Schedule D is straightforward in most cases. If you make a thousand stock trades, you can merely mark the totals in a line in your Schedule D and write "various." Some brokers, like Etrade, will even give you the totals, in case you're not good at math (and even if you are good, who wants to add up a bunch of stock trades).

Of course, if you got stock options from three different companies, Schedule D is a bit trickier, but still, not really.

Have you tried that? Just wondering.

That is not a skill set most IT departments have.

I don't disagree with your point here, it seems to me it actually is safer to write "Widget w = new Widget()," and certainly redundancy can give you an extra check.

As the next step after that though, I ask myself, "how often does this prevent me from making a bug?" To be honest I can't remember a single time I accidentally wrote something like "Wadget w = new Widget()." So while it does make you safer, I think in practice there's not much of a difference.

btw, it's even if you aren't setting your pointers to null after freeing them, dangling pointers aren't a common problem. Someone on Slashdot once said that it's the programmatic equivalent of tripping and falling on your face. Sure, sometimes it happens, but it's rare. So it's not like you have to be a super-programmer or something, you just have to be average.

So far I haven't had a problem with this either in ancient code, or third party code. If it's ancient enough, then it's probably been debugged. As far as third party code, if it hasn't been debugged, then that's a strong warning not to use it.

As for third party binaries.....those tend to be pain in no matter what language you use, unless they have extremely good documentation, which is rare. Even when using the Java standard libraries (which are) well documented, it's occasionally convenient to step into the source so you can figure out what is actually going on when the docs are confusing.

You might add...this is the hardest problem of AI. The problem of learning, the problem of making good decisions.....I can see a pathway forward on that. But will....how do you give it that? I see nothing.

You have the Douglas Adams idea, which is to give it a pleasure wire that gets pressed when it does something 'right,' and its goal is to maximize pleasure. In a way, we humans have that, we are driven to have sex, by the survival urge....but these are just urges. We can choose to follow them, or choose not to follow them. And that choice is where free will lies, and it's hard to understand how to give it to a machine.

The secret ballot has two purposes. one is it maintains your privacy and that's good for you. The other is it prevents selling your vote and that's good for the public. If I have a bitcoin ballot then I can easily transfer that coin to someone else to vote. thus I can sell my vote and the buyer knows for sure how it will be cast.

the purpose of elections is to convince the public the election was fair. crytpography isn't transparent. worse in some forms of crytography it gains security from centralization of the key control making single point of attack more likely. It's much better when the public can see how the election works.

ok, if you want to modify the definition of the word, then yes, you are right. Good job, congratulations.
btw most people don't define science as "everything a scientist does as his job," but if you want to, go ahead, I have no problem with that.

He's also trying to convince the country (and world) to do something.

Well yes, I don't disagree with you.

Someone pointed out, "science as a tool is often useful. Science as an institution is always problematic."

That's what code review is for. You teach the people you work with to be better programmers. If someone wants to write bad code, there are plenty of ways in every language. If you can't trust your coworkers, language choice is the least of your problems.

Please tell me you aren't also annoyed by the fact that Mann is doing political analysis.

Projection? I absolutely do not deny being lazy.

As for your rant about burden of proof....outside of a courtroom, the burden of proof lies with the person who cares. If no one cares, it won't get done.

ok, you're smarter than me, I guess.
But my code is better than yours.