A lot of occupations require a suspension of empathy. I would be interested to see if "non-psychopaths" have a similar "empathy switch" ability regarding tasks associated with their daily occupation.

Glad to see that contemporary programming is finally taking more influence from early 20th-century Russian poetry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acmeism

When I was a kid, our neighbor had one of these obnoxious lights that would turn on and off constantly all night long. It eventually caught fire and almost burned their house down.

Friedman is the reason I stopped reading the NYT. His articles improve if you add the words "It seems like..." to the beginnig of every sentence, and the words "but if you think about it for 5 seconds, you'll realize that things are much more complicated than that" to the end of every sentence. For example: "It seems like ordinary people can now be micro-entrepreneurs, but if you think about it for 5 seconds, you'll realize that things are much more complicated than that."

If I search my name on Google, I get hits from my firm's website. If I search any other search engine, I am nowhere to be found. Google knows my IP address, so they give me pages about myself. If I search Google on my phone using the mobile network, it's all other people with the same name (my phone is not linked to my Google account). Just because Google serves you up as the first hit for your name, don't assume that everyone else is seeing the same results.

This is a feature of all private property protections. We don't mind having private property because the goal of our society is promoting general welfare, not promoting equality. Sometimes these two goals are compatible, and sometimes they are not.

I have been using DuckDuckGo as my main search engine for about 6 months now. I use google about once every 2 weeks when I really really have to do an image search or DDG just isn't delivering the goods. However, I think the poll was deliberately avoiding any search engines that anyone might actually use.

... what Bennett Haselton thinks about the right against self-incrimination? Convince me why I should read this instead of an article by a competent legal scholar, or why I should bother trying to convince Bennett Haselton of anything.

What little "programming" I've done (bash scripting, HTML, MySQL, a bit of Scheme from SICP for fun) doesn't really count. What I've learned, I've taught myself based on information found online and in books. I know enough to write some useful scripts for my office Linux server, but I leave the real programming to real programmers.

Actually, the belief that the American Revolutionary War was won with guerrilla war tactics is a popularly-held misconception. The colonists did use guerrilla tactics, but they did not start to win battles until they started fighting like the British. See, e.g. http://www.unpopulartruth.com/2009/04/american-revolutionary-war-was-not-won.html

Everyone knows the Death Star plans are not in the main computer.

This 1,000,000% increase in Bitcoin's value has made it soooooo uncool.

Imagine this pitch to an investor: "As a software company, our coders are our biggest asset. That's why we don't let them take a proper lunch, and feed them junk food and caffeine instead. This is directly reflected in the quality of their code."

On the flip side, imagine saying this in a interview: "By the way, I am not even capable of feeding myself, and I have the diet of a feral 6-year-old, so if you don't give me free candy and soda I will be unable to work and I will probably starve to death." If you live on diet coke and candy bars, you're doing it wrong. If you don't know how to go to the grocery store and buy real food, that's not your employer's fault.

How does a UPS make you prepared for a storm outage of hours or days? Do we now consider a media server to be necessary for human survival? The only real use for a UPS in the home is to give you enough time to turn of your computer and prevent data loss from a sudden outage. My plan for electricity in a power outage is to not have any and still be perfectly fine. The list of "necessities" in this poll reads like it was made by a hyperactive 7-year-old. I'll also be fine even though I don't have "chips, soda, snacks, or pizza." I have plenty of water, non-perishable grains and canned food for sustenance, and books and musical instruments for entertainment.

...we'll go to work building robots, and then building better robots. That's already what is happening to the labor force.