My wife's laptop got hosed when the automatic update started and the battery was very low. I do hope they learn to check on things like unplugged in laptops. Sometimes you need to get some information from a laptop and don't have an outlet handy. I think she might finally join the penguin side after that annoyance.

What are the equivalent costs of highway building and maintenance?

There's no such thing as complete freedom of expression.
We naturally put limits on expression to prevent assholes from taking advantage and causing us all grief.

Some people see DRM as part of the assholes who would cause us grief.

There's nothing bullshit about the border search exception.
It was defacto law before it was dejure law and it was done before The United States were United.

Yes, 100 miles from the border is nonsense, but the basic principle existed long before the Constitution did.

No, I can't. I started out and I sucked. I got better eventually through experience. In order for it to be truly bimodal, people have to start in either camp A or camp B and end in the same camp they started in. Because if you transition from one to another over time, any point in time will capture a group of people in between the modes. Now, you can argue that people don't spend much time in between those modes but you haven't presented any evidence for that. What's more likely is you have geocities coders on one tail and John Carmack/Linus Torvolds on the other tail. And in between are people like the presenter and I. And since I'm not instantaneously going from bad to good, the reality of the situation is most likely some degree of a normal curve filled with people trying to get better at programming or even just getting better though spending lots of time doing it and learning a little along the way.

For all your attacks on the presenter, your argument of a bi-modal distribution sounds more flawed to me. I would love to see your study and hear your argument.

To be fair, you can spend a great deal of time talking about something and make progress on the issue without solving it.

For example the current metrics are abysmal so it's worth explaining why they're abysmal. I just was able to delete several thousand lines of JavaScript from one of my projects after a data model change (through code reuse and generalization) -- yet I increased functionality. My manager was confused and thought it was a bad thing to get rid of code like that ... it was absolute dopamine bliss to me while he felt like our production was being put in reverse. KLOC is a terrible metric. But yet we still need to waste a lot of breath explaining why it's a terrible metric.

Another reason to waste a lot of time talking about a problem without reaching an answer is to elaborate on what the known unknowns are and speculate about the unknown unknowns. Indeed, the point of this article seemed to be to advertise the existence of unknown unknowns to "recruiters, venture capitalists, and others who are actually determining who gets brought into the community."

Perhaps ... but that would imply that one does not transition over time from one hump to the next or if they do, it's like flipping a light switch. When I read this I assumed that he was talking only about people who know how to program and not "the average person mixed in with programmers."

But you just said there's no way to measure this ... how could he have collected data? What data set could have satiated us? The answer is quite obvious and such collection would have been a larger fool's errand than the original article's content.

Please don't try and conflate Islamic fundamentalism and the Nazis.
Untermenschen does not mean "the unbelievers" it means "the under-man"

The American who first used the term in the context of inherent inferiority, which is how we understand it, said thusly:
"This term is The Under-Man the man who measures under the standards of capacity and adaptability imposed by the social order in which he lives."

That same year, he also published The New World of Islam where, if you glance at the chapter titles, you'll notice he calls Muslims "Bolsheviks."
Unsurprisingly, this is the same label that the Nazis attached to the Jews in an effort to slur them.
(And no, Bolshevism and communism are not the same as national socialism. The Nazis weren't commies.)

What exactly is it that you think Government does?

Because collective security is the most basic function of Government.

As an example, if you insult the King of Thailand, the only thing keeping the Thai government from crossing borders to take you in for prosecution is your government.
Or do you think you can defend yourself against the resources of a nation state?

I pay close to $250/month for power (it just went up 47% in CT in the last 6 months for the same power usage). So if the 10kWh PowerWall costs me $3,500 (+inverter, grid tie-in, installation), then it pays for itself in ~18 months. That's a pretty easy sell from my perspective.

Adding $10k of solar panels to the system to go completely off the grid, just adds to that value, and to the resale price of my house if I choose to sell it within the next 10-20 years. As panel efficiencies improve, I can upgrade those panels, or add an additional PowerWall, and increase that independence.

Totally worth it, in my opinion.

Besides, many (most?) communities are now putting a quota on the number of solar installations, because of the pressure they put on the common utility/grid system (yes, they do -add- more pressure to the grid, contrary to common thought, especially at nighttime and when there is heavy, localized cloudcover), so if you wait, you may find yourself the only one on the block who can't add solar because it's prohibited. A PowerWall tied to the common utility can relieve some of that pressure, and increase the independence from a constant feed from the power company.