Steve_Baker's comments

"she later told me that I was anti-authoritarian and more likely to do what I thought was right rather than what I had been instructed to do. I am still baffled to this day about how that is an undesirable attribute"

Pretty much sums up everthing that is wrong with Corporate America, American government and American society in a nutshell. Your betters (aka "leaders") want solders, not moral people. This is social Darwinism in action, and it's not going to lead to a good place.

Liquefaction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_liquefaction

Every time fizzbuzz comes up, someone has to post a solution it seems, but why does everyone write such huge fizzbuzz programs?

  for(int i=1; i <= 100; i++)
    printf((char *[]){"%d\n","Buzz\n","Fizz\n","FizzBuzz\n"}[((i%3==0)<<1)|((i%5)==0)], i);

The virtual size of a program includes all shared objects (shared libraries, shared copy on write memory pages, the read only executable pages and other shared memory) that a process uses in addition to the memory that only that particular process is using (its resident set size.) Shared objects like shared libraries can be mapped into memory by multiple processes and thus don't use any additional physical memory for each additional process that uses it.

The RSS thus usually indicates the amount of heap and stack a process is using that is unique to it.

Politicians already make a lot of their wealth from insider information. Even if you somehow stopped all donations, corporations would just trade more knowledge for favors.

Politicians should be prohibited from direct investment, both during and sometime after serving. Doesn't stop someone from enriching some partners who agree to pay him back at some later date. There probably is no end to the corruption.

I think that letting foreign companies shape our legislation is such a manner ought to considered at best a stones throw from treason.

I think you may have missed what I think is the most important point made in the article:

"It is also interesting to consider that students in the treatment group spent approximately half of the summer working on pre-algebra skills. Because the Khan software is individualized, it identified that most of our students had significant pre-algebra skill gaps and delivered instruction and practice problems to address these deficits. Students in the Khan/treatment group therefore spent up to 50% less time than the control group on the algebra content that the MDTP exam measured. The treatment group, however, still performed at a similar level the control group on the algebra measures."

That says to me that these students spent most of their time filling in gaps in their knowledge and still managed to keep up and even get ahead of the other class in a very short amount of time. They're basically saying flat out that these students learned as much of the advanced material in half the time as the other group and probably have better foundational knowledge.

No significant difference my ass.

How do you tell a file from a directory without stat()ing it? The d_type field is not portable. Since find and other tools like it need to recursively descend a directory tree, a stat() for each file to determine its type is unavoidable.

Yes, you just split the current view (vertically or horizontally) or open a new window. Any change to a file will be immediately updated in the other views/windows.

I think regardless of the reasons why, people who want to be leaders, on the whole, clearly shouldn't be. Since these people comprise a small subset of the total of all people, simply choosing randomly will tend to not choose them. I doubt it has to do anything with fairness.

Maybe "leaders" aren't as necessary as people think, and actually are a drain on productivity.

Obviously not for me. I finish all my programs in under 5 minutes. :-(

I'd tend to agree, but for myself I think what I enjoyed most about programming was the problem solving aspect. As I've matured as a programmer the problems become easier and thus less interesting and there seems to be less and less undiscovered country. I wonder how to get that feeling of exploration back and I think I should blame myself for not having the time or energy to explore harder problems.

I do think the author is misplacing his angst, it isn't programming itself, it's the business of programming that sucks. How to fix it though?

I live in a smallish city in Indiana, pay $56 a month for < 5Mb cable and it's often down for hours at a time, and from my own experience is better than the alternative DSL in available in the area. The reliability has improved over time, in the past we've had occasions where it would indeed be down for days at a time. Wireless/Cable => apple/oranges maybe, but doesn't sound vastly different from North Africa from where I'm standing.

If only the average administrator were so forward thinking. Too often they can think no further than the next quarter. Still, there are always consulting fees for him to look forward to.

I know that a lot of people would think that, but I can tell you from personal experience that that is likely not the case. One offs, impressive or not, rarely, if ever, factor into an administrators budgetary decisions. Killing the goose that laid the golden egg is a quite common occurrence.

I don't think it follows that polyandry is less advantageous for a woman than polygamy -- more men equals more resources. I think the reason is that most societies are patriarchal rather than matriarchal and this has traditionally led to men being the greater holder of wealth, and the disparity between the rich and poor being what it is, 1/100th of a rich man is worth more than even 100 poor men. That still doesn't mean that a woman wouldn't choose to have 100 men if she cannot have a portion of a rich man, but in a patriarchal society, those women would likely become prostitutes -- the (to men perhaps) more socially acceptable form of polyandry? This might even be preferable to the woman, since I could see multiple men in the same household potentially being much more rife with conflict. I wouldn't be surprised if societies tend to try to suppress polygamy at equal or even greater rates than they do prostition.

Basically I don't think polyandry is rare at all, it's just in the form of uncounted prostitution. I'd lay odds that you'd see more (monogamous) polyandry in societies that are more (very) matriarchal and/or the distribution of wealth is flat, both being rather uncommon.

Anyone who wants to see Avatar (or any western movie) in China can just plunk down the 9-10 yuan (<$1.50) for a (probably pretty decent) bootleg DVD that can be found in just about any marketplace. I'm sure this is mostly for posturing and perhaps economic reasons. I'm sure they sometimes do these things just to remind people that they're there and that they can, even if the people there aren't overly impressed or bothered by it.

My inlaws in China probably watch more American movies than I do and I have netflix.

People like to watch train wrecks too, but that doesn't mean they want to be in one.

Why buy the more expensive calculator with feature X when you can add that feature to your cheaper device with a software upgrade? I imagine some of the difference between models might be mostly software.