Sometimes their "philanthropy" is self-serving. Paul Allen is currently in my country with his huge-arse luxury yacht with its two helicopters and two submarines, parked not at the harbour because his boat is too big, but just sitting out in the bay blocking the view. But because he explores shipwrecks and the like (something that he does for fun), it's called charity, and he gets welcome to park his floating palace at no cost.

Many big games hire actual economists to design and maintain a workable economy. They tweak things much like the Fed tweaks interest rates, in an attempt to keep the game interesting, and to deal with the occasional bugs that cause rampant inflation.

What I find most annoying about all this is less the could of smug, and more the fact that household electricity use is such a small slice of the pie of overall US energy use. From wind power to this DC nonsense, it's obsessing on feelgood measures of little importance to the big picture.

This biggest slice of the pie is industrial energy use where electricity isn't part of the picture: "Primary energy use" by heavy industry for blast furnaces and the like. Industrial electricity use is the next biggest slice, followed by IIRC industrial transportation.

Because then your compression function effectively becomes your encryption function. And it wasn't designed for security.

Keep in mind these are simple issues to identify and exploit. All these "what-if" scenarios have been played out repeatedly, which is why the standard response is always "use a proven secure algorithm, don't roll your own cryptographic solution." It's easier, less bug prone,and the security has been analyzed by more qualified people than you can afford. Any known weaknesses have already been identified and fixed.

Yes, but by the threads definition it doesn't matter.

The second one was not terrible, as direct-to-video movies go. Though it would have been better if they had dropped any references to the first movie.

It was not good enough for me to have bothered seeing the 3rd, though.

Instead he has taken up the profession of fighting anyone that criticizes his movies.

sure thing ...*Brave Guy*

My point is that it is hard to test for 'math potential'. In no small part because high school teachers (and before) have so little of it.

For the record: There are a very few remaining swamps that are putting down future coal. The Okifanoki is one.

We can't possibly burn all the coal. Not even all the high grade coal, to say nothing of brown coal.

So was AOL in it's day. Those people should be kept off the general net if at all possible.

People that already know how to code test out of COBOL. The syntax is butt simple and being an introductory course the coding is also simple.

It's directed at the students that use salary surveys to pick majors. We are doing them a favor by showing them the worst CS environment early.

The only real difference, is intentions. The results are the same.

These days people have far less excuse for not learning a couple of programming languages in middle school then going from there. I had to wash dishes for a summer to pay for my first 'microcomputer'. These days you get better ones in cereal boxes.

I've never met a 'talented programmer' born after 1960 who learned to code in school. Not one.

They did pay attention in school and learn to code to standards, but already knew how to code. Coding just comes natural to some of us.

'What programming languages did you know when you started your professional education?' is one of my goto interview questions for the degreed. For the no-degree type I just find out if they can code worth shit.

Consensus: Perky nipples a cool and brighten any day.