A friend of mine was at one time a dot-com millionaire, but he managed to blow it all on hats.

Throughout the dot-com crash, his company website had two or three open positions. The job requisitions were updated regularly - that is, they weren't always the same job. Sometimes he needed engineering, sometimes QA, sometimes sales.

So I dropped him a dime and said "Aren't you busted?" and he replied "Yeah but as long as our creditors think we're still in business, they hope to get repaid. If we weren't hiring they might send the sheriff around to seize our office furniture."

I've been asked this same question in interviews twice:

write a C function to reverse a C-string in place.

I expect most slashbots can supply a correct answer, but a good friend of mine who has many years of experience as a visual basic coder, and who does know some basic C, is unable to answer the question.

When I supplied my answer, the company owner said "I see you have an eye for efficiency". I found that puzzling. Perhaps that's why I got the job.

I've interviewed with google a few times. I won't tell you any of their interview questions, that would be rude, but I will tell you that their HR recruiters - all in-house, not third-party headhunters - all screen new candidates by asking the very same, very basic three computer science questions. Anyone who has done one single algorithms class, and worked a year at a good coding job should be able to answer all three questions, but I expect that many prospective candidates cannot.

What they teach in a Computer Science degree are some of the more common or interesting algorithms, algorithm analysis and design, some operating system theory, say how to write a mouse driver as did my friend at UC Santa Cruz.

So you get out on the workforce looking for your first job, and you see that the craigslist "sof / qa / dba" section wants someone who knows PHP, Javascript and MySQL.

So you buy some books and learn those, maybe you get the job, but eventually you go looking for another job. They want C# .Net, Microsoft Internet Information Server and SQL Server.

I now have a vast number of technical books, and a hard time getting a job because I've never written an Android App.

How about on-the-job training? There were at least at one time some companies that did it. That's how I learned Java, Python, Smalltalk, Postscript and UNIX Sysadmin. But on the job training is very uncommon these days, because employers want "someone who can hit the ground running".

If you paid your new hire to spend his or her first week reading an O'Reilly book, then the next month paired up with a more experienced coder, you'd find that there is no shortage of workers, rather there is a surplus.

marijuana is completely legal and grows wild all over creation?

While Albert Hoffman had yet to discover it in 1776, LSD was perfectly legal from his discovery during world war II until 1965.

Now we find that the conservatives work vigorously to prevent the cultivation of industrial hemp. I'm not talking about The Evil Weed. I'm talking about the plant that you make the kind of paper out of, that you write declarations of independence on. Hemp paper lasts forever, and is a lot cheaper and better for the environment than paper made from wood.

This despite that most other countries actually encourage hemp cultivation. It won't be long at all before the american paper industry collapses, because we won't be able to compete with Canadian hemp paper.

Women should not be permitted to wear pants?

Mentally ill people are burned at the stake as witches?

c'mon, help me out here I'm begging you!

I know lots of people from right-wing families, who got lots of help with their businesses and so are now quite wealthy, quite often through no fault of their own.

I personally feel very strongly that I must succeed on my own merits, so actually for most of my career I've been self-employed. But I never got any real help from anyone other than, if I'm really lucky, the occasional helpful advice.

I learned the very, very hard way that accountants and attorneys are a compete waste of my valuable time. They are willing to give me real bad advice in return for an hour of their fees, but they only give good advice to those with deep pockets.

Consider say Ronald Reagan. He was very poor when he was a child, but quite wealthy as an adult. But then as adult, he did everything in his power, to enable the already rich, to get even richer, while at the same time knocking down the poor people. For example one of his very first acts as president was to deny food stamps to college students.

-eritance.

My mother's father committed suicide when she was just seven, in 1948. While he was quite wealthy, being a suicide his life insurance didn't pay out. At they time her family owned a fine mansion. They had to sell it, give away or throw away most of their possessions, then take what they could pack in a truck to my grandmother's childhood home in iowa until they all could recover.

Hence my mother quite adamantly refusing to give me so much as twenty-five cents per week. To expensive you see.

"So mom. I'd like to buy you a good quality turntable with a USB port, so I can digitize grandpa speelmon's collection of monophonic 78 RPM classical records."

"No mike. I'm just going to throw all those records out."

"WHAT? BUT THOSE WERE GRANDA'S RECORDS!"

"They can't possibly be worth anything to anyone. I'm just going to toss them."

"How about giving them to your sister?"

To have any hope of my mother not getting me arrested or committed to a mental instutition, I have had to learn to just let her destroy my inheritance from all of my granparents, as well as my father.

My mother has lots of money, and splits her will evenly between me and my sister, but that's it: the will quite clearly states we each get half.

OK... so who gets what?

My friend Maria has disowned her two sisters, because the two of them snatched up all of their father's possessions when he died.

Similarly with my friend Charles: "We don't actually want to have the dining room table back. We'd just like to eat off it sometimes."

I don't know but I expect granpa speelmon's 78s would be worth maybe fifty grand to a collector. But the money is not the point; I would never sell them, I would do my best to ensure they stayed in our family through successive generations.

"Mom? Do you know where dad's slide collection is?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"Those were just pictures of Europe," she calmly replied.

"JUST PICTURES OF EUROPE?" actually what upsets me most is that I cannot remember what many of my childhood friends even looked like, but I'm sure dad photographed at least some of them.

"You could have sold dad's photos to a stock photography company for ten grand!" Actually more like a couple hundred grand. Dad could have been a national geographic photographer had he but lifted a finger.

that I cannot meet your demands this very night to provide a citation immeditately, does not mean I am delusional or incorrect.

You might as well have just invoked Godwin's Law.

That's just like appealing to authority, for example "C++ sucks because Richard Stallman prefers C and Java".

Perhaps I should defy you to demonstrate that the Right actually PROMOTES critical thinking instruction in schools.

Give me a fucking break.

My first two years at Caltech, my total tuition, fees, room, board and books were just ten grand for a top private school.

I transferred to UC Santa Cruz where I later graduated. At that time, tuition, room, board, books and fees came to about three grand.

Fast forward today today. I don't know the actual numbers but my understanding is that UCSC now costs somewhere around fifteen grand. That has a lot to do with the fact that the UC Regents can set their own salaries. The California legislature, government, the UC Students, the courts and what have you, have no control over the UC regent salaries.

There is no damn good reason that Caltech actually needs to charge anyone anything to study there. It has more money in its endowment than G-d Almighty Himself.

Despite that, towards the end of my time there, they announced a collossal tuition increase, so as to be more in line with what other top schools like Stanford were charging at the time.

That never made any sense to any of us, but there it is.

So anyway, my McDonalds manager friend really did put himself through school. He did not qualify for need-based financial aid.

Rather, he attended the local community college for his first two years, which was at the time dirt cheap, then later transferred to UC Berkeley.

Actually I have a lucrative C++/Linux contract

The client just tonight said "We want you to own the code".

When I hesitantly asked for permission to do some things that upstream might find offensive, he told me to go to town.

I expect the reason I've been homeless is that I quite prominently link Living with Schizoaffective Disorder and My Deepest Fear quite prominently at the top of every page of my site - including my seven page resume.

Word seems to have also gotten around that I have very high ethical standards, and so regard my half-dozen or so protest resignation letters as among my very finest written works. One of them is online somewhere but I don't recall the link.

It is true that I am unlikely to figure out how many times I have been in mental hospitals. I really am that crazy at times. However I have only just once been in one for more than a few days at a time. I got three extra months for spending twenty solid minutes quite lucidly explaining to a Court Commissioner who was quite clearly out of her depth when attempting to determine whether the mentally ill should be held involuntarily, that she was a seething idiot.

She started shouting at me. Repeatedly. I mean she totally blew her stack. She then locked me up in Western State Hospital in Lakewood Washington. They wouldn't let me have my Macbook Pro there, so I continued the development of my iOS App by hand, on paper, with a pencil.

I'm old enough to know that there was a time that that was the only way you COULD write software, as keypunch machines and trained keypunch operators were such scarce and expensive resources.

Quite commonly social workers and case managers try to force me onto the disability check, or into government subsidized housing. Always I refuse; despite being mentally ill, I am in reality not in any way disabled.

Look man: half the reason I'm a coder, is that I can still write good coder while I am floridly psychotic! That is G-d's Gospel Truth. The NAZIs used to hold Panzer manuevers in the parking lot of my old office. I'd just shut the blinds, turn out the lights, tell myself I was hallucinating, then continue with my code.

YOUR.
MOVE.

Sigh.

Kids these days...

It was several years ago that I read this in the news. I don't recall where I read it, but it was in a dead-tree newspaper.

Given that there is opposition to teaching evolution in some states, and that some state legislature tried to pass a law that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter be exactly equal to three, how is it that you assert that the opposition to critical thinking on the part of the right wing is just my imagination?

I should have mentioned that my father is also at fault, but only in his own way.

Were I to have ever asked him for an allowance, he would have just said "Go ask your mother".

Now in many ways he was a wonderful father. That's how I got accepted to study astronomy at Caltech.

My father taught me to pound nails the very instant I was strong enough to hold his hammer in two hands. I had to wait a long time before he would trust me with his circular power saw. Now I own HIS father's contractor's table saw, I am very good at carpentry so if coding ever doesn't work out I could do construction.

He did that in much the same way as little girls were taught to type, you know, in case their husband ever abandoned them. :-/

Anyway:

"Dad!!! Dad!!! the ice cream man is coming!! Can I buy an ice cream?"

He would just whip out his wallet and hand me a few dollar bills, without counting them, without ever expecting to be paid back.

That was nice at the time, but to this very day I have a problem with binge-purchasing. It is very difficult for me to keep much cash in my wallet for any length of time.

Really what should have happened, is that THE TWO OF THEM should have agreed on some reasonable allowance, then if I wanted an ice cream, I would be expected to pay for it out of my allowance.

For example, just the other day I saw an ad that said something like "AAPL! Could you turn one thousand dollars into one hundred thousand dollars almost overnight?"

That's known as a "Pump-And-Dump Scheme" Arguably such an advertisement should be illegal, but this is America!

To teach critical thinking, would be for example to teach schoolchildren not to trust advertising.

The right wing quite forcefully opposes such forms of instruction.

Actually that is precisely what the US Federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration is for.

Perhaps money changed hands.

The key words here are "PER UNIT".

I expect you know very well that just about all software costs less than a penny per unit to deliver into the hands of customers.

As I recall, in 2002 the Oxford Semiconductor OXFW911 Firewire/IDE storage bridge chip cost eight bucks apiece, when purchased in quantity. It was a little small than a dime.

For eight bucks, you got a 32-bit ARM7TDMI microprocessor, 64 kB of Flash for your firmware, 1800 bytes (yes, really: BYTES) of RAM, an IDE core for talking to your disk drive, a Firewire link-layer core (for talking the logical 1394A protocol), and a serial UART that was thrown in just for grins.

Now that was in 2002. What would that same chip cost now, if it were designed and manufactured today? Probably about ten cents.

However I expect the logic diagram, the physical design of the chip - that is, the mask pattern that is printed onto the silicon wafer - the verification of the design before manufacturing, a few rounds of bad silicon and design revision, cost tens of millions of dollars.

So in reality, it is quite possible that DARPA, or one of its contractors, could blow a billion dollars on the design of a chip, that when actually cast into silicon was a very small chip. The price of manufacturing just one chip is, for the most part, it's "real estate". That is, the physical area, like one square centimetre.

The wholesale price of the chip is then determined for the most part by how many you make. There are HUGE economies of scale in silicon manufacturing.

You are correct to the extent that you are discussing the proposed Pay It Forward plan, in which tuition is free, but one pays a fixed fraction of one's income for twenty-five years after graduation. One does not have to pay if one does not have income, and one's debt is forgiven after twenty-five years.

But to the best of my knowledge the Pay It Forward plan has yet to actually be implemented anywhere.

Student loans are funded by banks, and guaranteed by either the states or the federal government. The government pays the interest while you are in school, but if you are not enrolled - even if you haven't graduated - you have to start paying, even if you don't have a job.

A while back I calculated that student loans are actually just welfare for the banks. For the government to pay the interest while you are in school, as well as to guarantee the loan, so that the government pays if you default, costs the taxpayer more money than if the government just gave you the money outright, say with the Pell Grant that I received starting in 1982.

However if any legislator were to propose that we eliminate student loans, but then used the money saved to give outright grants, the banks would see to it that that legislator loses the next election.