There are two types of fools:
1. The fools who trust in the optimization skills of the compiler/JIT compiler
2. The fools who trust in their own optimization skills

My personal experience is that Type 1 fools are harmless, you can speed up their code easily. Type 2-s on the other hand do a lot of mess, code in assembly, whatever and still manage to fuck up performance and it is a pain to correct it later. Modern CPU architectures are extremely complex, and different architectures have different characteristics (e.g Atom vs Pentium 4). There are many programmers that used assembly in their college years and think that those skills apply on current systems.

And new infection vectors for trojans...

"[blink]You are infected!!! [/blink] Your friend recommends this virus scanner".

Try Miss October

Most of the people don't realize how useful is the theoretical background they receive. They think like "hey, why do we learn about XY, I will never use it in practice" but in reality we DO use lot of these stuff. Theoretical stuff changes your thinking and extends your abstraction capabilities. Your vocabulary grows as well. Just ask any outsider what do they understand when you start talking about technical matters. Maybe you will never use matroids or Galois fields or Laurent series in your life, but you heard about them and you will know where to search if needed. If you don't know the basics, then you cannot search.

It is not just about how much money was actually received from the parent. Just knowing the fact that there are your rich parents to save your ass if you fuck up your business is a big boost. Also, richer kids have greater ego as well, and that helps them.

Awaken my child, and embrace the glory that is your birthright.
Know that I am Richard Stallman, the eternal will of the swarm,
and that you have been created to serve me.

Serve the Hive!

"The free space loss exponent is 2"

Of course it is, I haven't denied that :)

I just added a comment in a geeky "hey I'm important, too" style, to show that in practice the signal attenuation can be much faster than the simple theoretical model. That shows the 1500m limit in a different light.

In practice that could be way higher than 2 (or sometimes less). From Wikipedia:

"In the study of wireless communications, path loss can be represented by the path loss exponent, whose value is normally in the range of 2 to 4 (where 2 is for propagation in free space, 4 is for relatively lossy environments and for the case of full specular reflection from the earth surface—the so-called flat-earth model). In some environments, such as buildings, stadiums and other indoor environments, the path loss exponent can reach values in the range of 4 to 6. On the other hand, a tunnel may act as a waveguide, resulting in a path loss exponent less than 2."

It is funny that Slashdot swallows hungarian characters: "Él" is certainly not what you wanted to write :)

Yeah, and his name is Él(Lowercase O-double acute), not Elo, but I understand that "hungarian umlauts" causes significant cognitive stress :)

Even for Slashdot it seems...

They exactly plan something like that:

"The transparent plane's outer skin would be made of a special futuristic type of ceramic. The push of a button would send electricity flowing through the material, making the main body of the plane see-through,"

This is a vicious circle:

If a lot of households have weapons, it means that the criminals are more likely to carry a weapon. If the criminals are likely to carry weapons, it means that even more households will acquire a gun, too. Stalemate.

How do you start disarmament?

Isn't Git Linus' software?