Maybe if I was a Nobel Laureate material... I'd agree with you.

However, Feynman is not a suitable teacher neither for I, nor for that 99.9% segment of Humanity we call "mere ordinary mortals".

My wife, bless her, is quite capable of digesting and following Feynman's books, but then her skills are "world class" (to me "goddess-like").

By far most maths / physics university graduates, let's be honest now, get a "Whee! Wow! That was exciting!" feeling when reading Feynman...

Very very few can then move on to doing anything useful with what they should have just learnt.

Learning to do stuff with that material takes either genius, or days and days of hard page after page after page of slogging through the math. (Often both)

Yup, a brilliant guy I'm sure, but not the guy I want teaching me. At the end of a course, (call me greedy), _I_ want to know how to do everything in the course, not merely have a warm fuzzy WEE-WOW feeling that something exciting just went by that I can't quite reproduce.

Give me Richard Hamming's books instead of Feynman's any day. Ok, they won't make you go "WEEE WOW!!!", but on the other hand you will have an excellent understanding of the material AND be able to reproduce and USE any result in them yourself.

char*_="Hello world.\n";

That is it - the whole program.

echo 'char*_="Hello world.\n"; ' > a.c
$ gcc a.c
/usr/lib/gcc/i486-linux-gnu/4.4.1/../../../../lib/crt1.o: In function `_start':
/build/buildd/eglibc-2.10.1/csu/../sysdeps/i386/elf/start.S:115: undefined reference to `main'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

Doesn't say "Hello" to me!

I'd keep chanting about how marvelously solid the America dollar is (must be).... while buying hard assets / resources from whoever would sell them to me in exchange for Junk America bonds.

But wait, that's exactly what China is doing.

End game?

Guess who ends up owning the hard assets... and guess who ends up owning "Intellectual Property".

I know which I'd rather own.

Our (NZ) Mad Scientists are quite Busy in rather fascinating ways thanks.

Oh! But you should see it go *SPLAT*!

Feed me a pop up or pop under and I instantly block.

If the page takes ages to load because it's waiting for the ad server. I block.

Feed me more content than crap, and I disable ad block on that site.

ps: I usually use "no script" because 99.99% of what I care about doesn't need JavaScript and 99.99% of what pisses me off does!

And now you have created a world view where being tough and succeeding is all that matters.... small wonder that the 2nd generation is a trifle stressed even in the midst of seeming plenty. I dare say if conditions get that tough again they'd either "harden the fuck you", or die... or fall back on alcoholism and the "gin and valium" of your forgotten peers.

Therefore the only things I put on facebook are what is already public knowledge.

As such it's useful.

The private stuff... that's what disposable email accounts are for.

One is emacs and has 43 open buffers, only about half are file edits, the rest are some sort of in emacs application.

The other is terminator a split screen tabbed xterm which currently has a rather low number of 7 tabs open unusally (for me) only one of which has been split 3 ways. (I have a wide screen monitor)

The third is firefox with 3 tabs (unusually low for me) with split browser addon.

The forth is gkrellm with 7 monitoring plugins running.

• Be exact about versions of the software and related software (distro, kernel etc.)
• Produce the smallest possible test case. NEVER say "it just happens when I do something with this 10000 line document I can't let your see."
• Be responsive in answering queries in the issue tracker for that issue. Try out patches and workarounds suggested and give feedback.
• Report the problem to the correct forum. Understand which is the correct forum. Understand the differences between distros, distro versions and original developer. Try work out if it's a packaging problem or a software problem.
• Try the latest version from the original developer. If that fixes the problem, reports this in the distros issue tracker as well.
• RTFM.
• Report bugs in The Fine Manual, preferably along with a suggested rewording.
• Test and Report bugs in Beta releases. Critical bugs reported then will get fixed before release. Bugs reported after release will probably only get fixed in the next release.

Just don't piss her off Mr Bobbit.