Yes, it can be both. He's giving it away for free and asking for voluntary donations. I.e. it will be free and if people donate, he will make a profit.

The last sentence also shows he is concerned about readers misunderstanding this model of free+donations and accidentally paying when they actually wanted it for free. It is a valid concern and it shows his heart is in the right place.

I'm sorry I don't have any good advice but I hope someone else does. This type of initiative is what the world needs.

And here is the truth behind that statement:
http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/06-01-05/

It is unlikely those were his words and the statement has most likely been "been drastically exaggerated beyond anything that he could recognize as his own".

It not the first time I hear religious people (jews and christians) claim he was "one of theirs" using dubious or out of context quotes. I can excuse the historical inaccuracies in your old books but I can't excuse the making up of new ones.

TiddlyWiki and unit tests.

For plain bugs such as "seg fault when doing x" I just write a test exposing the bug. This way, I won't forget about a bug even if I don't touch the program in six months. It will appear again as soon as I run the full test suite.

For more complex bugs such as design flaws, bugs from user interaction etc I keep them in my to do list in a TiddlyWiki.

TiddlyWiki is the perfect documentation/note taking tool for projects with a single developer since the entire wiki is in a single self contained html file. Therefore, it requires no installation of any software (except a browser) and you can just keep it with your sources and commit it to your repository for safe keeping.

I keep all notes related to the project, ideas, design notes, to do lists, bugs etc in it. I prefer it to plain text because it's so much easier to keep it neat and somewhat structured without being a pain to use. The ToDo list is the most important item since I never know if I will continue programming tomorrow or in six months and need to be reminded of what should be done. Bugs end up in the ToDo list since they are things that should be done just like "Redesign the crappy back end". When one item (feature/bug/whatever) gets too long, I move it to a separate tiddler (like RedesignCrappyBackEnd) and just link to it which keeps the main ToDo list clean.

When I'm finished with a bug or feature, I move it from the todo list to a "Done" list. In this way, I can keep a simple log of bugs, features and what's been done recently. This can be very handy if you suddenly remember you had a similar problem before but can't remember what it was or how you solved it.

The main drawback is that you can't/shouldn't use it for projects with 2+ developers since it handles simultaneous edits just as bad or worse than a plain text file.

I think it provides the most bang for the buck being almost as simple as a text file but much more structured. I have tried some more sofisticated tools but always come back to TiddlyWiki because of its plain simplicity.

(Actually, I use the MPTW clone which has better tagging)

Mörner is not one of the serious scientists. I thought I recognized his name and looked him up at wikipedia. One of his previous achievements is winning the "Deceiver of the year" award for supporting dowsing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils-Axel_M%C3%B6rner#Views_on_dowsing

Oh, and his claims about the sea level is not supported by satellite measurements.

Exactly. The whole point of owning shares is to receive a part of the profits (dividends). Stock buy backs is also a way to reward stock owners since it increases the value of the remaining stocks.

The only reason to buy stocks in a non-dividend paying company is if you believe:
1. The company will grow and invest a lot and once their profits have multiplied they will pay huge dividends making up for the lost time.
2. A bigger fool will come along and buy your shares once the price has increased a lot.

This is a sound move of Apple. If they had continued refusing to pay dividends despite HUGE profits, all their investors would have to hope for (2). The question now is of course if the payoff is enough to motivate the share price ($500 per share, $2.65 quarterly, $10 bn buy back etc) but I leave that as an exercise for the reader...

Set a maximum of at most N top priority projects. If someone wants to upgrade project X, another top prio project must be downgraded. That should make people think twice before suggesting a prio upgrade.

I prefer this one:
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2001-10-25/

I wish they would. LaTeX is typically much better at typesetting than your average artist/editor using Word. All real programmer would use LaTeX right?
(No, I haven't RTFA)

Oh, you mean like this site does: http://www.google.com? Yeah, it's time someone took care of those infringing bastards!

I recently looked for scientific articles supporting the claim that fish makes you smarter. It seems the scientific consensus on omega 3/fish oil is inconclusive at best. Here's an example of what I found:

"However, Cochrane reviews of these studies have indicated that most of them are observational studies, that hardly any RCTs have been done and that all studies have led to inconsistent and contradictory results that do not support most of the claims."
http://digitaljournal.com/article/284399

Here's another article with a list of contradictory studies. One of the studies was on alzheimers and showed no effect.
http://www.pcrm.org/search/?cid=2723

I do C++/Python hybrid programming for a living. I do it exactly because it is so easy to rewrite performance/memory sensitive parts in C++.

And no, you will not "rewrite half the project in C/C++". I'd say at most 1/5th. I spend the majority of a regular working week programming in Python. Every now and then when speed becomes an issue, I find the bottlenecks and move them to C++ (if necessary, sometimes numpy is enough). Since I'm probably twice as productive in Python as in C++, about 1/10th of the program is in C++.

Oh, and I do numerically intensive work (for example, monte carlo simulations). Most often the major bottlenecks can not be removed by switching programming language. If it takes forever to calculate stuff on long time series in C++, it hardly matters if it takes an additional 2500 instructions to use the final result in Python.

Python is great for it's intended use.

In other news: Walther sues Bond movie for not using a real gun...

The politicians wanted to "calm down" the markets so things would get back to normal. The loans were not that short (1+ years as far as I remember) because they wanted to "show strong, long term support". Banks have rather long mismatches in their balance sheets (like 30 year house loans but no 30 year deposits) which usually isn't a problem as long as the flow of new loans/deposits is more or less predictable over time. If the government had provided only short loans, the market would not know how long the banks would survive since the gov't could change its mind any day. The government had to provide loans that were long and large enough to make the market believe the banks would survive the crisis.

Also, many banks were in really deep shit. Asking for a large interest could have caused a couple more defaults and thus added to the mess. Yes, it was a donation to the financial industry but the fear of the alternative (a long and deep liquidity crisis) was real. The liquidity crisis was rather short lived though so that actually worked out well. We still have a crisis but not a liquidity crisis. The real crisis is about bad debts all over the world. That has not been resolved yet.

This is based on what I remember from the news and discussions back then so it may require a grain of salt or two. I'm sorry for sounding like a politician/banker. I don't exactly buy all the crap above but I do understand some of the reasoning behind it.

From a very general view, banks manage cash flows. There are in flows and out flows from both loans, deposits and various instruments. There is never a one to one match between the in flows and the out flows and there are gaps in both time and nominal amounts. The banks manage these gaps by keeping a liquidity buffer by borrowing and lending from/to each other. Banks make money by making sure their inflows are greater than their outflows. For example, a very simple way is to lend money with long maturity (high interest) and borrow money with short or no maturity (deposits, low interest).

In a liquidity crisis like the one we had, the inter bank borrowing and lending stops dead because no one knows who's gonna go bust next. So, even if a bank has solid finances with 100 billion of loans maturing next month they may still go bust if a client wants to withdraw 50 bucks and they simply don't have the cash today. That's why the government stepped in, to provide liquidity when no one else dared to (it was one of the official reasons anyway).

This is also why they lent money to foreign banks. They had obligations in dollars and couldn't get dollars any other way. I'm not an expert on this large scale banking stuff but I was quite surprised to see RBS as number 4 on that list.

Quantum theory doesn't have to be wrong for quantum computers to be impossible. We know that quantum effects are only present microscopic and not macroscopic systems (with some few, very particular exceptions like crystals, plasma etc). It is plausible that there are yet unknown consequences of the standard QM model that would prohibit quantum effects in sufficiently complex systems, thus "forbidding" quantum computers without making quantum mechanics wrong. I for one hope there are not.