American football where I grew up was a right of passage, and pretty much mandatory. It helped teach me self confidence, teamwork, and the ability to bash my head into things. Mostly the head bashing, though.

I use that skill almost every day as a computer programmer, and it is an invaluable part of my toolkit. Poorly written business requirements, bash head. Last minute changes, bash head.

I have a degree in EE, and write code daily. You are right about me not writing large programs though. Generally I write small, simple programs, and then reuse components to make larger more complex apps. The people I work with do the same, and it's great to have a well documented, simple libraries to pick and choose from. The skills I see that provide this type of codebase are good organization and communication skills.

As time goes on, and proper development libraries become larger, hopefully there will be less and less unsupportable monolithic slabs of code.

I would think the future, at least the future of computer programming, relies much more on communication skills than rigorous attention to detail. As languages become higher level and more extensible, it is much more important to write code and doc that others can read and understand.

Thanks for the response! Not to sound like a 3 year old, but why? Wouldn't length contraction cancel out the effects of time dilation.

So I understand that more energy means faster moving protons and anti-protons. How does this equivocate to finding, say, the Higgs-Boson more easily?

I understand that particles moving at 99.91% c are going to be observable for a longer period of time due to the Lorentz factor, but is that the sole benefit of this massive energy upgrade? Anyone have recommended reading for me?

What exactly are the police going to do? It's not like the kid is in imminent danger, the perpetrator is not physically there.
If the police don't need to respond instantly, wouldn't it be better for the kid to tell his parents what happened, as opposed to wasting police resources on a non-emergency situation.

If you disable data services, and accidentally click on a data service button, you will be charged $1.99 for the bandwith it took to send you the 'You do not have this service' message.

The problem is that they round up to a minimum of a $1.99, regardless of usage. That's a steep minimum. A comparison would be rounding up 1 second of calltime to 17 minutes (1 sec to 1024 sec).

Also, even if you disable data services on your phone, they charge you $1.99 because it took bandwidth to send you the "You do not have this service" message.

Achievement Unlocked: Hack-worthy Account!

I'm very skeptical about this. Currently, lab developed polymer solar cells have about a 5% energy conversion efficiency. Let's assume that this kid made a solar cell that is twice that efficient, so 10%.

Let's say sun irradiance is 1000 Watts/meter^2, which is also pretty high. And lets say the solar cell is a .1 meter^2. This would make the optimal wattage for his solar cell:

Irradiance * Size of Cell * Efficiency = Wattage
1000 W/m2*.1 m2 *.1 = 10 Watts

Even in superoptimal situations, there is no way his cell can be producing the 18 watts described in the article.

Well, it's harmful because it's divisive and not constructive. Also it tends to rely on ignorance as opposed to logic.

However, I totally believe that any legislation that tries to protect us from "hate" sort of neuters us from a valid human emotion. I am pretty much against any legislation that limits speech to protect people, because in the end it does just the opposite.

I agree. Where the problem comes in though, is defining the boundary between hate speech and ignorant rhetoric. For instance, if I were to say that women should not serve in the military as infantry because they don't have the musculature, is that hate speech?

What if I said women shouldn't be infantry because they are weak and can't handle it?

As a sidenote, I don't believe either of the above statements, I am just trying to prove a point.