You could flip that around and say that degrees may not have value beyond what employers believe they have. Right now a degree gets you extra money, on average, compared to someone without a degree. That alone gives a degree value.

No, but the fact that the compiler doesn't warn on the unreachable code that follows is a programming error.

There aren't many fields that use more than 2-3 branches of math. Programming tends to use formal logic, lambda calculus, and graph theory. I never understood why people here think math ends at calculus and statistics.

Ask wolfram alpha.

Every purchase you make on a credit card the merchant pays a portion to the credit card company, generally 1-3%. The interest on balances is actually a small portion of the major cards' profits.

HP being a good example. Their hardware is generally solid, but every piece of software they're associated with is crap. This includes drivers, most firmware, and pure software (QTP is overpriced and broken, their diameter api crashes as often as it works). I suspect that the process for building good hardware is so different from the process for good software that companies have trouble doing both.

DMCA takedowns apply to sites that host user-created content. It does not apply to content that a site creates itself.

In every software company I've worked at the codebase is roughly 5% critical, complex code that makes the company money, 95% boilerplate utility, ui, boring code that everyone tries to find ways to reduce. For that 5% it's important it be GPL-free since there's no way in hell the company will release it, and GPL violations can be expensive. Anything it links against in the other 95% must also be GPL-free. The rest of it can contain whatever free code reduces work for developers. Fixing a bug in boost may help my competitors, sure, but maintaining a fork just so I can jealously guard a little change in a third party library is a shocking amount of work long-term. The money rests in giving back and getting someone else to maintain as much code as you can, other than your core competence.

Not true, young males are higher risk even when learning, for flying or driving. That's why insurance is cheaper once you're over 25 regardless of experience, and for females under 25.

This is about rural Iowa. The main cost for maintenance is probably getting a person to the area where a problem is. They cherry-picked the date to be in the middle of a recession when they could pay peanuts for someone to drive 3 hours to the middle of nowhere to replace a repeater, versus now when they have to pay 9 peanuts.

I would agree, probably some ethernet or ip handling code. Something that has to exist on every device that connects to a network and is run on every single packet. The CRC check on the ethernet frame is a likely candidate. Every router, switch, and networked device is going to run an identical check on every packet before it can even verify that the frame is well-formed. Maximum frame size is around 9kB, and the standard is 1500 bytes. That's a lot of runs on a 10 gb lan.