May I ask how many of those cards you actually use in practice? Think hard: how often have you built a deck that used that white 1/1 banding creature card (I forgot its name...)? It's not limited to uninteresting common cards, either. When I looked into selling my shoebox full of cards, I got told that players seldom fielded Serra Angels or Thunder Spirits anymore because there were better white creatures -- whereas back when I played, you'd find a few of either or both in nearly every white deck.

Back when I played, there were (give or take) a half dozen cards per extension that players (bar beginners) cared to use in practice. You'd be looking into perhaps two or three hundred cards when building your decks. Even less (though admittedly from a slightly different set) when building a highly themed deck -- those were the only reason you'd keep cards like Goblin Bombs in your shoebox. With a few hundred cards, you've more than enough to build a deck around pretty much every theme you want.

Go dancing, really... As a bonus, you'll socialize and get to hang out with cute chicks, for potentially more interesting physical activity.

And walk there, if possible.

And if email was away as well, we could probably solve our economic crisis.

Keep China's high population, the latter's geographical repartition (mostly to the east), its economy's high growth rates by western standards, and the fact that it's a developing country (still under-equipped) all in mind. Not to mention its government's authoritarianism. In that light, 40 million connected households in two years is not unrealistic imho.

Nah, the brainfuck version is a mere google away: :-)

Given enough time, a monkey banging at random on a keyboard will produce the complete works of Shakespeare. Does that mean that writing is not out of reach of the average monkey?

They're called rare earth metals not so much because they're rare, since they're a bit all over the place, but because they're not concentrated enough to mine efficiently. This makes it highly polluting to extract them.

The US a couple more countries used to extract them, until China came along with no pollution standards, and priced everyone out of the market. Trouble is, you can't "just restart" such a mine. It's a decade long process to do so -- and it's in progress insofar as I've been following, because China decided to keep these strategic minerals for itself so as to keep high tech manufacturing at home.

Gl stands for Glycemic load. Barium is a rare earth metal. No idea how the test works exactly.

Mining rare earth metals is very polluting. In the past two decades or so, most countries stopped producing rare earth metals, because China was producing enough and at a lower cost than they did. (It helped to have no pollution standards.) recently, China decided to keep its rare earth metals for itself to keep electronics manufacturing at home, and sharply cut exports. At the same time, its local population is increasingly vocal about pollution.

And agreed... TFS sucks and the question it concludes on is absolutely ludicrous.

There's a part he gets slightly wrong, though, if he's hounding pussy. In that case, it's much more ideal to immediately offer to have a coffee in a public place, so as to get to know each other. A surprising number of chicks will accept -- likely more, in fact, than after a lengthy conversation.

Consider the number of young readers who live at their parent's place. Or the number of more seasoned readers who might be divorced, or still single, and aren't going as much as they should.

You forgot a few:

- php sucks: 47 million.
- ruby sucks: 6.3 million
- python sucks: 3.7 million
- JavaScript sucks: 26.5 million

And even though they're not Turing complete:

- HTML sucks: 76.2 million
- CSS sucks: 4.3 million

By your metric, JavaScript is the most popular:

http://www.dodgycoder.net/2011/11/stackoverflows-programming-language.html

https://github.com/languages

And therein lies the rub in your argument. Many companies actually are web based. Many others are into mobile. And a shit ton of stuff is embedded or low level enough that .Net isn't even an option.

In my own industry (telco/finance), hardly anyone I'm aware of uses C# or VB.Net. It's almost all C for the low level stuff, Java for the enterprisy stuff, and java/Obj-C for mobile stuff. Oh, and there's some COBOL for legacy stuff, too.

In my brother's (automation/machine tools), it's mostly C for low level stuff, and C++ for higher level stuff.

In my sister's (public administration/archives), it's mostly web-based intranets.

And best I'm aware, games are mostly coded in C++ or (more recently) Obj-C++.

Admittedly, I haven't touched a Windows box in years, and my sample is too small to be noteworthy. In each case, though, note that .Net is nowhere in sight except on desktop apps such as Office. That's arguably where the volume dollars are at -- even though I'd suggest that volume dollars currently are in mobile.

At any rate, if TIOBE's metrics includes new lines of code produced per year, I for one am actually surprised that .Net came out on top last year.

Actually, you're incorrect -- things are not so simple.

Not. But fwiw, at his age, the brightest kids in a the class are frequently looking into what's coming next, as in what's taught a year or two later. On a more personal note, I never felt like an exception in doing so -- the brighter kids in some other classes did as much, and we had the nerdiest of conversations when we shared and discussed our findings. At any rate, at his age, many kids have a rather precise idea of what a vector is, or a matrix for matter. Some actually know enough of the latter to never need to ask about the former.

Also fwiw, and fyi, there actually are people out there who rederive a heck of a lot more than their teachers or peers wish they did. In particular in social sciences. But don't get me started.