Darn noobs! I remember having fun making the MCC Interim distribution work...

They're also moving the low-level courts to use a lot more technology to support them, things like video links so remand prisoners do not need to be brought to court, tablet computers with the legal texts on them in searchable form, that sort of thing. These are the sorts of things that technology can definitely help with, even though they definitely change the nature of justice somewhat.

The real key is that there is a body in Canada (other than the ordinary Joe on the street) who wants prices to be kept down, and which has the power to actually make that happen. Because keeping charges down is a priority, use of generic drugs will be more widespread, as will the use of programmes to improve general public health (because they tend to be very cost effective overall) and the more rapid progression from diagnosis to treatment. That last point can be both good and bad: good because if they got it right, you're getting treated sooner instead of having more expensive (and possibly invasive) tests done, and bad because if they got it wrong, you're not being treated for what's wrong at all.

They're probably still working that out. It's one thing to know that it's theoretically possible, but another to demonstrate how to actually do it, so the report that it has been done (even if it turns out to not be very useful in the end) is relevant.

That's not true. It's that the rich control both corporations and government. Observe how many senior politicians move in the same circles as corporate board members, and typically have done since early in life. It's not precisely corrupt, it's just that they prefer to do things for their kind of people above and beyond all else. Joe Dumbass can always be told what to vote for on things where it matters through advertizing and related stuff. It's not total control though; they ignore much of the detail of local politics, since who is your neighborhood dog-catcher doesn't matter at all to those with real power.

That matches my memory of trying to build things with the IRIX C compiler too, especially in 64-bit mode. Or were you talking about libressl specifically?

That's what the professor's family is for, to keep track of all the rest of human knowledge that the professor hasn't got time for.

Not even within a VM? OS X hosts those just fine...

If they want to arrange their own blackjack and hookers, they're free to do so. It's Open Source.

I really doubt that that's it. I think you've let the tinfoil slip over your eyes a bit too far, and you've lost sight of reality there.

That's not special to the USA. I have some numbers set to auto-block with very good reason. It's significantly less annoying in Europe though, as the caller pays the cost of the call (except in exceptional circumstances, which robocalls don't count as).

That's what the FCC needs to crack down on. The easiest way would probably to have a rule change that makes the phone companies part liable for any court-imposed liabilities arising from private actions over robocalls where those robocalls come from a spoofed number. That'll encourage the phone companies to sort out the problem very rapidly indeed, perhaps by making it significantly more difficult for phone users to supply the phone number in the first place. I know this will be inconvenient for some PBX operators, but mechanisms that are too easy to abuse need revision anyway.

Nothing much ensures that the data is complete or correct now either, other than peer review over a long period of time by people who are wholly unconnected with the original work (and its funding). In fact, in some sciences you're not going to get complete data in a public venue anyway (some sciences work with data that in raw form can identify individual people; think medical research). Correctness is hard to evaluate; what does it even mean for raw data in the first place?

But keeping versioned data does help with some types of analysis, such as working out whether a scientist's hypothesis was reasonable based on what data was available at the time, and whether that hypothesis still holds water or when it ceased to be good. It also makes it much easier to detect fraud, and you can use all the sorts of concepts developed for distributed source code management to make it all more comprehensible.

Don't think "wikipedia for scientific data", think "github for scientific data". That's a much better model.

As opposed to what? Saving state by tattooing it on a hairy fairy's derriere? If you're saving state, so that you can shut down an IDE and start it up again in the sam place, it's going to be saved to disk somewhere, and the chance that it's going to be in a file when its going to disk is enormously high. (Technically you could also store it in a DB that is written to a raw partition, but I'm not aware of anyone mad enough to use a full installation of Oracle on dedicated storage devices just to save the state of their IDE...)

Am I right in saying that the marks of a message passing solution are that it can handle "calls" of arbitrary methods and that the class/object itself can control what happens in that case?

That's largely a crock of shit and C++ programmers are just kidding themselves. The only two paradigms that C++ really implements are OO (for structural organisation) and imperative (for operation description). It's not functional in any meaningful way (it's possible to pretend, but it feels very strange if you do) and declarative programming is rather different. The only declarative language that most programmers normally encounter is SQL.

My point was that there's no real reason why OO can't be used with functional programming, or declarative programming. It just tends to be paired up with imperative programming for historical reasons.

I forgot the term. Oh well.

That's because most OO languages are also procedural programming languages (for historical reasons). OO is principally about how to organise data and the operations on it, which is orthogonal to whether the operations are sequences of commands or composite functions to be applied.