Well, jeez, in the case of China, the alternative is "stark poverty" so it's not really a choice. Forty years of Marxism reduced their people to equality - equally poor. The Communist Party hijacked the people's revolution onto the capitalist road and it's been all up since then. And the EPA really does have uptight, business-hostile practices. Just ask the people who work there what they think about the very idea that businesses should be allowed to exist, much less make a profit.

Ty Warner, the inventor of beanie babies, is worth $2.6 billion.

Yeah, but he didn't buy any.

I see a lot of that attitude today and it's always by leftists who are utterly frustrated that opposition is allowed to exist.

We have state after state where Republicans are trying to keep old people, minorities and students from voting.

Tell me where Democrats are trying to keep anyone from voting. It's always projection with you guys, isn't it.

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy."

Odd that you choose that "people who disagree with me weren't allowed to vote" part...that's pure projection. I see a lot of that attitude today and it's always by leftists who are utterly frustrated that opposition is allowed to exist. After all, their policies are correct and anyone who disagrees is a fascist-KKK-nazi. Seriously, you would not believe the villianization and dehumanization that occurs.

Poetry dug its own grave. It's hard to have sympathy with them.

"Poetry is nobody's business except the poet's," wrote Philip Larkin, "and everybody else can fuck off."

My assumption is anyone that would mistake a quote from some 1950's John Birch guy for a statement from a Founder is probably more worried about black people or Mexicans voting than preserving government by, of and for the People.

Still doesn't say anything about Civics. It just lists the brands, not the models. I'm guessing Accords at least. So, Prius and Camry over Varis and Mustangs and larger Fords over Fiestas.

How many of us have tried to do something and wished we had (at least) a third hand?

I would pay a *lot* for a third hand, as I do a lot of my own construction work (building an interior into an old church we now live in.)

I can't even guess at the number of times I've had to wait until I had someone at my side to hold, turn, twist, drill, cut, brace, etc.

This stuff is great to hear. Love the idea of extra fingers.

Although it does put me strangely in mind of that scene in Heavy Metal where a robot, after having "done" a very sexy human female, spins his fingers around with a "whiiizzz", while commenting something on the order of "human woman love sex with mechanical assistance" lol

For most programmers, recursion seems to be a tool to completely -- but unpredictably -- blow out the stack. Cynical, I know, but that's been my experience.

Although I gotta tell ya, one of my favorite recursive things is a particular area fill routine for rectangular pixels. Simple and beautiful. Just elegant as all get out. Once I understood how it does what it does, it was like someone washed my mental windshield with Windex. That was a great day. :)

Yep. One of the things you discovered is that your school was one of the (many, many) schools that are horrible at teaching things, and in particular, math. Welcome to the real world. :)

So... how's your luck been in convincing employers (if you go that way) that your Coursera work is worthy of qualifying you for jobs?

I'm going to go with this:

The vast majority of programming is fairly simple manipulation of states and symbols, which are themselves a small subset of numbers. yes and no are 1 and 0, etc.

The way those manipulations work together quickly becomes very complex.

You can do a boatload of things with just that knowledge. Entire video games. Many types of process control and dedicated controllers. Most reasonable scripting jobs, most "webby" stuff, database stuff, etc.

But then adding some knowledge of math, in the purely technical sense, gives us more symbols to manipulate, and more ways to manipulate them, and this, like any major skills enhancement, definitely makes you a better programmer. Some mid-level math concepts -- very simple in nature, actually -- amplify what you can do so much it's just amazing.

I suspect -- I can't actually tell you because my math is only mediocre to fairly good, nor have I ever knowingly come in contact such a person -- that *really* advanced math skills combined with *really* advanced programming skills (which I can lay claim to) would combine to create a true monster programmer.

But...

I think there's something about the essentially concrete nature of programming, and the incredibly abstract nature of higher math, that makes these dual-facet powerhouses the rarest of the rare. In my experience -- admittedly, just one person's career -- serious math heads tend to be pretty lousy programmers. Lots of bugs, poor structure, little to no sensitivity to shortcuts and loading. Then really great programmers seem to be only sorta capable with math (although what they can do with what they have tends to be quite surprising.) Just an IMHO based on my experience. Something I've found interesting enough to contemplate many times. Having said that, I sure would like to meet Mr. or Ms. combination-o-both. :)

There was a large fleet of German civilian ships in the Atlantic between 1941 and 1945, although they were all submarines.

They did have torpedoes on board, but they were civilian torpedoes. For defense.

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Some of us look and see that the words of our founders "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury.

Except, no "founder" ever said that.

Unless you consider Ronald Reagan one of the founders, which considering your sentiment, is quite possible. Either people have the right to consent to their government or they don't. Whether or not there are social programs does not change that. What that quote (from the 1950's) is really saying is, "We'd be better off if people who disagree with me weren't allowed to vote".

There's the snarky answer, and what I suspect is the real answer.

First, systemd and everything associated with is just so kewl and shiny that's it's a privilege to even use any of it, which makes it all the more amazing that they're actually welcoming us to do so, instead of making us fight for a place in line.

Second, X11 goes way back before anyone was really concerned with security. I suspect from a core competence point of view, the X11 coders are far more comfortable and far more engaged with the graphical display code than the input side. I get the impression that a lot of effort was spent in properly cleaning and separating the root-requiring functionality. I know I've read of KMS and DRI work for years now. It's been a long road, and I believe it may have only been in the past year that the display side has gotten to the point where they could think about going rootless.

I also suspect that the input device part is not their core competence - they'd like events coming in from "elsewhere" and get back to their graphics work. So along comes systemd, saying, "We'll handle the gnarly details of console access and security for you," and X said OK, if only in the spirit of modularity and going back to their graphics work. (Graphics work includes processing the inputs, not just drawing outputs - I think they'd just like the inputs to be clean and handed to them.)

Some rich people drive crappy old Honda Civics.

Citation?