Well, these three options are too limited. Another group would be people, who can *strongly* but politely get the point through without looking like a socially handicapped imbecile. And another group of people do not point out any flaws, but smack you in the face, give you a wedgie and rip your head off with a chainsaw without even telling you the reason.

These contests are writing about highly efficient programs performance and memory-wise and C/C++ are very adequate for such algorithm competitions. Any inefficient step performance or memory wise will be punished by failing tests and losing points. C/C++ has been one of the classical programming languages always used in algorithm contests. And what the fuck do you mean by "worst languages on the planet". You do not implement performance critical algorithms and data structures in Python or Ruby, this the correct job for C/C++ programming languages.

Not really the best analogy, but give the best empolyees in the company the power to order distant fire and I am sure some additional breakthrough will happen.

Actually, this study does not say anything directly about code quality, because Density = Total Defects Found / Code Size. The problem is with the "Total Defects Found" part. How they are found and how they are reported may differ vastly from one project/company to other. The report sais that the quality of code increases with larger codebases in propertiary projects. In fact, the best you can say is that the metric decreases with larger codebases in propertiary projects. Maybe many of the defects have not been found yet in propertiary projects. Maybe they have less manpower to seek the errors, maybe they just don't care as long anything does not crash. But smaller defects may be in the code. Open source code is more open to "finding the defects", thus possibly obtaining worse "quality" they are talking about in the article. I think this has to be kept in mind when reading the report.

"... decided that it is not a security risk to show passwords on your screen in the latest Alpha release of Fedora 19 ..." Security risks is not something that can be "decided" by somebody. There are always risks and showing the password on plain text is certainly more risky than masking it. Or are there some really awesome benefits for showing them in plain. No. Because noone expects that, so both usability and security suffer.

Just saying that maybe you should reconsider alternative things you could also do. I'm not saying that PhD is a wrong decision, but its a painful one. Research is hard and getting stuff published in respectable places is even harder. Make sure you are ready to spend the best years of your life doing that.

That's nothing. I was once asked to design & implement a space shuttle software in 30 minutes, which I did while undercover in communist Russia stealing their top secret documents. I also had time to prove that N=NP, create a simple script that passed the Turing test and create a machine learning method, that can predict exact date and time when you die with 100% accuracy. Anyway, this free consulting thing is a joke from Dilbert, so I would suggest reading less comics :D

I bet the name of the employee was Wally.

I like my touchscreen phone, but I hate the fingerprints on it. As for my computer, I clean my laptop screen and external monitor once a week to get rid of all that dust and cr*p that gets on it. The idea of going with my sweaty fingers all over it gives me goosebumps. How would I dare to show anything to my boss or co-workers in my computer if the screen is full of s**t?

In this case it is better to be safe than sorry. Monitoring online news comments is totally acceptable to prevent next Breivik cases, I would not classify it as terror or excessive surveillance. If we would consider things like ACTA, PIPA, SOPA etc, then its a different story.

I totally agree with your summary on human nature. It is just true.

I have not used any Excel recently, because they all tend to die when coping with larger datasets. R (www.r-project.org) has always worked better for me. And, o yeah, plotting .. no excel can stand against R plotting capabilities, it is just superior.

While reading your post, it suddenly came to me: "Why the heck am I reading all this!? I won't get much smarter reading slashdot posts and I have a lot of urgent things to do!" Thanks man, I'll continue finishing my schoolwork now! :) +1 Useful, If there was such an option.