LISP is not a scripting language.

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My other car is a cdr.

I took a statistics course as an undergraduate and a stochastics course in a graduate EE curriculum. Despite the fact that the undergrad course was taught by a guy with a masters in mathematics, the two courses had NOTHING in common.

I'd advise dumbing the math way down. Present it as formulas to be used and teach students how to plug values from story problems into the formulas. Focus on why and how this is useful instead of on how it works.

ISPs own carrier equipment too, just like your employer does. Should they be entitled to snoop your home banking session?

I am more of a fan of the SITI project: http://telcontar.net/Misc/SITI/

Two aliens are looking down at the earth when one of them remarks, "It appears that the dominant species on this planet has developed space-based weaponry."

"Really?" replies the other, suddenly interested. "So they're an emerging Intelligence, then?"

"Nah, probably not." returns the first, "They have all the weapons pointed at themselves."

Agree. The first sentence is grammatically incorrect and the second is mathematically untrue. ("It is known that there is an infinite number of worlds, but that not every one is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite nuber of inhabited worlds.").

The way this kind of rubbish gets transformed into respected "reasoning" is one of the miracles of human thought.

The bane of our times: a few people (shoplifters in this case) do something bad, and the immediate reaction is to make life harder on everyone else.

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Testing, 0, 1, 2... -- Donald Knuth

You're working on one of the smallest possible incremental changes in your house's electrical usage. What's the point?

The wall warts (AC adapters) scattered about your house almost certainly use and waste more electricity than your PC. The US EPA guesstimated in 2005 that around 200 gigawatts (6% of US total power) goes through these things, and a significant portion of that (30 - 50%) is wasted.

See http://www.buildinggreen.com/auth/article.cfm/2005/3/1/Efficiency-Standards-for-AC-Adapters/ Getting all your wall warts onto centrally controlled power strips would seem like an interesting and money-saving challenge. If anyone has done that, I'd love to hear about it.

Yes, the look and feel is that different. You and I might prefer Ezri Dax, but the vast majority of the public prefers Pamela.

Researchers are finally nailing down what you already know intuitively: people are good at perceiving when others are dumber than they are, but terrible at perceiving when others are better/smarter. Extrapolating from that, I'd posit that most people (present company excluded of course) are also terrible at selecting quotations that are much above their level. If that's true, a list of quotes selected by the masses in the manner of Kindle will likely have little to recommend it on a pure "quality of quotation" basis.

See http://news.yahoo.com/people-arent-smart-enough-democracy-flourish-scientists-185601411.html for a bad summary with an even worse title.

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All notions of cause and effect are merely assertions of a faith in statistics

AutoCAD R14 loads in about 250 milliseconds, in a freaking VM on a Mac.

Anything slower is bloatware.

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#include <universe.h>

Might be related to the skill that makes people good spellers. I know how to spell thousands of words whose meaning I am shaky at best on. And have always wondered whether that makes them part of my "vocabulary" or not.

Have any of these companies contributed their kernel changes back to the community?

Is there any way to redirect this whole thread into /dev/null? We've been through all this so many times before.

Systems theory defines information as data that causes one to change one's mind about something (it's a surprisingly useful definition). So, since no one on this thread is going to change their mind on account of the arguments presented here, the entire thread is information free.

> When has running something like a business been an innate recipe for failure?

When the "something" is a country. The business aspects of a country need to be run like a business. But governments are organized for the collective welfare of the governed, putatively anyway, and the governed don't like being treated like lines on a P&L sheet.

I wish it were as simple as this thread implies. The truth of the matter is that most commercial developers who are paid to worry about maintainability don't understand how to do it much better than their academic counterparts. Managers notice this and put all kinds of process in place to enforce good practice--requirements and design docs that are practically books, compile-time coding standard tests, smoke tests, regression test suites, automated tests and so on and on and on. These do not, however, turn developers into good programmers. They only turn them into safe ones.

Another thing the thread ignores is that 90% of all robust mission-critical code is in error paths. Academics rarely put those in, and great developers count on great code structure to save themselves much of that trouble. Let a few mediocre-but-safe programmers at that great well-structured code though, and the error paths multiply and must be addressed (usually by more mediocre-but-safe programmers). So for large systems, the starting point doesn't matter very much.

See, 2,000 safe programmers can write systems that enable a company that writes mission-critical applications to reach billions in sales, regardless of whether the initial code base was academic or extraordinarily good. Twenty genius programmers cannot do that, as a rule, even if they are 100 times as productive as the worker bees. Managers and executives understand this and go with it. At some point the weight of poor-but-safe code overwhelms the system's ability to grow and evolve, and it's time to start over.

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A hundred buggy lines in the code, a hundred buggy lines.
Fix a line and recompile, a hundred one buggy lines in the code.