Then you don't matter. Not to the automakers. You'll buy a car (probably not even new from the dealer) about 4 times in your lifetime, if you chose wisely and don't get in wrecks.The automakers will make almost no money off of you. I'm the same way. Mostly I only buy late-model used cars, and try to drive them until everything starts to fall apart at once like the Bluesmobile.

The people who matter are people like my dad, who has bought or leased a new car every 2 years or less as far back as I can remember. The first thing he asks me about any car I buy, going back to he 80's, is how good the stereo is. So yeah, the "car entertainment system" sells cars.

They both breathed air and occasionally took dumps too. However, the statement of fact that started this thread is horribly, irredeemably wrong. The only POTUS' to have actually been impeached were Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton.

Any time you hear someone wax nostalgic for 70's or early 80's music, I guarantee you that's the case. I was listening then, and you have simply no concept of how much crap I had to sit through in order to hear the occasional great Led Zeppelin or Rush song. There was a time when I was literally (and I do mean literally) getting rickrolled daily. That was an actual chart-topping song in the 80's. Think for a second about what that says about its competition.

You can accomplish nearly the same thing quicker and cheaper with car exhaust, rubbing alcohol, and that ranting homeless guy who lives in the park.

The term Open Source was invented to describe software licenses in the face of copyright law. Hardware in general is "protected" by patents, not by copyright. Those are two completely different mechanisms, and talking about them like they are somehow the same makes no sense at all.

There's a really annoying trend lately of people completely misusing the term "Open Source". By definition, for something to be "Open Source", there must be some source code somewhere in it (and term only applies to that part). Calling a pure hardware system "open source" makes no sense whatsoever.

The word "open" works just fine there all by itself. There is no need to embellish it with the nonsensical "source".

Probably the case. But as I told another poster, it would be even smarter to keep the math career as active as possible in the meantime, as that gets the first few years of lowest pay and prestige out of the way, and gives him that extra 3-5 years at the high-paying end of the career as gravy.

You are missing (or conveniently ignoring) the part where I said he'd be lucky to keep at it that long. In point of fact, the *average* NFL career is a smidge over 3 years. A bit more for players who are good enough to make active rosters, less for players who aren't kickers or QB's. There are a lot of variables. As there are with salary.

The point here is that NFL careers aren't that long, and the pay for people who aren't superstars only makes up for that if the alternative is something like a service/menial job. If the alternative is getting a jump of that many years on the ground floor of a high-paying career, in many situations it would be way smarter to take the longer career. Particularly if it is something you love doing (which seems the case here). If he's going to try to be a mathematician after sports "retirement" anyway, the sensible thing is to keep that career as serious as possible in the meantime.

I'll agree with this statement the day you can't use The Bible or the Torah in your first sentence and justify the exact same attacks.

A lot of this is fair, but the same goes for any ideology. You could say the same for Christianity. You could say the same for Protestantism, which kept central Europe awash in blood for hundreds of years after its introduction. You could say the same for political philosophies. The Spanish Civil war, and to a large extent WWII were fought over Republicanism vs. Authoritarianism, and millions slaughtered each other in the most gruesome ways imaginable.

Yet nobody runs about decrying philosophy in general. That would be stupid. The problem is humans naturally like to think in us-vs-them terms, and like to kill "them" (chimps go to war too. It sucks, but its natural). Religion is just an excuse. Strike it down, and another will be used.

Quit crying and screaming! No, there are no monsters, and no you can't have a nite-light! That's bad for you. I read it online a week ago. Just sit there and snivel in the darkness!

Scientists ... traumatizing children since the Renaissance.

Perhaps. The league minimum is about half a mil a year. Good money by any standard. However, that's only about 4x what an average math PhD can pull down in a year. Compare that with the fact that an NFL linesman career is going to be over in 10 years if you are really lucky, while a mathematician can work until either they drop or age-related dementia sets in, and it really isn't so cut-and-dried. At the absolute least, he's smart to be trying to do both so he isn't starting from base salary(/reputation) on the math thing when forced to retire from football.

This is your indication that you are talking with an adrenaline/endorphin junkie.

I play futbol (soccer) defense, and can completely understand this. Its an otherwise thankless position. If you do it well pretty much nobody but your goalie notices, and if you mess up everyone hates on you. So why do it? Honestly, I believe I got addicted to the adrenaline/endorphin hit. I don't even feel right until I've had my first hard tackle. It is next to impossible to get that fix in real life, but a good physical confrontation will bring it right up. I once hadn't got there yet, and then a (clearly juicing) big forward knocked me to the ground while the ref wasn't looking. I got up laughing and thanking him. Not quite the reaction he was expecting.

I don't know how many here have seen Clint Eastwood's Every Which Way but Loose, but the main character Philo clearly had this as well. It was a major plot point that he had to fight, and had an unusual thing where he got better the more he was hit. Classic Endorphin/Adrenaline junkie.

I think it ought to go without saying that as a mathematician Urschel isn't going to get his body chemical "hit" in his daily life. I've certainly found that to be the case as a software engineer.

The problem with that is that it simply isn't. Take a look at the sources for any multiplatform project, and you'll see its chock full of platform-specific precompiler code sections. C is one of the *least* portable programming languages available.

Where it does get similar is that the language provides a lot of features that are frankly too low-level for a programming language. For example, there's the "auto" and "register" keywords. Those are supposed to be for telling the compiler when to put variables into a register. Every modern C compiler *ignores* these keywords, as no human can hope to perform this optimization properly at the C source level on a modern processor. That's just one prominent example.

So C is actually a non-portable non-assembly language.

That means nothing of the sort. LLVM is a compiler framework, whose back end contains rather a lot of machine language, and whose front end depends on the language being used. Most language front ends are self-hosted (written in themselves).

Likewise, using the Objective-C runtime doesn't mean anything other than that it was a convenient runtime that already existed, and they know how to interface to it. If you can do that, your sources can be in any language you prefer.

But most importantly, C fans seem to have gotten it in their collective heads that C is somehow the root of all language, from which all other programs must have ultimately sprung. This is complete and utter hogwash, and makes having a discussion with them really difficult. If such a thing exists, it is machine language, not C. Does that mean machine language is superior? Hell no. You just need it sometimes, but mostly to help build things that are better for humans to use.