...when every programmer (and tech support person, and manufacturing person) in the US can get a job, that's the time for US operations to be looking for foreign help.

But since age, health, formal schooling, in-country location, and credit score are widely and consistently used to deny highly skilled US programmers jobs -- I am very confident in saying that Mr. Graham has not even come close to identifying the "programmer problem" from the POV of actual US programmers. All he's trying to do here is save a buck, while screwing US programmers in the process.

Do it his way, and the US economy will suffer even further at the middle class level as decent jobs go directly over our heads overseas, while, as per usual, corporations thrive.

This is exactly the kind of corporate perfidy that's been going on for some time. Graham should be ashamed. He represents our problem. Not any imaginary lack of US based skills.

Maybe they're gamers.

Well, you're not going to get that big an improvement, but you can often chip for efficiency and gain a few MPG at the expense of a few HP. Often it's actually a very good trade. Until recently when the mileage targets surged few automakers have truly pursued maximum mileage. Typically, they're too afraid of customer response to truly go all in.

What? What is it good for, then? It's a shiny lure.

I treat the battery as a built-in UPS, so I have no idea how long it would run if run right until drained. It's lasted at least as long as promised in the past, but I don't tend to do much besides play music and edit code when it's unplugged and on the road.

There are few jobs for great programmers. Great programmers tend to work best on an independant task and can put out an ungodly amount of functional code in the same time as a whole team of "competent" programmers.

But that's not the kind of work most companies need done. What they need done are huge applications (primarily web based nowadays) that can only be accomplished through teamwork, because the sheer volume of work required is far beyond that of any one programmer by themselves.

So the vast majority of jobs only look for (and barely pay for) merely "competent" programmers. They're not looking for and not interested in hiring "top talent" if they can get 2-3 "bodies" for the same price.

I agree with most of the posters that if you want to attract top talent you need to pay top wages. But for every company that wants to hire a "Linus Torvalds", there are a thousand that want to hire "Joe Coder" instead.

Widom-Larsen requires an implausible mix of scales. The effective mass of heavy electrons in the solid state is a collective phenomenon happening over distances and time-scales that are large relative to the nucleus and nuclear time-scales and affect the dynamics of the electron's interaction with the lattice, on those scales. To impute to these large-scale effects efficacy at the nuclear scale is very unlikely to be correct.

Consider a car analogy: a car moving along a freeway in dense traffic interacts with all the cars around it. If the driver accelerates, they will pull up close to the care behind and that driver may speed up a bit too, sending a diminishing wave of acceleration through the traffic, so compared to the same car alone on the road the car in dense traffic appears to have a much higher effective mass. Alone, you hit the gas and speed up a lot. In traffic, you hit the gas and speed up a little bit. That's what the electron in the surface looks like: a car in traffic.

But on the scale of car-car interactions, the "bare" mass of the car is what matters. If two cars collide you get an energy of 0.5*m*v^2, not 0.5*Meff*v^2.

Yeah, there are multi-car pileups that muddy the analogy, but they add up to nothing like the effective mass of the whole traffic block, so there. And the difference in scales between "cars and traffic" is tiny compared to the difference in scales between "nuclei and the lattice", so the effect that analogy hopefully makes obvious will be that much larger in the latter case.

While I don't disagree on the smell, Gates is richer than God, and the first thing I thought on seeing this was that if I had that kind of money I might spend a bit of it on wigged-out ideas, just in case. It's like me throwing a panhandler a buck just 'cause I can.

If the main text of a religion isn't a reliable guidebook to that religion, how can we determine if anything is?

Obviously, we can't.

What made you think we could?

All major (and most minor) religions present huge diversity. Within Christianity, the bible is taken as everything from vague metaphor to the "inerrant word of God." The Koran for Islam, the same. Buddhist practice ranges from meditative to non, from vegetarian to non, from rigidly scientific to the most laughable crystal-gazing nonsense you've ever heard of. New agers.... that's a basket so broad I don't even have a clue as to what it really means, although I have to say, I've rarely come away from someone's description of their new age ideas thinking "wow, that made sense." OK, actually, never. But I figure it could happen. :)

In addition to actual sect differences, there are practitioner differences, and they range all the way from non-believers who are there for the social aspect, to rigid adherents to every jot and tittle in every book (and some, like the Catholics, have quite a few books.)

For my part, I figure, if I want to know what someone thinks, just ask them. Unless I have specific relevant evidence, I don't assume people fit into standardized boxes. I have found that to very rarely be true.

Wait, really? Are you trolling, or just completely batshit bingo ball crazy?

are they using -march or -mtune?

I do understand that many won't run out of the box with less than a 586-class processor now, but I don't think P4 is common yet

Well, you should stop waiting, and get a case with a keyboard in it. Then, you can have the best of both worlds, because you don't have to carry the keyboard around when you're not using it. I understand that the TF series can be a bit big for one's pockets, but there are other options.

Of course I do, and furthermore, the more important the decision is, the more likely I am to follow the herd. If I'm buying a car, for example, I want to know that I'll be able to get parts for it. If it's used and cheap then I can afford some expensive parts, no big deal. If I'm buying a new car, I want something good yes, but also something everyone else is buying so that I know that parts availability will be high, and parts cost will be low.

Of course, the mast majority of people who buy mobile devices buy Android devices, not iOS ones, so the herd is still no argument for Apple.

Kind of makes you think he was behind the attacks to begin with, huh? Otherwise, why negotiate with terrorists?

You can mill an object out of wood, or you can 3d print an object in Inconel. Many cheap tools (notably ratchets!) are just cast, and they work just fine unless a fastener is rusted on, or was grossly overtorqued to begin with.