind. But that doesn't show the whole picture - remember that consoles are sold at a loss, which they make up for by a surcharge on software (known as the Gillette razor model). For console software in 2011, the market trailer, the PS3, sold the most according to what I've heard (doing a quick google search, I come up with this, which validates what I heard from a game magazine editor I'm an acquaintance with - don't really see him enough to say he's a friend - a friend of friends).
If you count just Japan though, Nintendo wins hands down - PS3 and XBox360 are tiny shards of market (around 10% I think - Nintendo was over 70%).
I doubt it - neither Kalispell (Montana) airport nor MSP airport caught my wife's mini boxcutter or pocket knife multitool (3 inch pocketknife) in her purse. She didn't even realize they were there until arriving home.
I think they're saying if they didn't charge for it, demand would oversaturate the SMS/MMS data band. Of course, that misses the point - texting is dying because the providers continue to charge inordinately high fees for a service that is free on the internet. I used a pinger # for years to avoid having to pay texting (why pay for texting and data when you can get texting free?), but recently I lost that because everyone just sends a facebook message now and I hadn't used the pinger # in 3 months (I renewed it twice, then let it drop).
The US's taxation vs GDP (or here if you want a nice chart is far lower than it should be for a first world country - in fact, it is lower than some third world countries (so no, it isn't just Socialism or Communism). There is no reason the country can't afford to pay its debts, buy spacecraft, and fund Social Security and Medicare (personally I say get rid of 'em, but 49% of US citizens have no private retirement savings, and that 49% would probably slam a 24 pack of Budweiser and go shoot up the white house if those programs end) - we just need to change tax codes to start collecting first world taxation.
My big problems with this: 1) it is slower than the proposed 39 day VASIMR trip to Mars proposed last year, 2) it is nearly twice as expensive as the Russian nuclear spacecraft 3) the non Saucer and body section parts are for... looks? Site is slashdotted, so I can't tell. 4) The rotational area isn't large enough to provide a consistent 1G, so head and toes will feel different gravities (I did the math on this once [for a spaced based game], and I believe it was around 35-37km/22-23 miles for a 1.8meter/6 foot tall person to feel a fairly consistent 1G - probably not practical for a spaceship). This can cause vertigo.
We don't invest in fusion for the same reason we don't invest in safe fission - the companies that own the rights to build light water reactors want to protect their monopoly and the government is in their pocket via a very powerful lobby group (NEI). If you have any doubt about that, look up a guy by the name of Alvin Weinberg - he led a team that made a much better fission nuclear reactor and was rewarded by Nixon by being fired and information about the reactor was largely kept from the public until much later. Why? Because Nixon wanted light water reactor jobs in California, his home state, which required more workers both in assembly and maintenance and fired Weinberg to shut him up (there is recorded phone call evidence of this, you can probably even find it on the internet - I found a transcript).
Many games were ported in those days, probably more-so than these days. Castle Wolfenstein was indeed written for the Apple ][ first by Silas Warner, who is quite possibly the weirdest person I've ever met (while at Microprose/Spectrum Holobyte, and RIP). Beyond Castle Wolfenstein was simultaneously written for Apple ][ and C64.
My first thought was we can make ST:TNG communicators with this. The first thought of the rest of the pervs here seems to indicate it should apply to some sort of sex toy - at least yours wasn't;)
I'm guessing you are joking - kinda hard to tell with the invalidate part- I can name several that didn't start wars in the first 12 months - Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Obama to name 4 - some were in wars already, but they didn't start them and there hasn't been an officially declared war in a long time. Military actions, sure, but not wars.
The old saying goes every _generation_ has its war. Perhaps he got mixed up on that one. My generation almost missed one, or perhaps even missed one, since our war was Panama, aka "the tropical vacation that was mistaken for a war" according to a friend of mine that served there.
It seems you don't realize why North Korea even exists - the North Koreans were essentially vanquished and their soldiers fleeing into China in the first year of the Korean war - then China felt threatened by the prospect of a US backed country so close to their border that they declared war in the name of national security and drove UN forces (mostly US) back to the current DMZ. North Korea today has over 1 million active soldiers (4th largest army in the world) and 8 million reserves - that is 5 million more reserves than the US has total soldiers.
Attacking North Korea is like kicking a beehive sitting next to a bear. You may be much better armed and able to take out massive numbers of bees, but you may also annoy the bear enough to attack you, and by attack you, I mean China and the US would engage in a nuclear war. Even if China wasn't provoked, a massive draft would be necessary for soldiers and the ensuing occupation, and even if the war was relatively short, the people there are massively brainwashed and would fight any occupation. The US would need to borrow huge amounts of cash once again and China wouldn't be lending it to us. The added debt load on the economy will probably cause the government to collapse a few years before the Social Security burden will do the same thing (when SS takes up 90% of the budget we'll either need serious austerity or kill the program, and with 49% of people without any retirement savings other than SS... well, does the word the US is fucked mean anything?).
North Korea knows the US probably can't "win" such a war which is why they continue to develop nuclear weapons and jam GPS and sink ships - they know they can be the bully and have no serious repercussions (aside from starving a few million peasants, but that is why you have a insular police state - hard to start a revolution with Big Brother watching). The only real reason I see for North Korea to need long range nuclear missiles is in case China turns on them.
yeah - I was thinking it was something other than a proxy, but using google translate is a proxy, and when the US ever blocks pirate bay, google will block it too (sorry, I don't see this as an if - censorship will prevail, it is the American way).
Technically every platform has a free IDE - Visual Studio Express for Windows, Mac Dev tools for mac, and stuff like CodeBlocks and Eclipse work everywhere. Visual Studio Express requires registering an email with Microsoft and some people consider that selling their soul to the devil, and I think Apple's does as well, but the others don't AFAIK.
Yet we had a nuclear reactor that had almost none of the problems of light water (like shutting down, melting down, proliferation, burns a tiny amount of fuel and leaves the rest as waste...) reactors in the 1960s. Too bad Nixon was a greedy little bastard and only cared about getting light water reactors built in his home state of California. In fact, he so much wanted knowledge of this project buried that he fired Alvin Weinberg, the guy that had invented it and the light water reactor who was head of Oak Ridge National Laboratory at the time.
If you don't think any of these are prophetic, we are already leaning towards an oligarchy/plutocracy where the rich rule - in fact, just being a Representative (the lowest paid lawmaker) puts you easily into the top 10% of income earners, possibly even top 5 - FOR LIFE with COLA (cost of living adjustment). Many states even put their lawmakers in the top 10 - see here.
The US is continuing down the path of not funding Social Security and Medicare. When those run out, I see two scenarios 1) the government is overthrown by the angered poor 2) the government represses the poor just like in such dystopias
This was predicted by Karl Marx for what eventually happens to Capitalism (keep in mind I'm talking about Socialism vs Capitalism as an economical policy - Socialism as a political policy is as flawed if not more flawed because the socialist group isn't driven by a common goal, which in socialism is money - if the company is successful, you all are, because you all own part of the company - a government doesn't have this motivating factor).
The main significance is WHO is praising the Windows phone, not that it is MS shilling. Unfortunately, the poster degenerated into Apple bashing, which I find annoying. If you want to bash, look at market share - iPhone and Android crush Windows phone, which has less market share than mac does. I don't know where Windows phone stands today, but it lacked numerous features when Windows Phone 7 was released and I was in the market for a phone almost 2 years ago (like multitasking, html5 support, threaded email, and copy/paste).
As for newsworthy, probably not as much as Ubuntu on Android though personally I dislike some of the changes made to Ubuntu lately (I have several flavors of Linux on various VMs for solving user problems, so "not using it" is not an option - I often have to use what customers use to see the problems they are seeing). I have no idea how it will translate to a phone.
I still don't see what the point is. At my company we have patents and we have trade secrets. If someone figures out our trade secret on their own and patents it and sues us, we claim and prove prior art (trade secrets are written up just like patents but filed with corporate lawyers instead - I don't know what they do with them, but I suspect they are dated and notarized). Sure you don't get 20 years of protection with a trade secret, but sometimes that is more valuable than a patent since other people that try to do the same thing may do it in a bad way like one of our competitors did copying one of our features (the one I'm referring to works, it just performs poorly compared to ours, and how we get that performance is a trade secret).
Feudalism started mainly because the Carolingan (Frankish Empire associated with Charlemagne) bureaucracy couldn't afford cavalry, so manors started to foot the bill on taxes they collected on their land and made the cavalry hereditary (which is how we got knights). Peasants would voluntarily subject themselves to serfdom in exchange for protection and a plot of land and maybe a cottage, so in a way the sword is correct (they offered military protection), but it was really more about cavalry.
Part of the problem is there is no clear definition of where middle class ends and upper class begins. If you use the traditional definition of wealthy, that is well less than 1% of the US population. Even then, upper middle class covers a huge swath of income earners, about 1/3 of the population, starting at around $65000 for a single earner and going to about $350k to 650k (that number varies widely - depends on where you start the lower upper class). They also skew the information further by showing a graph of the top 10% earners, which is down to less than $130k household (or maybe $120k - I looked it up last year but forgot the specifics).
That said, it is a fact that the upper income earners pay the majority of taxes. It is also a fact that the burden of taxation falls on the middle classes because they cover the majority of the population that can afford to pay taxes. It is therefore possible to argue that the rich pay most of the taxes even though the middle class pays most of the taxes as in that wall street journal graph - the top fifth includes a wide swath of upper middle class, who are in fact paying the majority of the taxes.
Also if you look at taxation at all levels compared to GDP, the picture is reversed and we as a country are near the bottom and Denmark near the top. All those socialist programs they have there have a cost (these would be things like Social Security and Medicare here; things we aren't properly funding). This suggests that other sources of taxation aren't paying nearly what they are in other countries (like corporate taxes).
Anyhow, my point is there is a lot of ways to show information that hide facts, and the grandparent has a point - this article seems to be intentionally deceptive. However, liberal views are probably just as deceptive (they would show taxation vs GDP instead of the big picture).
Actually, one is - Wal-Mart is mentioned in an article as paying 5.9 billion in taxes. They made something like $15 billion, so a little more than a third is taxes. For comparison's sake, Verizon made 4.7 billion and had a net negative of something like -2.7% taxes (yes, we taxpayers paid Verizon to make 4.7 billion and treat its workers bad in the process), and Wells Fargo also had a negative tax rate as well. That is two among many.
We've known about these tax shelters for years, yet nothing is done because corporations own the government already through lobbies and PACs. This drives the rich poor divide, and once Social Security and Medicare go belly up (there is no if - these are both doomed), I expect a lot of dissent in this country, if not an outright revolution. A friend of mine went into foreign services to work in other countries because he feels a revolution is imminent, but I don't think it will happen until SS fails. If welfare can't compensate for the failure of social security, I have little doubt the government will either collapse, or the poor will revolt. If all goes well, I will be retired someplace tropical and far away from the fighting.
Except killing civilians is in direct violation of the Qur'an - in fact, it is in the same section that is used to justify suicide bombing, if I recall correctly. It takes a _very_ liberal (mis)reading of the book to justify suicide bombing.
Most Muslims believe suicide bombing is wrong, but Americans really only hear of the extremists - this is like assuming all Christians are like that Waco cult.
An omniscient God's problems go further back than that - how does "he" explain the angel f*ckup that made an evil angel? I find free will and perfect to be at odds with each other. Nobody's perfect... except God... but we're not perfect, so how could God be? If "he" is all knowing, he'd know better than to f*ck up in the first place.
I reject and have always rejected any argument that God is omniscient, even when I was going to church 3x a week with my Bible thumping parents. Omnipotent, Omnipresent I'm OK with, but omniscient is a big fat no possible way.
In some ways it was a perfect storm - you have Jews and Gypsies who were despised historically because they were not banned from usury (moneylending) by the church, the pre-socialist party government was in shambles due to the Treaty of Versailles, part of that treaty gave the mineral rich Saarland to France which devastated their industry, their currency was in shambles and in hyperinflation, the government unable to turn things around... in other words , the perfect setup for extremists to take power.
I read the English translation of Mein Kampf (Volume 1 and kind of read Volume 2, though it was more of a skim job) and got an FBI file when I was 14 or so, since checking it out from any library got you on a watch list. I can't say I remember much about it, though, and remember it being a tedious read - Marx wasn't much better, but Machiavelli and Greek philosophers (too many to name) were better reads and I agreed with Marx's points more than Hitler's at the time, even though I was trained that Communism was the same thing as Socialism and they both are complete evil (yeah, so much for objective teaching in America - we're dead or red here - Capitalist Democracy is the only way to go, follow don't lead and be a good little citizen robot).
no, Logo is similar to Lisp but without the parens, as someone mentioned. It was also the primary influence for Smalltalk, as I recall.
and Turtle graphics is not Logo, but as I recall Logo has no formal definition, so there are about 200 different implementations that are not compatible, some of which may be turtle graphics.
Wow... I haven't touched assembly since about 15 years ago. Trying to program your assembly to outperform a compiler with out-of-order instruction execution on the CPU takes a mad genius. You probably would get about 10x the speed boost by rewriting code to use GP-GPU instead.
In defense of the grandparent, I'm fluent in C++, program it every day, and find it a mindbogglingly complex set of bolted on features that keep expanding and some that overlap each other. From a design perspective, elegant would be the last word I'd use for it, and it really was never a well designed extension on top of C IMO. Objective-C is a MUCH cleaner object extension to C, but it ties you to Apple (yeah, I know about GNUStep, but Apple drives the development of the language). In addition, many C++ features were so poorly implemented that they are rarely used, like try-throw-catch (I have yet to see professional code that uses them - hell, I've seen more code that uses the taboo GOTO for error handling than try-throw-catch). Templates are extremely powerful in C++, but often lead to ugly, obfuscated code. Multiple inheritance has also caused me many headaches compared to interfaces (like Java and Objective-C). C++11 only adds to the feature bloat, but some of the features are more "finally" for me like lambda functions and native multithreading. I've wanted native multithreading since I first started thread programming back in 1991, having to use 4 different thread libraries for 4 platforms (I believe pthreads, Windows threads, MacOS9 threads, and BeOS threads at that time - this was all student programming and I was still learning C++ and very self-motivated). D seems to have cleaned up a lot of the issues I have with C++, but wasn't ready for prime time when I tried it last (several years ago).
I have a love hate relationship with perl, too (another language I use practically every day). It gets the job done, but really, I never needed objects in perl, and haven't used any new features since about perl 3. That said, it is the best cross platform shell language that I've found, and I can write and run quick powerful cross platform scripts.
Slashdot Mirror
Did Nintendo win the console wars? Sure they have the highest percentages of consoles, but Microsoft really isn't that far behind. But that doesn't show the whole picture - remember that consoles are sold at a loss, which they make up for by a surcharge on software (known as the Gillette razor model). For console software in 2011, the market trailer, the PS3, sold the most according to what I've heard (doing a quick google search, I come up with this, which validates what I heard from a game magazine editor I'm an acquaintance with - don't really see him enough to say he's a friend - a friend of friends).
If you count just Japan though, Nintendo wins hands down - PS3 and XBox360 are tiny shards of market (around 10% I think - Nintendo was over 70%).
I doubt it - neither Kalispell (Montana) airport nor MSP airport caught my wife's mini boxcutter or pocket knife multitool (3 inch pocketknife) in her purse. She didn't even realize they were there until arriving home.
I think they're saying if they didn't charge for it, demand would oversaturate the SMS/MMS data band. Of course, that misses the point - texting is dying because the providers continue to charge inordinately high fees for a service that is free on the internet. I used a pinger # for years to avoid having to pay texting (why pay for texting and data when you can get texting free?), but recently I lost that because everyone just sends a facebook message now and I hadn't used the pinger # in 3 months (I renewed it twice, then let it drop).
The US's taxation vs GDP (or here if you want a nice chart is far lower than it should be for a first world country - in fact, it is lower than some third world countries (so no, it isn't just Socialism or Communism). There is no reason the country can't afford to pay its debts, buy spacecraft, and fund Social Security and Medicare (personally I say get rid of 'em, but 49% of US citizens have no private retirement savings, and that 49% would probably slam a 24 pack of Budweiser and go shoot up the white house if those programs end) - we just need to change tax codes to start collecting first world taxation.
My big problems with this:
1) it is slower than the proposed 39 day VASIMR trip to Mars proposed last year,
2) it is nearly twice as expensive as the Russian nuclear spacecraft
3) the non Saucer and body section parts are for... looks? Site is slashdotted, so I can't tell.
4) The rotational area isn't large enough to provide a consistent 1G, so head and toes will feel different gravities (I did the math on this once [for a spaced based game], and I believe it was around 35-37km/22-23 miles for a 1.8meter/6 foot tall person to feel a fairly consistent 1G - probably not practical for a spaceship). This can cause vertigo.
We don't invest in fusion for the same reason we don't invest in safe fission - the companies that own the rights to build light water reactors want to protect their monopoly and the government is in their pocket via a very powerful lobby group (NEI). If you have any doubt about that, look up a guy by the name of Alvin Weinberg - he led a team that made a much better fission nuclear reactor and was rewarded by Nixon by being fired and information about the reactor was largely kept from the public until much later. Why? Because Nixon wanted light water reactor jobs in California, his home state, which required more workers both in assembly and maintenance and fired Weinberg to shut him up (there is recorded phone call evidence of this, you can probably even find it on the internet - I found a transcript).
Many games were ported in those days, probably more-so than these days. Castle Wolfenstein was indeed written for the Apple ][ first by Silas Warner, who is quite possibly the weirdest person I've ever met (while at Microprose/Spectrum Holobyte, and RIP). Beyond Castle Wolfenstein was simultaneously written for Apple ][ and C64.
My first thought was we can make ST:TNG communicators with this. The first thought of the rest of the pervs here seems to indicate it should apply to some sort of sex toy - at least yours wasn't ;)
it will be Mickey Mouse when they apply the Sonny Bono copyright act (aka the "Mickey Mouse law") to patents to protect this.
I'm guessing you are joking - kinda hard to tell with the invalidate part- I can name several that didn't start wars in the first 12 months - Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Obama to name 4 - some were in wars already, but they didn't start them and there hasn't been an officially declared war in a long time. Military actions, sure, but not wars.
The old saying goes every _generation_ has its war. Perhaps he got mixed up on that one. My generation almost missed one, or perhaps even missed one, since our war was Panama, aka "the tropical vacation that was mistaken for a war" according to a friend of mine that served there.
It seems you don't realize why North Korea even exists - the North Koreans were essentially vanquished and their soldiers fleeing into China in the first year of the Korean war - then China felt threatened by the prospect of a US backed country so close to their border that they declared war in the name of national security and drove UN forces (mostly US) back to the current DMZ. North Korea today has over 1 million active soldiers (4th largest army in the world) and 8 million reserves - that is 5 million more reserves than the US has total soldiers.
Attacking North Korea is like kicking a beehive sitting next to a bear. You may be much better armed and able to take out massive numbers of bees, but you may also annoy the bear enough to attack you, and by attack you, I mean China and the US would engage in a nuclear war. Even if China wasn't provoked, a massive draft would be necessary for soldiers and the ensuing occupation, and even if the war was relatively short, the people there are massively brainwashed and would fight any occupation. The US would need to borrow huge amounts of cash once again and China wouldn't be lending it to us. The added debt load on the economy will probably cause the government to collapse a few years before the Social Security burden will do the same thing (when SS takes up 90% of the budget we'll either need serious austerity or kill the program, and with 49% of people without any retirement savings other than SS... well, does the word the US is fucked mean anything?).
North Korea knows the US probably can't "win" such a war which is why they continue to develop nuclear weapons and jam GPS and sink ships - they know they can be the bully and have no serious repercussions (aside from starving a few million peasants, but that is why you have a insular police state - hard to start a revolution with Big Brother watching). The only real reason I see for North Korea to need long range nuclear missiles is in case China turns on them.
yeah - I was thinking it was something other than a proxy, but using google translate is a proxy, and when the US ever blocks pirate bay, google will block it too (sorry, I don't see this as an if - censorship will prevail, it is the American way).
Technically every platform has a free IDE - Visual Studio Express for Windows, Mac Dev tools for mac, and stuff like CodeBlocks and Eclipse work everywhere. Visual Studio Express requires registering an email with Microsoft and some people consider that selling their soul to the devil, and I think Apple's does as well, but the others don't AFAIK.
Yet we had a nuclear reactor that had almost none of the problems of light water (like shutting down, melting down, proliferation, burns a tiny amount of fuel and leaves the rest as waste...) reactors in the 1960s. Too bad Nixon was a greedy little bastard and only cared about getting light water reactors built in his home state of California. In fact, he so much wanted knowledge of this project buried that he fired Alvin Weinberg, the guy that had invented it and the light water reactor who was head of Oak Ridge National Laboratory at the time.
Incidentally and ironically, Japan is planning to build one if they can get some more funding - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuji_Molten_Salt_Reactor
Neither is slavery.
If you can't tell the difference, is there a difference?
The Iron Heel"
1984
We
If you don't think any of these are prophetic, we are already leaning towards an oligarchy/plutocracy where the rich rule - in fact, just being a Representative (the lowest paid lawmaker) puts you easily into the top 10% of income earners, possibly even top 5 - FOR LIFE with COLA (cost of living adjustment). Many states even put their lawmakers in the top 10 - see here.
The US is continuing down the path of not funding Social Security and Medicare. When those run out, I see two scenarios
1) the government is overthrown by the angered poor
2) the government represses the poor just like in such dystopias
This was predicted by Karl Marx for what eventually happens to Capitalism (keep in mind I'm talking about Socialism vs Capitalism as an economical policy - Socialism as a political policy is as flawed if not more flawed because the socialist group isn't driven by a common goal, which in socialism is money - if the company is successful, you all are, because you all own part of the company - a government doesn't have this motivating factor).
The main significance is WHO is praising the Windows phone, not that it is MS shilling. Unfortunately, the poster degenerated into Apple bashing, which I find annoying. If you want to bash, look at market share - iPhone and Android crush Windows phone, which has less market share than mac does. I don't know where Windows phone stands today, but it lacked numerous features when Windows Phone 7 was released and I was in the market for a phone almost 2 years ago (like multitasking, html5 support, threaded email, and copy/paste).
As for newsworthy, probably not as much as Ubuntu on Android though personally I dislike some of the changes made to Ubuntu lately (I have several flavors of Linux on various VMs for solving user problems, so "not using it" is not an option - I often have to use what customers use to see the problems they are seeing). I have no idea how it will translate to a phone.
I still don't see what the point is. At my company we have patents and we have trade secrets. If someone figures out our trade secret on their own and patents it and sues us, we claim and prove prior art (trade secrets are written up just like patents but filed with corporate lawyers instead - I don't know what they do with them, but I suspect they are dated and notarized). Sure you don't get 20 years of protection with a trade secret, but sometimes that is more valuable than a patent since other people that try to do the same thing may do it in a bad way like one of our competitors did copying one of our features (the one I'm referring to works, it just performs poorly compared to ours, and how we get that performance is a trade secret).
Feudalism started mainly because the Carolingan (Frankish Empire associated with Charlemagne) bureaucracy couldn't afford cavalry, so manors started to foot the bill on taxes they collected on their land and made the cavalry hereditary (which is how we got knights). Peasants would voluntarily subject themselves to serfdom in exchange for protection and a plot of land and maybe a cottage, so in a way the sword is correct (they offered military protection), but it was really more about cavalry.
Part of the problem is there is no clear definition of where middle class ends and upper class begins. If you use the traditional definition of wealthy, that is well less than 1% of the US population. Even then, upper middle class covers a huge swath of income earners, about 1/3 of the population, starting at around $65000 for a single earner and going to about $350k to 650k (that number varies widely - depends on where you start the lower upper class). They also skew the information further by showing a graph of the top 10% earners, which is down to less than $130k household (or maybe $120k - I looked it up last year but forgot the specifics).
That said, it is a fact that the upper income earners pay the majority of taxes. It is also a fact that the burden of taxation falls on the middle classes because they cover the majority of the population that can afford to pay taxes. It is therefore possible to argue that the rich pay most of the taxes even though the middle class pays most of the taxes as in that wall street journal graph - the top fifth includes a wide swath of upper middle class, who are in fact paying the majority of the taxes.
Also if you look at taxation at all levels compared to GDP, the picture is reversed and we as a country are near the bottom and Denmark near the top. All those socialist programs they have there have a cost (these would be things like Social Security and Medicare here; things we aren't properly funding). This suggests that other sources of taxation aren't paying nearly what they are in other countries (like corporate taxes).
Anyhow, my point is there is a lot of ways to show information that hide facts, and the grandparent has a point - this article seems to be intentionally deceptive. However, liberal views are probably just as deceptive (they would show taxation vs GDP instead of the big picture).
Actually, one is - Wal-Mart is mentioned in an article as paying 5.9 billion in taxes. They made something like $15 billion, so a little more than a third is taxes. For comparison's sake, Verizon made 4.7 billion and had a net negative of something like -2.7% taxes (yes, we taxpayers paid Verizon to make 4.7 billion and treat its workers bad in the process), and Wells Fargo also had a negative tax rate as well. That is two among many.
We've known about these tax shelters for years, yet nothing is done because corporations own the government already through lobbies and PACs. This drives the rich poor divide, and once Social Security and Medicare go belly up (there is no if - these are both doomed), I expect a lot of dissent in this country, if not an outright revolution. A friend of mine went into foreign services to work in other countries because he feels a revolution is imminent, but I don't think it will happen until SS fails. If welfare can't compensate for the failure of social security, I have little doubt the government will either collapse, or the poor will revolt. If all goes well, I will be retired someplace tropical and far away from the fighting.
Except killing civilians is in direct violation of the Qur'an - in fact, it is in the same section that is used to justify suicide bombing, if I recall correctly. It takes a _very_ liberal (mis)reading of the book to justify suicide bombing.
Most Muslims believe suicide bombing is wrong, but Americans really only hear of the extremists - this is like assuming all Christians are like that Waco cult.
An omniscient God's problems go further back than that - how does "he" explain the angel f*ckup that made an evil angel? I find free will and perfect to be at odds with each other. Nobody's perfect... except God... but we're not perfect, so how could God be? If "he" is all knowing, he'd know better than to f*ck up in the first place.
I reject and have always rejected any argument that God is omniscient, even when I was going to church 3x a week with my Bible thumping parents. Omnipotent, Omnipresent I'm OK with, but omniscient is a big fat no possible way.
In some ways it was a perfect storm - you have Jews and Gypsies who were despised historically because they were not banned from usury (moneylending) by the church, the pre-socialist party government was in shambles due to the Treaty of Versailles, part of that treaty gave the mineral rich Saarland to France which devastated their industry, their currency was in shambles and in hyperinflation, the government unable to turn things around... in other words , the perfect setup for extremists to take power.
I read the English translation of Mein Kampf (Volume 1 and kind of read Volume 2, though it was more of a skim job) and got an FBI file when I was 14 or so, since checking it out from any library got you on a watch list. I can't say I remember much about it, though, and remember it being a tedious read - Marx wasn't much better, but Machiavelli and Greek philosophers (too many to name) were better reads and I agreed with Marx's points more than Hitler's at the time, even though I was trained that Communism was the same thing as Socialism and they both are complete evil (yeah, so much for objective teaching in America - we're dead or red here - Capitalist Democracy is the only way to go, follow don't lead and be a good little citizen robot).
no, Logo is similar to Lisp but without the parens, as someone mentioned. It was also the primary influence for Smalltalk, as I recall.
and Turtle graphics is not Logo, but as I recall Logo has no formal definition, so there are about 200 different implementations that are not compatible, some of which may be turtle graphics.
Wow... I haven't touched assembly since about 15 years ago. Trying to program your assembly to outperform a compiler with out-of-order instruction execution on the CPU takes a mad genius. You probably would get about 10x the speed boost by rewriting code to use GP-GPU instead.
In defense of the grandparent, I'm fluent in C++, program it every day, and find it a mindbogglingly complex set of bolted on features that keep expanding and some that overlap each other. From a design perspective, elegant would be the last word I'd use for it, and it really was never a well designed extension on top of C IMO. Objective-C is a MUCH cleaner object extension to C, but it ties you to Apple (yeah, I know about GNUStep, but Apple drives the development of the language). In addition, many C++ features were so poorly implemented that they are rarely used, like try-throw-catch (I have yet to see professional code that uses them - hell, I've seen more code that uses the taboo GOTO for error handling than try-throw-catch). Templates are extremely powerful in C++, but often lead to ugly, obfuscated code. Multiple inheritance has also caused me many headaches compared to interfaces (like Java and Objective-C). C++11 only adds to the feature bloat, but some of the features are more "finally" for me like lambda functions and native multithreading. I've wanted native multithreading since I first started thread programming back in 1991, having to use 4 different thread libraries for 4 platforms (I believe pthreads, Windows threads, MacOS9 threads, and BeOS threads at that time - this was all student programming and I was still learning C++ and very self-motivated). D seems to have cleaned up a lot of the issues I have with C++, but wasn't ready for prime time when I tried it last (several years ago).
I have a love hate relationship with perl, too (another language I use practically every day). It gets the job done, but really, I never needed objects in perl, and haven't used any new features since about perl 3. That said, it is the best cross platform shell language that I've found, and I can write and run quick powerful cross platform scripts.