I bet other civilizations failed to travel outside their star system because they devoted all their energy to trying to solve the Fermi Paradox.

Yes it is a form of "soft" censorship. So be it. We have to sacrifice some ideals to avoid living in a corporate waste-land. Tradeoffs tradeoffs.

You are free to tune out and make all that money worthless and put the people you want on the ballot.

What "works" for you or me doesn't necessarily scale to the rest of voters.

That's what they get for using double underscores in function names.

Paul Graham partially credits Lisp for making him rich via his store-site start-up, despite having viable competitors. The company that bought him out eventually converted it to a more conventional language stack for day-to-day maintenance.

The next probe will be Zombie 2.

The best "lone wolf" developers probably use something like Lisp and a high amount of math-like abstraction to crank out vast amounts of features in a short time.

However, a good team programmer knows how OTHER typical programmers think and read code, and writes code that is easy for them to navigate, digest, and change. Team programming is more like authoring a good technical manual, not clever gee-whiz tricks.

Indeed. My theory is that many of those mysterious gamma-ray bursts are civilizations earning a Galactic Darwin award.

"Hey look, we can create mini anti-black-holes in our la ~ ^ & [NO CARRIER]

No, it depends on the type and frequency of the changes. Some change patterns favor case lists and some favor sub-classing (in terms of fewest lines/blocks/modules that need to be changed). I don't believe one is inherently more common than another. Selecting the "best" solution requires knowledge and experience about the domain, and/or a good "horse sense" of domain analysis.

Predicting the future is never easy.

There are some other complexities to consider, such as if a set-oriented variation-on-a-theme becomes more appropriate than a hierarchy for modeling variation, but that's a long topic.

Your viewpoint is too idealistic in my opinion to result in a practical difference. You are fighting a personal war that nobody else is attending, tilting at windmills.

My two semi solutions are to put a ceiling on campaign contributions (which the current Supreme Court is against), and to have federal-level issue votes, not just representative votes.

Is it possible to use a big disk for both blocking light and for diffraction, per target object? That way both parties can be right. Win win. (Pardon me for sounding like a PHB there).

Will "AOL" be painted on the disk in huge letters?

Those damned Patriots under-inflated the snow machine!

The weather agency should state it as a percent similar to rain forecasts. Example: "There is a 70% estimated probability that snow will reach more than 2 feet deep in City X" kind of thing. It's then understood there's a 30% chance the snow will be a bust.

Unless a sufficient number of people vote for the 3rd party candidates, you are diminishing your selection power. At least voting for the top 2 gives a reasonable chance of making a small difference. (I think such stalemate is called the Nash equilibrium.)

And just because you are a third-party candidate does not mean you cannot be bribed.

In my opinion, those likely to be end users or power users mostly need to know about factoring (redundancy), set theory versus hierarchies; and associations, such as 1-to-many relationships versus many-to-many relationships.

Understanding loops and IF statements is good knowledge perhaps, but end users seem more lacking in practical knowledge about relationships of data objects (information) than they do relevant knowledge of loops and conditionals, and this leads them to poor decisions and confusion when working with developers and analysts.

In other words, focus first on enabling them to work better with IT rather than to potentially be or replace IT. And understanding factoring and relationships is good education for future programmers anyhow, if they go that route.

Roughly half the students will eventually be involved with IT design decisions, but only 1% or so will be developers. Thus, rather than try to improve or increase just that 1%, enable the 50% by making them better able to communicate with IT. It's a larger total benefit to society.