When the country is owned and operated by the stupid, does it really help to be smart? If you're full of a room of people where the "leader" says that 1+1 = 3, and everyone else says "yes sir, you are correct". If you're the smart one and say that 1+1 actually equals 2 - in some sense you're actually going to be wrong. We don't respect the thinkers. We elect the charismatic ones with the team mentality that don't have half a brain in their head. Those who get ahead are the ones who actually follow the rules the best - not the ones that buck the trend and show that things aren't necessarily as they seem. I have school aged children, and I can tell you that success in school has to do more with conformity than it does with intelligence. The teachers reward the kids that sit there and take notes (even if they're useless). You get rewarded for doing the problem on the test exactly as the teacher outlined. If you were to solve the problem with some brilliant and novel approach, you might be penalized. If Einstein were alive today, he wouldn't even be recognized. he'd be some bum working on a team just like the rest of us. We've modified the system so that "anyone can do it" - whatever "it" may be - and if you don't follow the procedure, then you're not doing your job well.

Gee I don't know smart guy. But you go with those skillz.

I was once described by one of my friends as "the smartest person he knew, but also the dumbest person he knew". What he meant was that he had seen me do some incredible (by non-computer people) technical things, but sometimes I do things that show a complete lack of common sense. I think that my dual nature is also seen in the group of people we know as programmers. Most of us are pretty smart people - capable of solving complex problems and occasionally doing some things that are just short of brilliant. But - man are we stupid. [Whiney voice]"Oh - but Pro923 - I do this because I love it... I think that everyone should benefit from my work - not just the rich"[/Whiney voice].
Well I've been around the sun 44 times now, and I've been both rich and poor. I'm currently pretty poor and I can tell you that it's a lot more fun and life is more enjoyable when funds are plentiful. Maybe when you're young and you live in your parents' basement, contributing to free software projects is a cool and hip thing to do, and you get some sense of satisfaction out of it. That's great, but you're bringing the whole thing down. Me - well I gotta come up with $2550 again this month just to pay the mortgage - I'm in a town that has a good school system because I have kids that I want the best for. My salary, however, has been stagnant for 5 solid years now and I place the blame on the 3 points that I made in my original post. I had to quit the golf club because the dues were too expensive given that the cost of living keeps going up. So now my summers suck, as I sit in the house and sweat balls instead of being out enjoying some of the finer things in life with my kids. All of you that don't think that you deserve to be paid well for being able to do something that most others can't do - get your heads out of your asses and smell the roses.

Your criticism actually does a fantastic job of outlining one of my main points - which is that software is getting worse and worse all the time. So this collaborative masterpiece can't figure out that when I press return on my keyboard, that it actually means that I want CRLF - and insert the proper HTML tags to perform that dazzling feat? Why should I have to know HTML in order to make a post on a message board? Isn't that a little bit silly? I mean, sure it's a board for programmers, but what if I write device drivers? What if I can't remember which HTML tags do what? Why should I have to?

Oh - and they'll retire when they're 51 and still get paid for the rest of their lives.

Look, I try to explain my though on this and everytime I do, my karma gets blasted. Please try to understand I'm not against anyone here or the principals that you stand for - I'm only stating my opinion. I don't teach my kids to code because I want them to focus on a field that has a future that could lead them to have a lucrative career, be successful, financially secure and someday marry a lovely wife and give me some great grandchildren. Coding is not that path. There are several factors that contribute. 1) We have people that come from other countries that bring with them a lower standard of living. Those people can be qualified for these types of jobs, and will bring the average salary down with them - simply because they'll accept less. 2) Our society is not impressed with those with brains. We are more geared toward giving money to the football team mentality, which basically entails - follow the team, take orders and don't think. These are the people that tend to become successful, as I have witnessed anyway. We also tend to make a joke of the bright. We make movies like "the intern" that shows smart people as not fun, not cool, and not someone you want to be. You want to be more like the idiots - Vaughn and Wilson. Smart people aren't respected, and as a result, society doesn't pay them. We'd rather pay the firefighters, our heroes. 3) Coders aren't the best business people. Although I understand the whole free software movement, and like aspects of it, it's bringing us all down as people who have a chance to be paid well (as I believe we should). My salary is not sufficient for joining the country club, or eating at the high end steak joints. My sales buddies have left me in the dust. When something is made to be free, for indirect reasons that I won't get into - it's quality goes down, and it's value goes down. Companies that make software have to come up with creative ways to even make money doing this anymore. I wish we'd take a cue from the artists and musicians, who constantly speak of the way that their product now being free has destroyed their industry, and led to nothing but crap being produced these days. So... For my kids? They're extremely bright - and could actually learn calculus and perhaps write brilliant code. But I'm going to steer them towards some public sector job - like spraying water on a fire - because that's how they'll become successful. They'll get the good healthcare benefits (that we pay for handsomely) that last for life, they'll work 3 days on and 4 days off, which will give them an opportunity to create some meathead company like landscaping or HVAC - then they won't have to pay taxes anymore either. It's just my opinion - but I really think we've shot ourselves in the foot.

Hehe. Well, lightning strike deaths are directly proportional to both population and "atmospheric energy" or average heat I guess. I hope you stay right, and we could accurately restate the same facts next year (perhaps 16 to 1) - would be fine with me!

Bird flu, swine flu - I was never afraid of these things. My attitude was perhaps a bit on the "I'll believe it when I see it" side of things. But something about Ebola scares me... I saw the "Frontline", where they went to pick people up in remote villages that were exhibiting symptoms (in a hearse no less - for lack of an ambulance). I guess what scared me was - the fact that their population density is so sparse and yet it was still spreading. Also, the sheer terrifying nature in which the victims die - painfully and helplessly (more or less)... I realize that they have customs and rituals (along with a lack of education) that simplify the virus' job of transmitting itself - but I can't help but wonder if our more germ conscious society would be better defended, with the increase in travel and population density.

I would agree... But in practice, every UI that I've used that isn't built from native code works like total crap. I don't understand why, but it just always seems slow, sluggish, and the components just don't work exactly like their native counterparts (like you'd expect them to function). Also, in reality every implementation is a bit different. Finally, we add an entire additional layer of security holes (all of the problems that I fix these days on my friends computers seem to result from unpatched java or adobe products).

This is why I don't waste my time with Python. There will always be a latest and greatest scripting language to come along and replace the previous one. We all know that real code is written in C/C++, but it seems that in the corporate world this has been deemed too difficult to understand. The recent trend that I've noticed is to create your system from piles of scripted modules. Also, part of the complexity in C++ is self inflicted. Years ago, C++ code was like a more flexible C - but with cool objects that you could use to create flexible, inheritable objects. More recently, people have taken the whole template aspect to an extreme and it (in my opinion) has really screwed the whole thing up.

No one _really_ understands it. This has to do with the "duality" of a particle to behave like a wave and a particle at the same time. The famous "dual slit" experiment demonstrates it, and it's more or less the foundation of what quantum physics is based on. Sure, people would answer you and pretend they understand it. But the truth is, no one really does. I saw a scientist on a documentary before admit that - sure everyone understands at some level how magnetism works and what it is. But at the root of it, no one really understands that either - what is physically going on to actually push two magnets away or pull them towards each other.

I thought about this. If someday, we had space vehicles that could travel really fast - call it speed:V. We'd send out the vehicle, travelling toward the destination planet at speed V. We'd also send out a comm vehicle at speed V/2. This comm vehicle would always be mid way between the vehicle and the planet. At some time, the comm vehicle would start transmitting entangled photons in both directions. It would take time for the initial connection to be established, but then theoretically, we'd have photon pairs at both ends - which perhaps we could use for communications... I dunno.

Teleportation of pork fried rice directly into my stomach

LEDs don't really emit much heat. The thing throws off a lot of light, but it's not a nuke.

Very interesting... Thanks!