Were any of those plants making key inputs for yours? If they were, and it wasn't practical to consolidate that function, then closing them down would have crippled you. Which individual plants make money is one thing, but where there's internal transfer of items between units of the business, the value attached to those items is fairly nominal in practice; it's the overall business that really makes the profit or the loss.

Or maybe they're just incompetent fucks. That could be true too. Hard to say without the full facts, but the fact that bankruptcy hit is strongly indicative.

Take at least one OO language (Java's fussy and bureaucratic, but its a pretty good example of the breed and is likely to be useful after you get your masters), at least one functional language (probably Haskell these days), at least one declarative language (Prolog or SQL), and don't just learn programming languages. You also need to learn about data, about data structures, about algorithms and their analysis, about parsing and compilation, and about concurrency; these are all independent of any programming language.

But computing is well served by not just learning about computing. If you have time, learn about math, stats and logic too, and learn how to communicate your ideas effectively; you'll never get far if you can't communicate with other people well.

Huh. I use it quite a bit when implementing an API. (You hardly need to use public at all inside interfaces.)

I'd guess something like:
        if(target->ThreatRating = ThreatRating::Trrist) { target->Kill(); }

Let that be a lesson to you: Trrist must evaluate to 0, for humanity's sake!

The problem is that it requires a true breakthrough, and there's no way to predict when that will happen. It also doesn't help that we don't really know what intelligence really is; all we've got is lots of things it isn't. I suspect that when someone cracks it, there'll be lots of people going "Is that all?! Anyone could have got that." and they'd be right, except that nobody did and it involves something both trivial and non-obvious. It might also require a lot of parallel processing, which we're still learning how to do well.

As we don't have any handy breakthroughs right now, we should instead study how brains really work and how to make computers do useful things (including stuff like "understanding" speech, "understanding" written natural language, drive cars safely, etc.) Those might or might not make the breakthrough easier, but they'll have other benefits along the way so they're still right to do.

And your grandmother's business too, assuming you want actually communicate that cooking recipe to her.

When their glaciers start growing. Duh!

That's what you might call a market incentive. Capitalism sees national security and arms export controls as damage and routes around it.

Don't worry about that! They had their own classes of blunders instead. (Every programming language has a characteristic set of problems that come up, and a set of recommended programming practices that avoid those blunders.)

If your compiler is doing that, you should choose a different compiler. Summoning elder gods just because signed arithmetic might wrap around is not a good cost/benefit tradeoff!

Better than a Lunar one I suppose.

I always preferred the phrasing "up to 1000 times faster, or more!" Totally devoid of meaning.

If a lot of browsers are getting it wrong in what they send, the incentive to support it is not strong. Guess what? A quick test with Chrome, Safari and Firefox indicate that they all get it wrong by default. Safari doesn't provide an option to change it that I can find; the other two pick the wrong default for me, instead of using the system language settings (which are correct and available for software to read) even if those are imperfect for the task. (I'm on the wrong platform for testing IE and I don't have Opera.)

Why would you make your website use a feature that no browser gets close to right by default?

He also didn't specify that the software couldn't do that. The test isn't about knowledge, it's about intelligence. Computers are starting to get good at the more knowledge-y side of things, but intelligence has got to be more about establishment of shared context, dealing with weird semi-out-of-the-blue digressions, and so on. Language fluency is someone else's research project.

Snowden's principal value to the Russians is for propaganda purposes, and this was the case all along. Making one's opponents look very bad is quite thoroughly valuable from a diplomacy perspective, since it persuades third parties (e.g., most of Latin America and Africa) to be more receptive to your message.