Which part of "worldwide" cost did you not understand?
Or do you think the US economy is 100% of the worldwide GDP?

> For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares?"

Then to whom am I replying here? Not that I care. :-)

Except you got the sense wrong. It goes like this:

Tu ne va pas au party? "(You're not going to the party?)"
Si! "(Yes, I _am_ going!)"

But agree with the general gist -- this is a human language
problem, not a programmer specific problem.

Las Vegas has made card-counting a non-factor. Between high deck-count shoes, variant games with unfavorable rules ("Super Fun 21"), and early shuffle thresholds, even a player keeping a perfect count cannot create a significant edge. And the million people who show up to try their hand at it and fail far make up for the cost of the few who can eek something out anyway.

What school system in any country teaches their kids, "Hey, so... we really fucked up a lot back then."

My schools never did as far as I can remember (American here). I doubt that's changed in the 5 years since I've been outta high school.

Meh. Check out the `series' package, by R.C. Waters, for common lisp.
Predates all this by more than 20 years.

I muse my broken-screen ibook as a "mac mini" for the
kids. Plug in a USB hub; keyboard/mouse and a screen.

It works beautifully.

And nothing of value would have been lost?

I second this. I've got both my sons, aged 8 and 12, totally hooked.
The 12 yr old is off writing games where sharks chase divers collecting
pearls, with 3 lives and game over, the whole 9 yards. It's incredibly
easy and intuitive, and teaches a distributed, message passing programming
style.

Enjoy!