I know, but you can't account for every person's actions and every variable.

" With that in mind, SourceForge pledges to present third-party offers only with the projects that explicitly opted-in to that program."

These days, whenever I see a company or organization use the phrase "opt-in", I immediately tune out anything else that is said, and decide I want nothing more to do with that company or organization.

Here's an example. Your company has contracts to sell diesel fuel to a couple of thousand trucking company customers, who need to know what your quoted price is going to be every day, so that they can dispatch their trucks. So there is a program that runs at 3:00am that calculates and sends out the quoted prices to these customers. Meanwhile, Susie Mushferbrains, a college intern, forgot to enter some minor data which is needed for a job that happens to run at 2:55am in the same job queue as the diesel fuel quotes program. So, at 2:55:13am there is a divide by zero error which holds up everything in the job queue, and nobody notices this until 8am the next morning. Because the diesel fuel quotes didn't go out, the various trucking company dispachers are routing their vehicles to your competitor's stores and you lose several million dollars that day in revenue.

It would be better if the system would just plug in 0 and send out a warning rather than crash a program because, OMG! bad math!

That's not what I'm saying. When you have a number of critical jobs that have to be run, you don't want all of them held up because some idiot somewhere forgot to put in, for instance, the number of students, and now there is a divide by zero error that brings everything to a standstill. In this case, it is far better to take the chance of paying out $10,000 accidentally (something that will probably be caught by someone before it becomes a problem), than the chance of losing $10 million because some other critical job did not get executed at the right time.

I know that in a business setting, making x/0 = 0 would be okay. At least it has always been okay in my 30+ years of experience. But I think the problem lies at a very low level, that is, the CPU cannot divide something by zero. I am pretty sure this is why it is, universally, an error.

This should be no problem. They just need to hire more sociopaths and psychopaths. Corporate America is filled with such people, most of whom are middle managers. Other areas to mine are collection agencies, repo agencies, and Audi drivers. A lot of those people would be perfectly content to spend all day killing humans remotely, then going home to the wife and kids. The military just needs to lower their physical standards a bit.

I hate responding to my own post, but I mis-wrote that I got my first student loan 40 years after he did. I meant to say that I got the loan 10 years after the author. I hope my post makes more sense now.

The writer describes the student loan process as being "legal but not moral". Considering when he got his student loan, and how he got it, I don't understand his perception of the loan as being "not moral". I took out my first student loan about 40 years after he did, in 1984. That was a different time. College was not nearly as expensive, and paying back loans was not as difficult. All of my student loans together added up to about 40% of the annual income from my first job. These days, comparable loans would probably come to about 120% of the annual income of a first job. The first obligation is something that could be satisfied in a few years. The latter, modern obligation might well never be satisfied. One might argue that the modern system, with towering loans to complete useless degree programs is immoral, but that was not the situation 40 years ago, or even 30 years ago.

What is immoral is not paying back what you borrowed. A couple of his suggestions for handling the situation are totally outrageous, most notably, that one should marry someone who has a good credit rating. Really? His life philosophy is to burden someone else with the consequences of his bad decisions?

I was in the Navy from 1980 to 1991 and served in two different squadrons aboard USS America (CV-66) and USS Eisenhower (CV-69). For much of that time I worked on the flight deck. I'm glad the EM catapults are more reliable and require less maintenance. I am sure sailors and aviators alike will not miss cold cat shots and fires in the cat tracks. Nevertheless, the rising vapor from the steam catapults added a kind of surrealism to the job. I'll miss the "theatrics".

It's one of those appliances that lasts a long time and a lot of people don't think about it. I replaced my old style door about a year and a half ago, and the only reason I replaced it was because I installed it in 1995 and it suddenly occurred to me that it was easy to break into. Mechanically, the old opener worked perfectly. I am glad the new door installer wanted the old unit (he builds automatic flag-raising systems with them). At least the old unit didn't go to waste.

It appears that they intend to make their money from commercial customers. The service does not work with most cell providers, but it's new, so we'll see.

I just closed my Paypal account. I hardly ever used it anyway, so I am sure I can live without it. Surprisingly, they made it pretty easy to close the account.

I was quoting the percentage off the top of my head. The number is actually lower. Here is an article on the CDC study that the numbers come from:

http://www.livescience.com/256...

I've been living with diabetes for over 12 years now. At one point I had lost 110 pounds through diet and exercise. At first my situation improved, but over time it got worse. I now live life as a type 1 diabetic.

You can certainly live better with diabetes through lifestyle changes, I'm not going to argue that. But for most type 2s, treatment will eventually still include medications and even insulin injections.

Cute. Yes, lifestyle changes make a difference for about 20% of type 2 diabetics, but for the rest, treating the disease is elusive. There are a lot of type 2 diabetics who are not overweight and follow healthy eating habits. There are a lot of obese people who never develop type 2 diabetes.
 

You know, in the past, they used to equate the amount of skill and experience it took to be a good coder to being similar with a skilled surgeon. There is some truth in that. In fact, being a surgeon is easier because you don't have to worry about basic human anatomy changing every few years. In IT, however, platforms and languages evolve and your skillset has to cope with these changes all the time.

Now they would have us believe that you can take regular people, and teach them to be "skilled surgeons" in a short period of time.

The reason there is a shortage of good coders is because it takes a lot more intelligence, skill and discipline than most people realize. There are simply not enough people with the capacity it takes to meet the demand.