The weather agency should state it as a percent similar to rain forecasts. Example: "There is a 70% estimated probability that snow will reach more than 2 feet deep in City X" kind of thing. It's then understood there's a 30% chance the snow will be a bust.

Unless a sufficient number of people vote for the 3rd party candidates, you are diminishing your selection power. At least voting for the top 2 gives a reasonable chance of making a small difference. (I think such stalemate is called the Nash equilibrium.)

And just because you are a third-party candidate does not mean you cannot be bribed.

In my opinion, those likely to be end users or power users mostly need to know about factoring (redundancy), set theory versus hierarchies; and associations, such as 1-to-many relationships versus many-to-many relationships.

Understanding loops and IF statements is good knowledge perhaps, but end users seem more lacking in practical knowledge about relationships of data objects (information) than they do relevant knowledge of loops and conditionals, and this leads them to poor decisions and confusion when working with developers and analysts.

In other words, focus first on enabling them to work better with IT rather than to potentially be or replace IT. And understanding factoring and relationships is good education for future programmers anyhow, if they go that route.

Roughly half the students will eventually be involved with IT design decisions, but only 1% or so will be developers. Thus, rather than try to improve or increase just that 1%, enable the 50% by making them better able to communicate with IT. It's a larger total benefit to society.

I see Comcast/TW's ads repeatedly, not NetFlix's counter-merger ads. Although granted, it's not a scientific sample.

Democracy doesn't mean we get the government we want, just the government we voted for. The people in congress were elected in free and fair elections.

Technically, perhaps. Effectively, no. Contrast our typical ballot:

[__] Bribed Politician A.
[__] Bribed Politician B.
[__] No-name who has no chance of winning such that you are throwing away your vote.

with a typical dictatorship ballot for representatives:

[__] Dictator-selected Candidate A.
[__] Dictator-selected Candidate B.
[__] Dictator-selected Candidate C.

This difference is relatively minor. The plutocrats are pretty much fulfilling the same role as the dictator(s).

Why doesn't NetFlix or smaller competitors chime in for the opposition? I suspect it's because they hope to merge one day also. Merging into oligopolies is a Get-Out-Of-Competition-For-Free card.

It's why Detroit became fat, dumb, and happy in the 1970's.

I see their pro-merger ads on TV and the web. Why are there no anti-merger ads? The public is only hearing one side.

It would be nice to crowd-fund some ads that describe how we need more competition and more competitors rather than huge bribe-heavy oligopolies. I'd donate $10 or so to such.

Being short is not much use if it doesn't tell you much and/or is misleading. Might as well call it "Do". Better vague than misleading. Or, just use a Windows logo icon with a roll-over if space is your main concern. I still find the case for "Start" very weak when weighing space versus communication success.

It's indeed disgusting. We are largely a plutocracy and few citizens seem to give a fudge. We chastise China, Cuba, N. Korea etc. for not having democracies, but neither do we, making us hypocrites.

(I know, technically we were a "republic", not a "democracy", but they functioned as mostly the same thing for most of our history.)

What's a good example of a "useful" independent study cited in the book?

And some statements were outright false, such as claiming OOP sub-classing reduces code over switch/case statements (as I interpreted Meyer's claims). Although it's arguably language-dependent, my experiments suggest that switch/case statements are about the same amount of code. (C-style code has one of the most awkward switch/case statements out there.)

We've had some long and heated debates over switch/case statements versus sub-classing at the c2.com wiki. My own observation is that the net benefits depend on future change patterns of the code, which can vary widely per domain and project.

You are correct that one can use comments for such, but if it's part of the language, then first, It's always there rather than relying on the good-will of team coders; and second, the parser can use that info to make error messages a bit more useful (typically a message closer to the actual problem block).

The asteroid the dinosaurs spotted was certainly "once in a life-time".

You trying to Start something with me? :-)

Call it "Windows" or "System" or "Services" or "Computer" or "Action". And maybe a Windows icon would have been better than "Start". Make a pop-up roll-over to the icon that says "Windows and User System Services and Options" or the like.

I mean the justification portions. Only a portion of the book is devoted to (alleged) justifications. If you want to pick a specific claim of his, we can go over it in detail. (Some of the criticisms are language-specific.)

The 'why' is often far more important than the 'what'...

That's pretty much the meat of the GOF meltdown: they didn't scientifically justify when to use what pattern (or use none) such that newbies and fad pumpers shoved square patterns into round holes and then smiled like Nobel winners as they ran off to their next gig, leaving you to hold their spaghetti pattern bag.