Yes! That's another problem! No new humans to oppress! I wasn't going to say anything, but there you go!

Force stop the app and it will be put into a state where it can't run services or receivers and will not use data.

Well another problem is that we actually know what conditions are like there. It's one thing to ask a bunch of religious fanatics who are being persecuted in their current setting to move to someplace nominally more rustic where they'd be free to practice their heathen rituals. It's another to ask someone to leave their gravity well for a long trip to a much crappier gravity well. It's kind of a hard sell. "Yeah, Mars is a shithole with nothing but dust and more dust, but we'd like you to move there so you can scrape out a subsistence living that we'll probably lose interest in the next time the budgets come up." At least in the new world you could live off the land hunting beavers in the event the budget for new world colonization ever got cut.

It's really not that much of a problem. You just replace any words you don't recognize with "Jihad!" Like "Hey Alex! You want to go to jihad later and get some burgers?" Clearly there's some sort of terrorist activity going on there which justifies an increase to the budget next jihad!

You get typecast. You could have 3 decades of C/C++ and mention that you studied APL for one semester in college and all the calls you'll get will be for APL jobs. I don't even list LISP on my resume, even though I became enlightened in LISP in the 90's. With LISP, enlightenment is a heady feeling where you suddenly see the elegance with which everything fits together, followed by the sinking realization that if you want to actually do anything with the language you'd have to write all the libraries yourself.

LWN is still a thing? Damn, I stopped reading them ages ago, when I realized that all the stories I was reading were popping up on slashdot several days earlier.

Amm... anyway, most of the programmers I've known over my career have been average. They don't seem to particularly enjoy programming but they can generally make the computer do what they want it to do. Then they're quite happy to go home to their families and do other things. I've run across (and had to clean up for) five or six truly inept ones. And I mean people with no ability with computers whatsoever, who were essentially defrauding the company they were working for. Usually those people had left the company by the time I'd gotten there.

I've never met a true rockstar programmer at any company, although I have met a couple in Linux channels on IRC. I got to audit the source of the AT&T C standard library on a contract in the '90's and a lot of that stuff was brilliant. I wish I could have worked with the programmers who wrote it.

Me? I'm not going to try to appraise my own skill at it. I enjoy programming and do it at home. I've retrofitted several projects with data structures and will fix crashes that other programmers tend to ignore. I've also been told code I've worked on is easy to understand and maintain (By people in other countries who it was outsourced to.) I prefer not to subscribe to institutionalized learned helplessness that dictates that the software works that way because the software works that way and nothing can be done to fix it. I have several github repos where I work on things that interest me at the moment, mostly licensed under the Apache license. That may make me different from a lot of programmers, but I won't argue that it makes me any better or worse.

Why doesn't the industry just charge those people for the addition of chemicals to their water? Those people are getting those chemicals for free right now, and chemicals don't cost nothing! The industry should be billing everyone in that town for the chemicals they're currently getting for free!

Oh we went to a 64 bit time_t ages ago. You should just have to recompile, even if you use long instead of time_t. Assuming you ever upgraded your machine to a 64 bit platform, which won't be a problem for most people by 2038. Even the US military and NASA should be on 64 bit systems by then. So essentially we've already fixed the problem for Linux. Specific installations that don't upgrade might have some problems, but most of those systems won't last another couple of decades and will require replacement sooner. Specific in-house software that was compiled 32 bits and the the source lost might also have problems. Any remaining SCO installations might also still have problems. I actually kind of hope I can spend my last couple of years before retirement stamping out the remaining SCO installations, naturally while billing $200 an hour.

I think internally they have such a tool and use it in testing all the time. I don't predict them exposing it any time soon. It was released by accident, but pulled very quickly. And their changes to permissions on the Play Store go the opposite way.

Its also all legal C++. Just because it doesn't use the advanced features doesn't mean it isn't C++. I'd argue that for something this simple its even better code this way.

1)Not necessarily. Something as simple as not enabling that code for a month after release would get it by reviews. They aren't reviewing source code, they're reviewing behaviors. Just like you don't speed when there's a cop right behind you you wouldn't connect when you're being watched

2)They ask for a lot of permissions because the permissions aren't fine grained enough, and because polsih requires it. For example I had an app that did sound effects when you tapped a key. The OEM requested that we turn off sounds when the user is in a call so they wouldn't play on the other end. This reasonable request required a new permission (CALL_STATE IIRC), which actually gave us much more info than we wanted (we got to find out when calls started, ended, and the connection number which we didn't need). But if you just looked at our permissions your reaction would be "why do you need to know who I'm calling"? We didn't there was just no way to request less info, we didn't even look at the number.

One of the big problems was that Google redesigned the play store to be less scary and show fewer permissions. One of those was that any app could request internet permission without it showing up. That was just wrong.

What we really need is the ability to turn on and off specific permissions by app. Perhaps with the ability to limit internet permission to certain IPs/URLs per app. That would solve most of the problem.

Your math is just wrong all over. You're using the wrong formulas and confusing yourself.

If your monthly payment is 1000 and you pay an extra 50, you take 50 off the principle. That means next year you pay 50*rate less in interest for all years in the future. Assuming you don't change the payments (and assuming fixed rate loans), this means for the same amount of monthly money you pay off 50*rate more each year. That's a savings of rate compounded annually. That's all the return you get.

I ran across a great quote the other day.

I'm generally in favor of free market capitalism, but sometimes I'm not sure that's what I'm seeing right now. I also think that problems arise when revenue and profit become the number one goal, especially at the expense of the products and services that are supposedly being sold for that revenue and profit.

No, its still only the interest rate percentage return. That's what compounding does. Of course compounding works on other investments too- you reinvest your profits, either there or elsewhere. So its not a magical advantage of paying off debt.