Yet another variations on 'As I Walked Amongst The Fluff of my Navel One Sunny Spring Morning'? Somehow, people who are succesful in business always want to leave a legacy, but unfortunately, all they seem to able to manage is this kind of vanity publications. Most of them seem to tell us that "I struggled in the beginning, but then I got lucky and now I feel I'm better than other people." The difference between the "successful business leader" is not that they somehow possess better abilities; they just got lucky, and they somehow feel entitled to profit. We never hear about the millions of similar, mediocre people who never made it; if we did, we would see the obvious similarities.

My dog would definitely agree with you on that.

However, although the technique is still in its infancy, it does seem very promising; there is already work being done on using 3D printing to produce functioning organs like kidneys and lungs, using living cells instead of plastics. It does not seem unreasonable at all to extrapolate this to include an ever widening range of organs over time - the hardest part will be nerve cells, I expect, not least because the cells can be so incredibly long. I think we may see the first, simple replacement organs in the next decade or so; you could even say we're already seeing the first examples: skin grafts made from a combination of artificial material and the patient's own cells: http://www.technologyreview.co...

It's always sad when these things happen. Personally, I'm not fanatical about this issue, but I hate it when I am dictated what to do and think, and how to work - this was my main reason for getting off Windows ASAP, and then later GNOME.

What makes it so sad is that it used to be fun - I loved playing around with DOS and later Windows, and even enjoyed programming for Windows 3, but I stopped enjoying what I was doing when they got imperialistic. The same thing with GNOME - when they started on 'simplifying' things on the desktop by taking away options and dumbing down the interface (a better way would have been to allow a form of expert mode - those of us with that ambition would be happy with vi and a config file).

And now this? I honestly don't mind, unless it forces me to use other things that I don't want, or gets in the way of what I do for a living. One of the things that annoy me at the moment is the drive towards turning Debian into a laptop/tablet OS, with lots of automatic crap going on as you log on to the desktop: network manager and the whole 'semantic desktop' or whatever it is called. It may make sense if you live your whole life on a portable device with wifi and USB, but I work on servers and I want my desktop PC to be a server with a desktop for convenience; I have no liking for tablety fashion statements.

Ironically, I chose Debian because it tends to be conservative, focused on SW freedom, but it worries me that they've recently looked like they're getting into bed with the GNOME crowd and now also systemd, if I understand things correctly. The fun - not to mention my ability to be productive - is under pressure.

Good joke, of course, but it is worth mentioning that there are legal requirements to electrical engineers in most countries, just like for gas engineers, building engineers, etc - not to mention things like lawyers and medical doctors. This is in contrast with software engineers, for whom there are no formal, legal requirements at all - the difference between the two is of course that a SW engineer's shoddy work can't cause building to explode, burn or collapse, although admittedly there are things out there that can severaly taint your soul.

I think the SW industry's focus on certified skills is at best half-hearted in that most companies don't really care all that much, and with good reason. Some of these certifications are at best a competence in using very specific toolsets - like eg MSCE - whereas others are too wide-ranging; a degree in computer science doesn't actually guarantee that the person is any good in a practical job, and it may sometimes be a hindrance, if it turns out that the need to understand everything in depth gets in the way of actually doing things.

Oh, but that's such an easy mistake to make; have a look at just how many kinds of hammers there are and think again. Yes, anybody can take a cheap hammer and knock in nail, although even that is not as simple to do well. To the untrained eye a hammer is just a lump of iron on a stick, perhaps, but using a simple tool requires much more skill than using a complicated, automatic gadget. Which is why amateur DIYers go and buy electric tools, where the professional will often buy simple, yet surprisingly expensive manual tools.

Despite having written programs for, quite literally, decades, I have yet to produce an app; I can't see the point, really. We already enough of that kind of crap lying around, and we clearly don't need people whose only skill is being able to produce programs. There is far more need for people with skills in bio-medical sciences and -engineering, which is where things are developing at a truly staggering rate.

When business people start talking about how much we need more coding skills, what they really mean is that they want it to be even cheaper, so they can make a larger profit in what is already a slightly stagnant market. Face up to reality - all the great inventions in computing have already been made something like 20 years ago: relational databases, internet, etc. Things like Facebook and Twitter are not innovations, they are just village gossip by other means.

How about:

static int
do_some_work (context_t context,
                            int x,
                            error_t **error)
{
        int rv = 0;
        database_t *db;
        data_t v;

        db = get_db (context, error);

        do some work ...

        if (v = compute_v (context, db, error)){
                more work ...
        }
        else
                return rv;
}

To my eyes, the block structure makes it easier to see what goes on, and the goto is not used. In your example, the goto blends into the surrounding code, making it easy to overlook. Also, I think most people expect the TRUE outcome to be the one actioned upon, which is in fact what your example does as well.

It sounds to me like you have a very remarkable child, whether autistic or not.

I'm not convinced that therapies designed for deeply autistic children are well suited in this case; without knowing too much about the subject, the autism spectrum is very wide ranging, and based mostly on symptoms, and it doesn't seem to be a one-dimensional scale either. I suspect - and this is based purely on extrapolation from my own experiences - that he will most likely benefit from learning about social skills in terms of 'technological understanding these skills, if that makes sense. It is of course very easy for an outsider to make wise about somebody else's problems, so please forgive me if I'm talking complete nonsense - but my guess is that he simply does not feel a strong need for social contact, nor does he have a strong intuition about these things, but because he is very strong in areas that require logical understanding, he will be able to appreciate the logic behind social and moral ideas, and he should be able to accept them in a positive way.

Other people with a similar personality often seem to say things like "Numbers are my friends" etc. If you start from his strong side, you should be able to help him grow towards the things he finds difficult, like social skills, expressing emotions etc. And remember, he is different; what makes you happy is not necessarily what makes him happy. As a parent, your goal should be to equip him for life on his terms, which may be radically different from what you would have chosen.

The phrase 'taking [...]'s name in vain" is a useful way to emphasize that you think somebody is misusing a reference to something. I didn't really need to tell you that, did I? Religion is full of colourful language that most people know, and I don't have a grudge against religion as such, only against those that insist on tweaking the thruth to avoid facing up to reality. And unlike religion, science earns the respect that people show it; science doesn't need to demand respect.

Don't blame the science - this is about taking science's name in vain and claiming something is proven when science has always been very up front about the limitations in what, for want of a better word, is called current knowledge. This is what always happens; people don't understand how science works or how scientists think and communicate. When the scientist says 'To the best of current knowledge, eating eggs is probably bad for you, although we really haven't researched that enough' it translates into 'Science says egg is bad for you'.

I would have hoped we, as engineers, or at least as individuals interested in science, would have a clearer understanding of this - it lies at the very heart of science. Unlike religion, science is not about absolute truth - it is all about improving accuracy by means of the scientific method. If you want certainty, go to your church/synagogue/mosque/temple/... - if you want something that is likely to work, go to science.

Slahdotted, were you?

Or perhaps not - poor they may be, but idiots? Take a critical look at what we, in the capitalistic part of the world have to offer; is it really all that great? Yeah, the prospect of getting rich seems attractive, but the abysmal inequality, the broken promises of the not-really-democracy, the hollowness of the freedoms etc - I think people in Cuba can see those problems clearly, and I'm not convinced they will want all of that.

Another thing is the question of who is going to eat who - just look at China and India. Both are developing nations, with well educated populations, and both are exploding onto the stage. Perhaps Cuba will do the same, to a lesser degree, so who is going to be eaten? The US, in particular, tends to believe that everybody else will bow to their power; but we should remember that the US also exploded onto the scene in similar circumstances only about a century ago, when they were in essence a developing nation. Back then, American culture became the hottest thing - maybe now we are going to see Chinese, Indian, Cuban etc as the hottest, new thing around?

One of the many, big, unanswered questions concerning the origin of the universe is - where did the energy come from? Conservation of energy - the assumption that energy cannot be either destroyed or created - is a fundamental axiom in physics, which goes against the idea that there was a point in time before which the universe didn't exist, but after, it did. Unless, of course, one can conceive of a negative energy of equal size having been created at that same moment.

A naive consideration would say that if a mass, M, is created, then there must have an 'anti-mass', -M, as well; using Newton's equations, we would expect M and -M to repulse each other, while M would attract M and -M would attract -M (yes, doesn't make sense at stated, but follow my thought here, OK?) And, if one were to ramble on along those lines anyway, it seems tempting to look at the equations for how electric charges interact and think of electric charge as a kind of imaginary (as in complex numbers) mass. No doubt better people than I have already spotted this and worked out why it doesn't make sense, but I haven't seen their work yet.

Yes, I didn't quite believe it either, years ago, but then I tried to actually grow cannabis myself "at an undisclosed location". I bought something like 10 - 20 seeds online for what would be about $20, all of which grew into large, nay huge, plants, about 3.5 meters tall. I never weighed them, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to think that there were more than 20 kg of smokeable pot there, very potent too. So, not hash, but not far from $1 per kg of what I would have called top notch, had I been able to pronouce that at the time. In the end I threw most of it out, as it was taking over too much of my life.

So, if we factor in the way hash is produced and where (in the Middle East, mostly), perhaps the real number should be around $5 per kg; produced industrially and legally in Europe or America, I'm sure we could get the price down to that level or lower. Whatever - the point here is that there is an absolutely astonishingly obscene markup on illegal drugs. Money that not only bleeds the consumer, but also doesn't produce any tax revenue; and on top of that, much of it goes directly into financing terrorism, if one is to believe official sources (it certainly sounds plausible enough).

What? You actually know what you're talking about, as opposed to somebody that I'm too modest to mention :-)

About telecommuting - don't you think we might go back to modus operandi somewhat similar to what we had centureis ago, where things like big workplaces like we know today didn't really exist, but where skilled crafts-men would ply their trade to a number of customers where needed? A sort of extended telecommuting, if you will.

As for decentralised production, maybe large volumes would be less needed? I mean, if we live in a small community of 1000 people, how many new cars would have to be produced to satisfy the needs of that community? I may only be speculating wildly, but I think it likely that if major parts of our large-scale infrastructure disappears, this will be accompanied by a cultural change away from comsumerism, and society will no longer produce and throw away at the same, staggering pace. I mean, take a car, or a mobile - how much of the need to buy a new one and throw away the old one is simply the result of unwillingness on the side of the manufaturer to make their products upgradeable? Wouldn't it be perfectly doable to design a line of cars or mobile phones that could be upgraded in small steps? I think so - it ought to be possible to make a car that could be modified in small steps all the way from a cheap, basic model with a .7 liter engine all the way to a huge, roaring super off-roader with 8-wheel drive and built-in swimming pool; you might have to change every compnent on the way, but it should be possible to so in small, very affordable steps.