There is no reason that we should all be striving towards having the same skillset, though.

There are reasons. They should not necessarily be, but there are reasons. We value certain skills and certain job types far more than others. I have always been good at software, but I elect not to do that and do something else. I can see where that job market is going, and what is going to happen to opportunities as I age, and what is going to happen to wages as people pile on. I have instead chosen to invest my time in something that for me, at least, was more challenging to learn, but which seems a little more immune to the tragedy occurring there.

It would have been EASY, it would have bypassed my disadvantages, to simply do what I'm good at. It would also be my eventual undoing. There's nothing wrong with forcing something, everything good requires heavy investment. I agree with your statement solely to the extent that if something is both hard AND unrewarding that there's no compelling reason to journey on.

Perhaps she's good at something else but doesn't like doing it, or perhaps it won't lead to a lucrative career? If she's slower at learning math, it's obvious she will need to spend more time at it to get the same proficiency as her sibling.

Being human is about overcoming the disadvantages nature has imposed on you, not embracing them.

Dogs are actually a feline attempt at genetic engineering that went awry. Created intentionally with a sort of built in Stockholm syndrome, they seem to have developed an overly strong empathy with their captives instead. Their intentionally capped intelligence which was to be useful for the more mundane task of physical security, and possibly to serve as a pack animal, also backfired: they chased anything that moved quickly, including their creators.

The project was quickly abandoned, unfortunately the prisoners and their obsession with all things related to mating have bred the abortions beyond all reason. The best that can be said for the beasts, perhaps, is that they provide distraction and amusement.

That's what they want you to think. The truth is that there is now an entire army of CIA spy cats.

You must not be a cat owner. The real truth, the truth they don't want anyone to know, is that the CIA, NSA, FBI, KGB, IRS, and especially the DMV, are entirely run by cats. That acoustic cat was actually a senior agent, trusted with testing a next gen prototype. He was not "run over by a car", he was assassinated by an enemy agent. That thing cats do in the middle of the night, where they charge around the house as if an axe murderer were on a spree? That is spy versus spy warfare, your cat saved your life. There's a war going on, a war most of us never see, and it rages under your bed, on your kitchen counters, even on top of your refrigerator.

The NSA isn't so much monitoring your email to see what dirty emails you send each other, they're looking for coded messages from field agents as they "walk across the keyboard". They no longer need acoustic agents, the agents are simply embedded everywhere, and they are always watching. It sounds as if this Snowden person has altered the communications flow, necessitating another field trial of a more "cat in the middle" interception plan. War kitteh is a hero.

I'm not sure there is any toolchain for synthesizing RTL for either FPGAs or silicon that is open source. That's a big project unto itself.

There are a few open source simulators though, so in a sense you can "run" their design under say, Icarus (http://iverilog.icarus.com/). Still, you have to run on proprietary hardware somewhere.

Just like riding lawn mowers, you should be able to get up and have it cut the power. Or in this case, it should detect no one is sitting in the driver's seat, and safely slow to a halt.

I wonder if it disables the air bags if it detects a child is driving though.

If you lie about lying that's like telling the truth.

The bottom line is that without upgrading their networks, they can't provide the promised service to 100% of their customers. Divide and conquer. Cut off a small fraction of people they feel they can label as "greedy", and hurt them most, rather than admit they're in default on their contract obligations and upgrade their network. /. can kick and scream all they want, but idiots in Congress will happily buy it all up and ignore dissent like they do every time.

The same thing as what happened to unicorns and leprechauns.

My understanding is that no purchases can be made unless an account password is entered

That wasn't always the case, and also a 15 minute window for "convenience" is clearly a loophole waiting to happen.

If this isn't a scam, that window needs to pop up every single time the app is hitting the user up for money. I do not give my son my password, and I've already told him I don't pay for in-app purchases ever (because individually I hate the practice), so he either needs to be able to play without, or find another game. However before all this became a big deal and the apps could hit the market without a password, there'd be lots of charges for crap that were purchased in game. Now that the awareness is out, there has to be the fear of God in app developers that they're going to lose their ill-gotten money if they don't play fair. I think the FTC has done that adequately.

If the app requires a password every time it racks up a charge (and iTunes/Play/Amazon stores do as well), then customers have no legitimate complaint about the charges. Either they gave their kids the password (idiots), or they authorized the charge. I have no sympathy for this crowd.

Notepad++ is my favorite, but windows only. It just has all the most important features. Since I'm not on Windows much anymore, I've had to move on... Atom is pretty decent on the Mac (ignoring how huge it is), Gedit is increasingly indecent and unstable, but it's close to Notepad++ in features.

Visual Studio/Xcode:
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

Real Programmers:
Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?

I tried but linux doesn't have a .vcproj or .sln. Someone told me they just use 'built in editors' but when I made a patch in wordpad, f5 didn't compile it.

I can't swing a dead cat (millennials don't like animal abuse) without hitting a millennial making way, way over $20/hr. They're all doing this new fangled processor design or software development stuff, I still don't think that stuff will take off.

The political fervour that is whipped up in the populace, from security theatre / war on terror, the war on drugs, etc, takes a life of its own in a pure democracy.

Who whips up that fervor, the war on drugs wasn't started as a grass roots campaign, for sure, it came from the top. It's the same in the US and UK, I think, certainly with the same dark motivations and same ill-gotten power. Anonymity is a friend to the masses and an enemy to power. Whistle-blowers, leakers and disharmonious speech are threats to the status quo, the same one that provides the wealth they wield to have this alleged long-term view.

I don't disagree with the concept of having a ruling body that is not beholden to the mob, I just haven't seen any mechanism by which that body can be kept honest and magnanimous. That is the same spirit which brought down monarchies to begin with.

I'm certainly too ignorant to decide in what ways the UK system or the US system are better or worse, but in this particular example I do not see any significant difference.