The most important part of college wasn't what you learned - it was probably nearly obsolete when they were teaching it to you - but learning how to learn.

The fundamental material in a computer science program is math. That is the type of subject which does not go out of style but is instead built upon, layer by layer.

I've never met someone working in a theater making more than minimum wage.

Every projectionist that I've ever met has made more than minimum wage. They are worth paying well (better than the average theater employee, at least) because of the cost of mistakes.

O'bama

I've heard of South African Dutch, but never Kenyan Irish!

I will buy the distance argument if Venus's current temperature is believed to be independent of its current cloud cover, but I don't believe that is the case (Venus is by far the hottest planet in the Solar System). It sounds like Venus is hotter given its cloud cover than would be expected without, which implies that Earth will also get hotter in similar conditions. Maybe not 300C hotter, but even 10C hotter is world-changing.

You will also get more water vapor ( another greenhouse gas ) in the atmosphere, but that will - eventually - be countered somewhat by the albedo effect of the large scale clouds that will form.

I understand the reflective effect of cloud coverage, but isn't that useless if the steady-state temperature is very different from current temperatures? What prevents extreme greenhouse effects from pushing Earth into a Venus-like state?

Ghandi's success wasn't from conscripting insurgents

A man like Gandhi doesn't need conscripts.

I am a frequent traveler and speaker and really do need something you can drop from 6 feet and pour coffee over have it keep working.

I know you're a normal person, but when I read that I imagined a huge fucking guy fumbling his tablet from shoulder-height, getting mad as hell, and throwing his coffee after the poor thing.

My point was sarcastic, I don't know if you missed it (non-native language?) or if you responded in-kind. Plainly, prohibition and licensing are not the same thing. An unlicensed "operator" is prohibited yes, but the cost of licensing is always goint to be lower than the cost of a black-market solution (by its nature; the black market solution is not attractive if it is worse, because of the inherent risk!) Therefore, the net result is more regulatory control when licensing is an option vs. total prohibition.

Ultimately, my point is that (1) comparing licensed driving to the War on Drugs is not valid, because (2) increased license requirements would serve to change the economics of learning how to drive rather than just imposing randomized penalties.

This is a good example of greenwashing.

This doesn't sound anything like greenwashing; greenwashing is a PR move to appear more "eco-friendly". This is simpler to explain as a rational economic decision: There are forms of non-renewable energy that are not harvested only because the energy cost to extract them exceeds the energy value they provide. If the energy costs to extract them can be brought down to near-zero, it is to Shell's economic benefit to extract and sell the heavy crude.

Your argument that the oil should "stay in the ground" is totally unrelated. I do not have an informed opinion in the matter of heavy crudes, but please don't use it as a rebuttal.

Perhaps we need stricter drivers license requirements?

It worked so well for the war on drugs!

Yeah, because prohibition and licensing are the same thing!

I see that it is in C99. But it wasn't when I was learning C in the 1980s.

Well! I'll get off your lawn now. I learned on C99, I did not know that the guarantee was new.

Don't use a language that encourages pointer calculations. If you're working in the kernel or hardware drivers maybe.

That is hardly an argument against sizeof as a language feature. I think we both agree—outside of the first learning experience—developers who are getting tripped up by sizeof should't be using C in the first place; but it is not the fault of the language or a misfeature.

If you think all strings can be defined as const char arrays

Lucky for both of us, that's not what I think. I specifically said "string literal", which is a const array and not a pointer. This is relevant for the sizeof discussion because the operator is evaluating the size of the array (therefore the entire string) and not just evaluating the size of a pointer.

Since (almost) no computer actually stores 1.0

Since almost every computer nowadays implements IEEE floating-point, they can all store 1.0 exactly. From the link:

Any integer with absolute value less than 2^24 can be exactly represented in the single precision format, and any integer with absolute value less than 2^53 can be exactly represented in the double precision format.

it should return the size of a memory pointer on the target machine, since that is what a "string" is in C.

A string literal in C is of type char[N] (where N is the minimum value required to store the whole string, including the null terminator). String literals degrade to pointers quite easily, so yours is a common error. So...
const char direct[] = "string";
const char *const indirect = "string";
sizeof(direct) == 7;
sizeof(indirect) == sizeof(char*); // 4 or 8 on most 32- or 64-bit architectures, respectively

So to allocate a string you have to multiply sizeof with strlen and add 1 for the null terminator?

Since you specifically mentioned strlen, I can tell that you are doing the wrong thing. It is guaranteed that sizeof(char) == 1, so you can skip the sizeof. And then instead of allocating strlen(x)+1, you could use the standard function strdup .

Aside from this particular example, what is your beef with sizeof? Do you know an alternative for compile-time size calculations?