I coach an after school program in robotics and programming at my local elementary school, and I agree that this is baloney. The parents are pushing hard for their girls to pursue tech, and it is the girls themselves that are disinterested.

This is only a meaningful data point if you can demonstrate that such families aren't already biased towards selecting for parents more interested in tech careers.

I rather think it's quite biased towards such parents. After all, why would you be hearing from parents not interested in tech for their daughters? So your ancedote wouldn't be meaningful in the face of rigourous data (assuming Google's study has such data).

Further, "Like many of new languages, Rust is walking the path of simplification. I can generally understand why it doesn't have a decent inheritance and exceptions [...]

Spoken like someone who has no clue about the breadth and depth of the various programming paradigms available. The fact that he still considers inheritance as somehow essential just reveals his ignorance on the progress on comp sci over the past 20+ years.

Exceptions are more debatable, since we don't yet have a better error handling abstraction that scales from local to global error handling (checked exceptions are the best we have so far).

[...] but the fact itself that someone is making decisions for me regarding things like that makes me feel somewhat displeased. C++ doesn't restrict programmers regarding what they can or cannot use."

I don't even... So by this argument, C++ restricts me from using generators and first-class delimited continuations, so it's not good enough either.

This argument is both a contradiction because C++ also makes such decisions thus disqualifying it despite the author's claims, AND it's tautological because every language makes opinionated decisions about acceptable idioms. Really, no language could possibly satisfy the author's requirements.

Given its goals, I think Rust made a pretty good set of opinionated choices though. Certainly better than C++ overall.

It's information about me, but it belongs to the phone company, and they have it.

Does the phone company have ownership over data about you? Should it? A person's "house, papers, and effects" recognizes a person's property rights. It doesn't seem unreasonable that use of a service, particularly a common carrier, generates new "papers and effects" that ought to be considered personal property.

For instance, we already recognize a person's right to provacy protection over their medical records, even though by your argument, hospitals and doctors "own" those records in a very similar way a phone company "owns" your metadata.

You've tasked these loyal people with a job to do in order to keep the USA and its citizens safe, and then removed the tools they need to do the job effectively.

Except there's no proof that these tools are actually effective, and there are plenty of arguments made by experts that they cannot possibly be effective (too many false positives ties up scarce investigative resources). So I reject your whole premise.

If you could measure programming ability somehow, its curve would look like the normal distribution.

Would it? I think that's probably true, but I haven't seen any real evidence of that claim.

Bzzt. Wrong. Those conjectures were from from Paul March who is "an engineer at NASA Eagleworks". None of the authors are named March.

The article text you quoted is completely ambiguous as to where "EM Drive propulsion conjectures" come from. If March had his own theory, then we'd be hearing about it more than the EM drive inventors' theory. I haven't. You find me the post where he claims to have this theory in the megathread the article was based on, and I'll concede the point.

I see no signs of such evidence here.

There is sufficient evidence of an anomolous result. Whether this result can be accounted for by conventional physics, either due to experimental error or because of some hitherto untested combination of physical mechanisms, remains to be seen.

Those conjectures are based on the author's explanations of the mechanism, which we already know to be largely bunk.

Compared to the actual momentum imparted by 1kW worth of photons, which is what current physics suggests would be the only source of momentum, the amount of force measured is much more significant. Hence, fairly efficient by comparison.

Finally note that the one experiment that got close to one Newton/kW was not done in a vacuum.

The NASA tests measured the same force in both vacuum and non-vacuum environments. Any results from China are suspect since falsification is much more rampant there.

They put in metric ton-loads of energy and measure a very small effect. They say they will need to increase the efficiency by many orders of magnitude to create a practical device. I say they probably made a mistake somewhere and the tiny effect they measured is either noise or due to something else they haven't yet accounted for.

They didn't actually put in that much energy compared to the thrust they measured. If the tiny effect is what you're worried about, then a proper metric ton-load of energy would immediately point out any error.

Let's see: we can violate conservation of momentum by invoking some sort of vaguely defined quantum woo.

If the observations are confirmed and not explained (which is currently the case), there's still something to talk about. So yes, this again.

The experiment excluded a certain class of catharsis theories. Fortunately, it's hardly the only such experiment. Catharsis theory has basically no evidence supporting it at this point, and enough evidence against it that it's pretty safe to say that indulging your anger does not "expend it" in any meaningful sense.

You don't prove your point by mentioning people who have steroid rage. Normal people can absolutely get their anger out by spending some time with a punching bag.

Wrong.

You now have min, max, and average times for a maze of that size/complexity

Estimating the size/complexity of a software project is exactly where all the error lies. The original quote was correct that it's like solving a maze, you just assumed they were talking about mazes on paper that you could estimate size and complexity at a glance. No, this is a full sized maze that you walk through and have no idea how deep and complex it is.

Didn't Apple just lose a suit over the legality of noncompete and nonsolicit agreements?

It does not claim (as I understand it) to represent every scenario, merely a special case of a specific scenario. Explicitly, it requires the organism to have enough intelligence to remember what happened in previous games, so a bacteria without memory is not covered under this model. The strategy requires multiple rounds be played.

Irrelevant. Genes that survive are the "memory" and successive generations are the rounds. If cooperation were an optimal solution to the iterated prisoner's dilemma, then it would explain the emergence of cooperation in evolution via natural selection.

Of course, these game theory papers are searching for global optimal solutions, but evolution via natural selection does not necessarily find such points. If the amount of energy required to achieve a global maxima is quite high, then it is quite "happy" to settle in a local maxima. This might just be such a case.

I notice that you don't balance how many times scientists have been wrong against how many times they've been right. What do you suppose a scientist's wrong:right ratio is as compared to a non-scientist's?