MichaelMoser70

That's what they say here http://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-federal-bank-near-zero-143...

They just can't pay anything on government bonds, given the deficit that has been accumulated so far.

>Why should retirement accounts get invested in anything but government bonds and index funds?

Here (somewhere near the end) Mr. Blank says that this is what got the silicon valley rolling. When pension funds were allowed to invest, control of the valley switched from the military to the VC funds http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo

Probably another reason is that bonds and index funds do not yield enough to keep the pension funds going; people now live a longer life on average, so they need to pay more on each pension; so its all screwed up.

Everything is screwed up; now that probably that has something to do with the fact that energy prices & commodities are high; there is less energy to go round, so other creative means are found to create 'wealth'; these tricks increasingly have something to do with extracting something from pocket A and transferring it to pocket B.

I think the problem with macros is that they do not always compile and do not always work fine. Debugging macros is hard by any definition, because you have to reason about both what is written and what goes on behind the scenes. A macro is great if the same genius is both writing the macro and using it, otherwise it sucks, in practical terms. With a function things are much easier – one know what gets in, and you can tell the author of the function what has gone wrong; much easier then trying to understand how the macro did unwind; with macros the additional complexity is that one has to understand what the user of the macro was trying to do.

They could have turned it into a payed service, with so many active users. What would be the arguments against such a move?

actually it is still available until June 1st. sad it will be gone. I think gmail will be next to go - I think the last gmail redesign made the product less usable on purpose; they must be paying a lot for storage cost on abandoned accounts, old emails etc; nowadays they get more transient user info from other sources ...

VirtualBox is very very slow on my PC, VMware player is faster.