If /. was put in charge or anybody who thinks the way an average /. user does, then all sorts of things will qualify as trolling. All of a sudden difference of opinion qualifies as 'trolling' on a government level and is punishable by jail time. Vast majority may find it wonderful, that opinions of a minority are qualified that way, however everybody is in minority opinion on some things.

Here is my take on it, I have a number of people from well known schools, same number of people from schools that nobody heard from and in some cases people from unknown schools who dropped out and started working for me when I offered them a job. I have a number of people that had no formal higher education at all and a couple of guys that didn't know much about computers before they started here.

AFAIC I care about the attitude, I care that the person can work within a team, that I can work with the person, whether they are eager to learn. This is a starting job for all of the people I hire, very few of them worked in the field before, I do not pay much but that is also part of the equation. The people that do not have student debts do not have the same problem as those with debt, they don't need to try and get a highly paid position right away and so they can afford to work with me, where they are gaining more than enough experience so that eventually they are propelled to better paying jobs.

I will say this: I have about equal number of good coders, whether they had any formal computer science training or not, but I go through many people to find good ones but it does not take much time at all to know who is who. Just in the last 2 months I interviewed about 15 people, 3 of them ended up with me, 2 are going to be excellent developers. Out of the 15, 4 decided it was too hard in the first 3 days. 2 decided that they made a mistake and shouldn't be in this field right during our meeting.

In the interview all I do is I show them what we do, how we work, ask them what they like to do and explain the structure here: you are studying here before I put you on an actual paying project. I teach you what you need to know and while I am teaching you, I am not paying you anything. Normally takes 2-3 weeks for a developer to go through training and start being productive. This is my way of doing stuff, I do not care where you studied, what you think you know, I only care to figure out if you are OK for the team and if you can learn and have the right attitude for this company.

They do do that already. Their prices are what they are and not 2 times what they are now for a reason as well. Of-course actually building Apple hardware products is a costly endeavour, nobody else can really afford to do what they do to achieve the save level of user friendliness and beauty. I don't buy Apple products (not because of price, I just do not like their software), but plenty of people do. Their products are priced to satisfy demand of a specific set of population, however if their revenues did not cover their costs and did not make them good profits, they would have lowered prices by lowering the cost of production and very likely by sacrificing build quality to gain market share, however their customers are used to certain degree of quality and shine, and so Apple spends more than anybody else delivering just that.

If Apple could actually cut their production costs in half, while delivering the same quality of product, their prices would go down to increase market share, but they are in business of providing top quality systems (even with some problems, like the new phones that probably bend much easier than some others).

If you in fact believe that you could provide similar quality of the product as Apple for half the price, you yourself could do what you are talking about, but apparently it is not as easy as you say, since other companies do not provide the same, shall we say 'shine' in their hardware so far, while being able to charge much less than Apple.

- encryption does not place users beyond the law, Comey likes to have FBI that is beyond the law.

Ha, the New Deal was part of the socialist infection that lead to the financial crisis that hit USA in the 1970s.

The Federal reserve bank of America, the IRS, New Deal, minimum wage and other price controls, business regulations, inflation created by the Fed and the Treasury is what destroyed actual productive economy in the USA and to look at all of that and conclude that in the 1970s what you observed (default on the dollar, stagflation) was not a result of the diseased socialist economic and monetary policy but to decide that whatever happened in the seventies was the reason for the further failures is to come to a completely wrong conclusion and to misdiagnose the problem.

When you misdiagnose the problem you then tend to misunderstand the necessary solutions, which is what has been happening for the last 50 years as well (and actually earlier, from about 1930, from the moment that the USA government misdiagnosed the problem that it created and by trying to fix it in the completely wrong way caused the Great Depression).

The complete misunderstanding of the underlying economic principles by those, who are supposedly our economic guides, the so called 'mainstream economists', their failure to be impartial on these matters and actually care about the principles of the economic systems, but instead injecting feelings and political and their misguided version of the social agenda into all of it is what allows the politicians to justify completely wrong moves that they sell as 'solutions' to the general population, most of which doesn't know or understand anything about economics, in no small part because of these so called 'experts' who exist solely to muddy the waters and steer people away from understanding for the benefit of those in power.

Wrong, if Apple figures out how to make their products at 1/2 the cost, their prices will come down in order to gain new market share and make more money by selling more of their product while taking sales away from the competition.

Yep, there are no natural monopolies, and where a company becomes a monopoly without any government intervention it does not mean it is a bad thing, it means the company is providing the best product at the lowest price at the time and place.

It is like Edison said: We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.

The free market (free from government abuse and protected with laws that are applied equally to all market participants without discrimination) capitalist (private property ownership and operation) economy works to lower prices and to increase choices due to competitive pressures and desire to get more market share, all of which is what 'trickle down' economics actually is.

The 'trickle down' effect does not come from money that is spent on leisure and consumption, the trickle down effect is the effect of the wealth being invested productively to lower prices and increase choices. This is something that many choose to ridicule, yet they benefit from this effect every time they get any benefit from the modern economy, which is all created from money that was made from businesses creating things cheaper and more efficiently (and when I say all was created by businesses, that is exactly what I mean, even the taxes that are stolen from the productive people are used by government in very few occasions to run yet another ponzi scam of a program, that money first had to be made by a business to be stolen by the government).

That law is unconstitutional and cannot stand in an honest, law abiding society, but the fact is that your society is not an honest, law abiding one. The Constitution is thrown out of the window, the socialist movement destroyed the principles that the system was built upon, the principles of equal treatment under law. It did so by promising 'fair' outcomes. The mob believes it's unfair somehow that a millionaire factory owner has more than some window washer, so we must make it 'fair', but that means we are going to destroy the law, the equal treatment of people under law and once we do that the law doesn't matter and you have no private property rights and there is no free market capitalism without equal protection against government abuse under the law.

What are people? People are economic actors, as to 'feeling superior' or 'rationalising lower standing' - nobody has to do any of it, but people are a series of economic actors, nothing more unless you are specifically connected to them in some way. What do you know about a guy that swept floors at a factory that made the screws that were used to make tools that were used to build a tractor that at some point was used by a farmer while picking apples that went into a pie you bought?

An unknown to you economic actor that was paid what his labour was worth paying for at the moment in that place. You don't know him or his parents or his children or his pet gold fish.

You can feel superior to him if you like or you can feel inferior to somebody that commands a large company that you end up buying your computer from or some other stuff if you want, nobody forces you to feel one way or another.

By the way, out of all the Edison related stuff that the comic strip is complaining about, the fact that he married a 16 year old should be taken in context. He was 24 at the time and girls were marrying at 16, there was nothing special or 'criminal' about it at all, people still marry at 16 even today.

Flight attendant job was never to serve you drinks, their first responsibility is the security in the cabin. Of-course given that it is strange that the vast majority of the attendants are women and what looks like gay males (not that being gay prevents a male from being able to control the passengers, just saying).

I normally have 4-6 500 Euro bills on me at any time and maybe 2 200 bills and a few hundreds and some change. It is much more convenient than having stacks of twenties or tens. I move from place to place, it's business related and I don't want to be in need of quick cash and have to run around searching for an ATM.

The criminals will not have a problem with any of this, this will only inconvenience the rest of the people, just like everything that governments do.

- yeah, he'll totally turn us into a wreck.

I don't see what a compiler's ability to do with other formats/languages has to do with a different format/language.

Ordinarily, it doesn't. But the thing is, there are two things called GCC: the GNU C compiler (which handles C) and the GNU Compiler Collection (a set of compilers which, though they share the same backend, are still separate entities).

GCC, the C compiler, cannot handle Fortran. GCC, the set of compilers, can handle it via g77 (the old compiler) or gfortran (the new one), but the C compiler can't. This is considered the traditional way of doing things.

What makes C++ different from many languages is that its maintainers insist that C++ compilers must be able to handle C code. It's not enough to have a different compiler in the set, the way GCC does: it must be doable with the C++ compiler itself, in the same application. And so g++ can do it too, because that's what the standard requires of it.

That's what makes the difference. Ordinarily, as you say, a compiler's ability to handle multiple languages shouldn't affect any of the languages in it. But C++ was defined in a way that not only makes those effects possible: it makes them mandatory.

Kickstarter is already providing the tools to connect innovators with investors, datamining investor information in order to target them personally like that may backfire and rather than entice them to invest more it may turn them against the very concept. Everybody needs a some degree of control over their actions and choices, stop pushing people, they are not your puppets.