They'll rape anything that takes their fancy, they're not picky.

It will take years to actually even start to identify the damage this new antibiotic may have on the body.

Are you saying it shouldn't be used to save someone about to die from an otherwise untreatable bacterial infection? If so, you have a future at the FDA!

Each step uses a factorial 1 or 2 higher than the previous step. The previous step's factorial is kept around, so a simple multiply or 2 is all that's required to get the new one. He isn't calculating a new factorial afresh at each step. That said, when I've done work like this I've always made a table of precalculated factorials, which may be a mistake if it takes a long time to fetch the table.

I recall that many of the Linux library math functions I've seen say "copyright Sun Microsystems", and that they were pretty old.

My experience has been that code that should be vectorized has to be written in a way that makes it easy for the compiler to recognize, otherwise it won't happen. That requires either experience or luck. Most authors will be better off using optimized libraries available for the most common functions.

I totally believe in universal health care

So you DO believe in grand larceny from legally disarmed victims.

It's a shame that the word "crime" has multiple definitions, but it does. The two most relevant here are (Funk and Wagnalls):

1. An act or omission in violation of public law either forbidding or commanding it, for which a punishment is prescribed and which is prosecuted by the state in its own name or in the name of the people or the sovereign.
2. Any grave offense against morality or social order; wickedness; iniquity

"Legal criminals" is an oxymoron by the first definition but sensible by the second.

If you had a broken leg, you’d pay a doctor to set it.” “Not if he was the one who broke it.” (Rand)

A black market is free trade against which a law has been passed. Although it may be criminal in the legalistic sense, whether it is criminal in the sense of unjustly harming someone depends upon the specifics of the situation, and usually requires that some other rightful law be broken. For instance, there's a black market in home-distilled booze, but unless it's tainted or labelled "Johnny Walker" nobody's rights are violated.

Capitalism is the economic application of human rights. Extortion is a violation of rights.

As photographic image improvement algorithms become more advanced, some will make their way to consumer-level software. Motion-blurred photos are very compute-expensive to correct; expect several minutes per image with a 3 GHz processor. More than a few seconds to view a sharp image is not going to make most people happy.

And fracking!

The ability to turn Knuth's text into a working program is very much an individual thing. I've known people who look at Knuth's writing, say "It's easy", and write the necessary code. I look at Knuth's text, almost get the idea, and then have to find another person's writing to turn out code. Knuth just doesn't click for me.

Apparently, Jobs was a bullying perfectionist. Without him, the excellent products Apple created would not have existed anywhere. Whether he damaged people's lives in the process is something I don't know, but there are bosses out there with his personality and practices that have left behind human mental carnage.

A great deal depends upon how much you like what you're doing. One summer job of assembly line labor left me refreshed at the end of each day. The last job I had, designing integrated circuits, had me working 60 hours a week just because I could.

Some of the great advances are the result of people obsessed with their work.