I'd rather hear what economists have to say, not IT dudes

I'd rather listen to an IT dude than a lawyer, and most of the politicians trying to resolve this thing are lawyers.

There is no way most software teams can consistently hit schedule without code reviews.

I agree 100%. Of course, there is no way most software teams can consistently hit schedule with code reviews.

Sadly,formating rules, variable names, number of comments, comment formats, etc. etc. and checklists of pet issues are the easiest things to spot in a group scan of the code.

I had the same experience. No one was willing to spend the substantial amount of time necessary to do an in depth code review, so the only things we found were minor syntactic things.

The question is, are code reviews really effective? I worked on a project where we did extensive code reviews and we rarely found any real bugs. Going through a program line by line and finding a non-obvious bug is very difficult. Also, a thorough code review is also very time consuming. It takes almost as much time to review code as it does to write it in the first place. When you have four or so people reviewing every line written, your productivity for the project goes way down. In my judgment, code reviews just were not cost effective for our project.

Lawyers have in the past decried software legal aids as providing customers with less than the best service possible

How many of those standard legal forms are filled out by the lawyer's secretary instead of the lawyer? I bet around 90%.

Why do I have a bad feeling about this?

Actually, I was aiming for "funny" rather than "insightful".

spent billions of dollars (in 1492 money) to visit the Americas. does that mean he owned them?

It means he owns all of the rocks he brought back.

It was certainly a valuable experience, if for no other reason than to see the court system in action.

I was on call once and served on two juries. I was glad I got to see a jury trial from the inside once, but I really don’t like having to decide the fate of other people.

In my state, the jury not only decides guilt or innocence, but also the punishment (a judge can reduce but not increase a sentence). The defendants in my trials were obviously guilty, but the defendant’s lawyers were trying to get a lesser sentence than the one they could get with a plea bargain. I was amazed at the things the jurors consider and how someone with a strong personality can sway other jurors. Probably the most important thing a lawyer does at a trial is jury selection.

OK. I had a course in the theory of psychological testing, so I know the answer. IQ tests are designed to (and sometimes do) correlate with things such as success in school, general problem solving ability, occupational success in fields such as science, etc. To say that they measure “intelligence” is a very vague way of saying this. And, of course, the correlation may not be very strong in some cases because of the limitations of the tests, and the influence of other factors.

If Jobs ran Google it would only find things approved by king Steve and he'd try to control the content of those.

Right. From what I read, King Steve has to approve all new products developed at Apple and he demands quality. What a clown.

A number of years ago, I worked on a team that developed this 500,000 line FORTRAN program for the analysis of scientific data. The code was very modular, but the data was all over the place. A change in the data in one part of the program could cause unforeseen problems in another part. Object oriented programming helps prevent this problem by organizing the code and the data it acts upon into objects. In my experience, object oriented programming is one of the biggest programming breakthroughs since higher level languages. I just can't see an institution with the reputation of CMU deprecating this methodology.

I agree. There was a big increase in Java's UI (Swing) performance with the release of JDK 1.6. For CPU intensive applications I would still use C++.

Every math course I took helps me think about the algorithms I develop at work, just as every English course I took helps me write and communicate. I took a lot of math that I do not use directly, but I don't consider any of it wasted.