If customer A consistently gives lower-than-average ratings, scale their reviews upward to that a "3" from them is a "5" from someone else. If they consistently give "5" rating but give a "1" to a particular driver, then pay attention to that deviation.

Same for drivers: if B frequently gives "1" ratings to passengers, then that's a roundabout way of saying that B is a difficult jerk and you can ignore those.

Why is 8GB overkill? I put at least 16 in anything I have control over.

I can't speak to Android, but Apple still supports and issues updates to the three year old iPhone 4S. Microsoft sometimes just walks away from stuff.

The enlightened self interest angle is that I don't want corporations treating H-1Bs like crap, because it enables the companies to get them for cheap, which depresses salaries in my career path. I want companies to have to treat H-1B visa holders well because 1) it's the right thing to do, and 2) so that I'm not competing against guys who'll work for 2/3 my salary for fear of being deported.

Precisely what I was thinking about your woefully inaccurate claim.

Correct, which is why I choose to believe the facts instead of naive misintrepetations off the Internet.

LOL that's precious. Meanwhile, the H-1B employees I know - my personal friends, people I hang out with and trust - describe a legal hellscape that's pretty much exactly indentured servitude. One of them managed to escape a bad situation by hooking up with a major corporation who could expedite the process to have the transfer done within a couple of months. That's two months of walking on eggshells so that they didn't get fired and deported. Another wasn't quite as lucky and had to ship out to the European branch of their new employer so that they can come back to America in a year or so, presuming everything is in order by then.

You're on crack if you think an H-1B isn't a recipe for suckishness. Regardless of what it hypothetically sounds like on paper, the situations I witnessed firsthand were terrible for the workers involved.

Python has a PEP (think RFC) for that. It says:

Use 4 spaces per indentation level. [...] Spaces are the preferred indentation method. Tabs should be used solely to remain consistent with code that is already indented with tabs.

That's the the near-universal style almost everyone used anyway, so it was more of a hypothetical than practical issue anyway.

One of the things I disliked about a data structures class using C was that you had to learn a fair amount of boilerplate and memory management to get up and running. Those are important things, but it's a frustratingly steep learning curve when you're more interested in a structure or an algorithm than you in the language. For example, here's a complete, working linked list in Python:

.class Node(object):
. value = None
. next = None
.
.head = Node(); head.value = 123
.second = Node(); second.value = 456; head.next = second
.tail = Node(); tail.value = 789; second.next = tail
.
.node = head
.while node:
. print node.value
. node = node.next

I don't mind C, but it's way too easy to get distracted by coordinating all the moving parts, so that you lose focus on the problem you're trying to solve.

The ones that FreeBSD de-emphasized due to security concerns?

Yeah, I'm not keen on relying on a proprietary overlay to a proprietary OS. What happens when backward-incompatible service pack X arrives and breaks the overlay, and then you have to decide between learning the defaults or not upgrading? I'm not a fan of such things on general principle: if the OS really wants me to do things a certain way, I try to either adapt to it or not use that OS at all. Continually fighting against the current makes me tired.

I also submitted the story but got scooped. I wrote this:

Our favorite source of resistors, odd batteries, and cell phone accessories is preparing to file for bankruptcy, according to the Wall Street Journal. Millenials won't remember a time when it was a legitimately geeky place to go with lots of new at the time computers on display, tons of electronic kits and DIY gear, and a Free Battery Of The Month club card. Sadly, Radio Shack never found a clear way forward from those roots and swung between emphasizing several categories of small consumer goods.

It's really too bad. Radio Shack was a great place when I was growing up, but floundered about from one market experiment to the next and never found its footing. I really hope I'm wrong and I wish them well, but I can't imagine how they could possible make it through this.