As an engineer and a computer scientist, I quite agree with you. That said, it is impossible to be competent at either without a firm grounding in the science that underlies them. Alas, it is quite possible for anyone - including distinguished scientists - to be abysmally ignorant of matters outside their specialties.

Nice and shiny. But as others have observed, it doesn't actually do much for visualizing the relationships. Up to about six sets really is my personal limit for visualizing these things at a glance. and I use a Karnaugh map for that.

Whether it was wishy-washy or palsy-walsy, the point is that there was hanky-panky going on.

In the bad old days when IBM owned a monopoly on the computer business, there were a number of Federal Information Processing Standards that all but stated that procured equipment should have on the nameplate the ninth, second and thirteenth letters of the Latin alphabet as used in US English. They were opened for competitive bidding, and you'd think that only IBM could play. But sometimes it lost a bit because it was undercut by either a used-equipment dealer or even one of its own resellers. In fact, IBM used its resellers to prove to several courts that the bidding process was competitive. It would bid the contract at a non-discounted retail price, sell the equipment to a reseller at wholesale, and let the reseller undercut the price. It turned a tidy profit either way, and was still the sole manufacturer of the equipment. But as long as there was the formality of a competitive bid - which it lost - competing manufacturers had no legal leg to stand on.

I know it's not a popular bullet point, but until Google Docs is 100% compatible, complaints like this don't have much grounds to stand on.

The difficulty: 100% compatibility is impossible even in theory. All that Microsoft need do is push a patch that adds or changes some minor feature, and now its competitor is no longer "100% compatible." So a Microsoft troll can always argue the "100% compatible" point, and win it by moving the goalpost. (I don't argue that you are a Microsoft troll, by the way: merely that you are advancing the argument that a Microsoft troll would advance.)

Of course, in the real world, the goalpost does move, because Microsoft is a monopoly and has captured the government. Microsoft products cannot interoperate perfectly even with themselves (ever try to open a 10-year-old document?). Nevertheless, failure to interoperate perfectly with Microsoft products dooms all competition to irrelevancy as "non-mainstream." Any non-Microsoft software, to be successful, has to address a problem for which Microsoft does not have even a bad solution. For instance, software to simulate the operation of a chemical plant might stand or fall on its technical merit. But even that might fail, because it likely has inputs and outputs that are tables of numbers, and therefore will face "100% compatibility" issues with Excel.

Given that no government at this point can intervene without crippling itself - governments run on PowerPoint, and Microsoft has them by the short hairs - I don't see the situation as changing very soon.

You were arrested for public photography. Oops, public photography isn't against the law. Sorry, our bad. But you resisted by putting your face into our fist, so now you're guilty of resisting arrest.

I didn't test PHP, because I never use it.

I did, however, do the responsible thing and ask myself, "does code that I maintain have a similar bug, and does its test suite validate it?" I checked the Tcl test suite, and discovered that it lacked a test for the case. I added test cases for input and output conversion of the largest positive subnormal, the smallest negative subnormal, the smallest positive normal, and the largest negative normal. (All the test cases passed, so committing them ended what I had to do.)

Tcl, too, has its own conterparts to strtod and sprintf("%g"), because it depends on float->string->float being 100% lossless and on having the string representation of a float be the shortest string that reconverts to the given number. It's quite tricky to get right; this particular corner case is the tip of the iceberg.

One way to calibrate your respect for the press: listen to them when they're talking about something you know about. Assume that they have the same depth of understanding when they're talking about something you don't know about.

It's always human error:

"Units are parts of variables" usually comes along with systems in which there is no escape. Dimensional analysis is fine up to a point, but when you get into weird quantities like dBm/sqrt(Hz) (seriously: ten times the log-base-10 of a quantity measured in milliwatts, over the square root of another quantity measured in hertz), the systems that enforce units tend to fall apart, and often it turns out that they simply lack the notation you need. (By the way, "dBm per root hertz" was a unit that I used in daily work at an earlier time in my life. And I still use weirdness like neper-coloumb per square micron.)

What theory of numeration are you using, that has all numbers rational? I'm sorry, but even the humble square root is something I don't want to give up, to say nothing of transcendental functions. The theory of exact arithmetic on the reals is not all that well developed. Bill Gosper makes a start, and a handful of researchers take it somewhat further, but actually using exact arithmetic for everything you'd want to do remains a mirage.

Well, it's at least a start. Now instead of having one case against defendants across the whole US, the lawyers have to refile in all 92 district courts, multiplying their expenses considerably. (Particularly since a lawyer who files pro hac vice in many of the districts must retain local counsel.) Moreover, the defendants will be sued in their home districts. They don't need to retain counsel and appear in DC to contest their cases. (If a distant court finds a way to assert personal jurisdiction, you're well advised either to prosecute an interlocutory appeal or settle, because the expense of simply making all the required appearances in the distant state will be ruinous.)

This was also a mandatory first move on the defendants' part. Once you've filed any paperwork with the court without contesting its jurisdiction, you've lost your chance. If you've been sued in the wrong place, you get only one short opportunity to tell that to the judge. After that, you're deemed to have acquiesced on the point. That's unbelievably harsh against pro se defendants, who may not have even been able to find a lawyer (especially since the notice served against them states that they need fo find one in the distant state) by the time they're required to file an answer, but it's the law.

So it's not a major victory, but it would have gone considerably worse for the defendants had the judge asserted personal jurisdiction against them.

And yet... ... try and find a competent journeyman plumber in America (perhaps outside a few major cities) at any price. And that's a job that can't be shipped offshore.

Just where in India, China or Russia are you finding folks who can do Fourier-domain image processing on hardware microarchitecture? I could use a few, and don't much care if they're American, Chinese, Indian, Russian, or beings from Aldebaran IV with green and purple feathers. Incidentally, I don't think that people like that are getting any rarer: we've always been few and far between. But the code monkeys are getting commoner, and the slushpile of CV's gets bigger and bigger with only the same few really promising candidates buried under all the others. (Summary: I'm an American, MSEE/PhDCS, and *can* do all the things you mention. I'm also, uhm, on the high side of fifty, quite expensive, and not in the market at the moment because I've had no trouble finding customers.

I love it: "Required: Proficiency in Hindi, Telugu, or Kannada." It's even relevant to the job because the candidate will have to communicate with all the *other* Indians already working on the project.