gngeal

So UK is getting as bad as the US? Or has it never been good over there? Given how mental health conditions and incarcerations (for whatever reason) go hand in hand, I'd expect any sane society to tackle the former even more ferociously than the latter.

That sounds very much like what the VPRI people have been doing all along.

Wow, you can change the brightness of the sun to meet a requirement?

BTW, there are quite a few limitations placed on you by nature: uncomputable numbers, NP-completness, ...

It's also null and void in my country (.cz), and probably in many other European countries.

Actually, I don't consider "asking someone back to their place right away" as either positive or negative thing because I don't understand the motives. Sorry, this kind of interpersonal stuff simply goes beyond me. ;/ But I assume that if that is important to someone, I don't see a reason for that person not to be candid about it.

I don't think many investors appreciate it, but that doesn't mean a cold email won't work -- but it better be extraordinary.

It's more that I see no reason for why this should matter when many business people don't even consider the effects that their actions or decisions have on human communities, changing the lives of countless other people. So many of them don't give a shit about what difference it makes when they decide to do something, but when someone else deals with them, many of them dwell on superficial veneer rather than on substantial matters proposed? Sounds very much like hypocrisy to me.

You mean "no unsigned types (even though the language is essentially machine-level when it comes to integers), no compact memory layouts for aggregate data, no useful function values without jumping through hoops etc." is an approach that leads to good languages?

There is very little in terms of "provability" that either C++ or its types give you. Proving anything really interesting (for example, the absence of race conditions in concurrent code) still seems like pretty much an arduous process in languages not explicitly designed for such things.

Compared to Python or Ruby, you're pretty much relying entirely on culture and good habits to ensure the proper rules of encapsulation. Any code may modify the private members of your objects. (Granted, C++ has "mutable", Java has the whole "Reflection" loophole as well. But you can search for those edge cases rather easily).

That didn't seem very comprehensible to me, but if you're claiming that in Ruby, you can modify member variables of someone's objects, well, you can't, unless you use reflection as well (not only that, but the access to member variables is object-based, rather than class-based, so you can't access the member variables of an object from any other object, even if they are of the same class, unlike in C++ - so much for the "objects communicate by passing messages" in C++!). More to the point, in C++, you can always cast a pointer into something that makes the raw data accessible. There's enough stuff in C++ for you to blow your whole leg off instead of just shooting yourself into the foot.

Are you sure you've read up on your C. J. Date? I've had that once before: someone complaining that "queries take too much time" with a paltry single-digit-GB database. When I asked about the specifics, the only repeating reply was "we can't tell you". You don't mention anything of value, but querying a few million records can't possibly take a few minutes on the aging desktop computer I've bought seven years ago, much less on a modern server.

Meaning that you probably still can't read email in it, but it can already do conference calls. ;)

I intuitively perceive it as good drivers being clustered together near the top, with a few outstanding lousy drivers near the bottom.

If you are not convinced, consider Bill Gates walking into a room full of college students - suddenly, almost everybody becomes below-average wealthy (if average == mean).

That's true in my country even if Bill Gates doesn't walk in. Hell, perhaps it's true even in the US.

Uh, nope. What does "almost wiped out" mean to you? 30% of population dead is "almost wiped out"? It's horrible, of course, but there were still 70% who stayed alive. Well, I could say that I can jump almost three meters high with that logic. :-)

That sounds very much like "I don't kill people because I'd get caught". Why can't you be civil (whatever that means) and think just because?

Also, on the neo4j.org page, the claim that "graph data model['s] expressiveness supersedes the relational model" seems a little bit spurious, seeing as, as I understand it, the relational model and graph data are both anchored in first-order predicate logic, and therefore should be able to do the same things essentially (although Codd-style RDBMS with a little bit more fuss regarding the necessary schemas).