Yes. That's why the safety record of airliners has plummeted as computers control more and more of the cockpit and air traffic control towers, why antilock braking systems controlled by computers are universally derided as dangerous, why robotic surgery is outlawed in every civilized country, and why pacemakers were outlawed after a brief, tragic experiment with them ended in the computer putting a virus in the victim's brain and using the host as a primitive version of Skynet.

Or maybe ... just maybe ... the software controlling critical safety systems is written to a different standard of quality than the software controlling fucking Twitter.

Well, the problem with QuickSort is that if you're unlucky with your pivot choice you can get O(n^2) runtime. The problem with MergeSort is that you have to copy the array, which, for n in the millions, could be an issue.

For such a case I would recommend heapsort or introsort (which is just "quicksort unless I'm getting unlucky, then I do heapsort instead").

HeapSort doesn't get enough love :(

Umm ... (+1, Funny) ... I hope?

Neither of those sorting algorithms is particularly good, but random sort (bogosort) is hilariously bad.

Sorry, the thief/embezzler bit came out a lot harsher than I intended. I'm not cynical/bitter. Merry Christmas.

You're right; I don't do much traveling on business. I'm rather glad of that :)

Re thief/embezzler, if the company's aware and okay with what you're doing, I guess it's okay, though I'd rather the company just give me the money than a non-monetary "perk" like that. Per diem sounds like a good way to do it although I don't think that's how my employer does it (not sure, haven't traveled on business with this employer yet).

If you got most of your status through your credit card ... you spent over $500,000 on your credit card and could have gotten $5000-$10,000 in cash back with a 1% card. $5000+ for a lifetime membership in AA's rewards program? Not worth it for me; Southwest is better and cheaper anyway.

You or your employer has almost certainly spent over $40,000 in airline fees for you to get lifetime gold status. Someone who travels as much as you probably would have gotten status (though not lifetime) on multiple airlines without trying.

There's no such thing as Motel 8; you mean either Super 8 or Motel 6. I see no reason why an employee, CEO or otherwise, should not stay in such a motel if it is convenient to the venue and provides enough space to work in the evenings, if that is a concern.

If they don't make you stay in budget motels or take the cheapest flight, it's a courtesy/perk your employer is giving you. Like I said elsewhere in this thread, doing that is a cultural practice that is imo. I'd rather a monetary bonus.

Btw don't knock Motel 6. Last time I stayed there they were as clean as any motel, and they give you free wifi. Not a bad place.

If you're looking for a good non-porn book, "Matched" is good. I haven't finished it yet, but it's been good so far. It's the first pleasure reading I've done in quite a few years. In college, I'd already gotten all my literature credits out of the way through AP and was bitter because I'd just discovered how vapid the field of literary criticism is ("death of the author" my ass), and I just stopped reading books. "Matched" is really good, so far. I think I'm about 1/2 through or so.

Southwest has free checked bags and generally lower prices in any case, so the "free checked bags" argument doesn't seem that useful to me. As for employers paying for business class ... it's just silly to fly business class at all, really. I'd rather fly coach and have 50% of the saved money as a bonus or something. But if you're working in a broken culture where flying business class is something people do, then okay, point taken, as far as the free upgrade with status. Still, you need to fly a LOT to get status ... someone flying 3 or 4 times a year will never get status. And, again, the status thing is there to trick you into making the wrong decision when faced with a cheaper price on another airline. If you want a chance at beating them at their own game, you have to be really, really careful and actually calculate out how much obtaining or retaining status is costing you in lost savings. If you don't, well, "the house always wins" comes to mind.

I've been on 12+ hour international flights in coach, and on 24+ hour train rides in coach ... it's really not that bad. Maybe when I get older it will be. But then most of the people I talk to on the train are older so maybe not lol.

I've looked at the game, and, for someone who doesn't travel maybe 10+ times a year, the only winning move is not to play. I don't take the train like I used to and I've got 15000 Amtrak miles idling. Ultimately I'm going to just take a vacation in one of their roomette's since I have a relative who likes being on a train for the sake of being on a train. Instead of having 15000 Amtrak miles I could have had maybe $100 or a little less cash back from a 1% credit card. It was probably worth having the Amtrak card for all the travel I took while I was a regular customer, but, now that my patterns changed, I have useless miles left over. The house always wins.

It pretty much does; the only exception I can think of is you can't racially/sexually/disability discriminate against people entering your property if it's "open to the general public".

And this isn't relevant to the passive blocking argument anyway: it's unambiguously legal. I wish more places would do it.

Ha ha ha ha ha. The best way to kill the project would be to set up the "organizational structure of Debian". Once you remove from Debian the ftp-masters political intrigues, the bureaucratic red-tape "freeze" phases, the militant feminist lobbying group, and the unnecessary and technically incompetent divergences from upstream (see "Debian openssl"), there's not much "organizational structure" to Debian left.

I have a powerline networking setup, and a home WiFi router, and both of them work just fine and don't interfere with each other.

While I agree you should be able to bring your own snacks inside a theater, I think bringing dangerous live animals with you is crossing a line.

You'd be wrong. The FCC has repeatedly stated that passive shielding is perfectly legal, and, yes, it would block emergency communication. It's your property; why shouldn't you be able to block radio signals from entering or leaving your own property? Unlike active jamming, you're not hurting anyone else's reception.

It might be a good idea to prominently place signs saying "cell phones don't work in here!" to avoid losing a lawsuit if someone dies in your theater because they couldn't dial 911, but that would be a civil not criminal matter anyway.

It's a bad strategy unless you're essentially cooperating with the airline to embezzle money from your employer for yourself in a very inefficient way. I personally would have ethical problems with that. The airlines and other companies have those programs to encourage brand loyalty, so that you'll go with them even when they're not the cheapest. They think the cost of offering these discounts will be made up by stupid or unethical people buying tickets with them even when they're not the best choice. It works; otherwise, they'd cancel the programs.

There's no "long game" with airline perks. Sure, get an account; there's no downside. But, once you have an account, try to get rid of your miles as quickly and efficiently as possible. Don't hold onto them; the airline can and will devalue them eventually if you do that. And don't take a trip on a particular airline to keep your miles from expiring or something unless you really calculate it out: the value of your miles is, if you're following this advice, almost certainly less than the value of the difference in the ticket. We're talking about maybe $150 worth of company credit here if you have 15,000 points on Southwest.

Of course, if you're a frequent business flyer paying $3,000 in extra airline fees on your company credit card so you get to go to Hawaii once a year and eat free peanuts before your flight takes off in a private lounge, well, again, that's called embezzling, and you're a thief. But I guess it might work out for you in that case if your company never does internal audits.

---linuxrocks123

Iraq was not engaged in an invasion of Kuwait or Iran prior to the 2003 invasion; we fought the first Iraq war to push him out of Kuwait, and he stayed out. The Iraq-Iran war was long, long over before the 2003 invasion. Likewise, Iraq last attacked Israel in 1991, not at any time remotely near the 2003 invasion.

I do not have time to write an essay to rebut each and every one of your highly misleading or outright false "points." Your post is bullshit and a good example of Brandolini's Law. Suffice it to say that the primary justification for the Iraq invasion of 2003 was that Iraq, due to its possession of weapons of mass destruction, was a threat to the international community, and Iraq possessed no such weapons. When this was discovered to be the case, supporters shifted to things like Iraq's human rights record and occasionally various random crap like the stuff you brought up.

Depressing view. Not saying you're wrong, of course, just that it would be a social good to solve these problems somehow.

This is a good start toward solving the problem: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/onl...