For a point of reference, the global death statistics say the death rate from all accidental injuries is 57 per 100,000. The biggest single cause is road traffic accidents, at 19 per 100,000 (more recent statistics put it at 18). Violent deaths (suicide, homicide, war) break down as 14 for suicide (more recent stats put it at 16), 9 for homicide, and 2.8 for war.

The suicide stat I think is an important one that's often overlooked. Globally it's more than 1.5x the homicide rate, and certain countries with extremely low homicide rate have extremely high suicide rates (e.g. Japan). Anyway, it's rather eye-opening to look through that list. I had expected war to be higher, but I guess the percentage of the population in a war zone is rather small compared to the percentage of coverage the news devotes to it.

The i5 and i7 designations don't indicate performance but feature sets. Current i5 processors don't have hyper-threading, for example, but all current i7 processors do.

On laptop CPUs:

i3 = dual core, hyperthreading, 3MB cache, no turbo boost
i5 = dual core, hyperthreading, 3MB cache, turbo boost
i7 = dual or quad core, hyperthreading, 4MB cache (6 or 8MB for quads), turbo boost

On desktop CPUs:

i3 = dual core, hyperthreading, 3 or 4MB cache, turbo boost
i5 = quad core, no hyperthreading, 6MB cache, turbo boost
i7 = 4-8 cores, hyperthreading, mostly 8MB cache for quads, turbo boost

In the early Core i days, the specialty features like hardware AES support were missing from the i3s, but most of these features have been added to the newer i3s. In fact the Pentium and Celeron lines had become pretty capable CPUs, up until Intel started using those names for Silvermont (Atom) CPUs thus forcing you to look up the exact CPU model to tell if you were going to get desktop-level performance or netbook-level performance.

What rubbish. Plenty of cultures have parents who are involved in their children's education. My own parents were extremely involved, and as the only child, they put a lot of time and effort into my education and extracurricular activities. To this day, they are quite interested in my career, and are just as involved in teaching my own year old language and music.

That is not a statement on their children's capabilities. Tiger moms are common, and it just demonstrates responsible parents who are genuinely interested in their kids' well being.

My wife and I will certainly be taking an interest in our kids' education and lives, and that is not being overprotective -- that is good parenting.

This isn't new, I've read articles on it (in California) over 20 years ago. Inspections work when a large percentage of your cars are emitting an excessive amount of pollutants. But as that percentage decreases, you end up wasting huge amounts of money.

Say an inspection costs $25 and 1 in 10 cars is not in compliance. You're basically paying $250 to detect each polluting car and require it be fixed. That's probably a worthwhile tradeoff.

Now fast-forward. After decades of inspections have successfully weeded out the worst-polluting cars, only 1 in say 1,000 cars is not in compliance. You're now siphoning $25,000 out of the economy to detect each polluting car. There's no way that's worth it.

California is pretty much already in that second state. 20 years ago the companies that make the emissions testing equipment suggested a much more financially sensible solution. Stop the inspections or reduce them to random lottery inspections which would hit each car on average every 10 years - the vast majority of cars are already clean enough and there's little to be gained from annual or bi-annual inspections. Instead, place detection equipment like used in TFA on places where cars pass by single-file, like freeway on-ramps. This equipment would automatically measure the emissions of each passing car (or truck), and if a particular car was dirty it would snap a photo of the license plate. If a car was flagged repeatedly at multiple stations, the State could then issue the owner a notice requiring him to fix it.

But the idea never got anywhere because the auto repair shops lobbied heavily against it. See, these inspections have become a billion dollar business, and they didn't want to lose that money. One person wasting money is another person making easy money.

That's why I really hate the term identity theft. I had that happen to me, and my identity wasn't stolen. I still had it. My credit card company was defrauded to the tune of a couple thousand dollars, but I was mildly annoyed and had to spend a few minutes confirming that a few purchases weren't made by me.

Actually it was the merchant which was defrauded. When you tell the credit card company that the purchase wasn't made by you, they turn around and tell the merchant to prove the purchase was made by you. If the merchant can't, the merchant eats the loss, not the credit card company. Those exorbitant interest rates credit card companies charge are to pay for deadbeats who don't pay back their credit card accounts, not fraud.

That's the real problem. The parties in control of credit card security - the credit card companies - have shifted the negative consequences of fraud onto a third party - the merchants. The merchants have a huge incentive to minimize fraud, but have no control over it other than some rudimentary tools the credit card companies provide them (you know how gas station pumps require you to enter you home zip code? That's the credit card companies' idea of "security"). Since they don't directly suffer the consequences of fraud, they've been sitting on their asses for 40 years doing nothing about it. If they'd been forced to pay for fraud, we probably would've all gotten chip and PIN in the 1980s when two-key encryption was taking off.

Anyhow, the personal cost of identity theft is clearing up your credit history afterward. You try to open up a new bank account, the bank sees all this activity and red flags on your credit report which you claim was due to identity theft, and just to be on the safe side the bank denies your new account. So in that respect it really is identity theft - someone has deprived you of the (presumably) clean credit linked to your identity and polluted it with their scummy one.

Some of the greatest minds have been interested in seemingly trivial and popular problems (e.g., Richard Feynman).

This is about science and engineering, and whether or not a phenomena can occur, and it's about public's reaction to something that was proven scientifically.

Plus, a lot of Slashdot's readers are American, and some of us are geeks who like -- wait for this -- football!

No, I can't. I started out and I sucked. I got better eventually through experience. In order for it to be truly bimodal, people have to start in either camp A or camp B and end in the same camp they started in. Because if you transition from one to another over time, any point in time will capture a group of people in between the modes. Now, you can argue that people don't spend much time in between those modes but you haven't presented any evidence for that. What's more likely is you have geocities coders on one tail and John Carmack/Linus Torvolds on the other tail. And in between are people like the presenter and I. And since I'm not instantaneously going from bad to good, the reality of the situation is most likely some degree of a normal curve filled with people trying to get better at programming or even just getting better though spending lots of time doing it and learning a little along the way.

For all your attacks on the presenter, your argument of a bi-modal distribution sounds more flawed to me. I would love to see your study and hear your argument.

To be fair, you can spend a great deal of time talking about something and make progress on the issue without solving it.

For example the current metrics are abysmal so it's worth explaining why they're abysmal. I just was able to delete several thousand lines of JavaScript from one of my projects after a data model change (through code reuse and generalization) -- yet I increased functionality. My manager was confused and thought it was a bad thing to get rid of code like that ... it was absolute dopamine bliss to me while he felt like our production was being put in reverse. KLOC is a terrible metric. But yet we still need to waste a lot of breath explaining why it's a terrible metric.

Another reason to waste a lot of time talking about a problem without reaching an answer is to elaborate on what the known unknowns are and speculate about the unknown unknowns. Indeed, the point of this article seemed to be to advertise the existence of unknown unknowns to "recruiters, venture capitalists, and others who are actually determining who gets brought into the community."

Perhaps ... but that would imply that one does not transition over time from one hump to the next or if they do, it's like flipping a light switch. When I read this I assumed that he was talking only about people who know how to program and not "the average person mixed in with programmers."

But you just said there's no way to measure this ... how could he have collected data? What data set could have satiated us? The answer is quite obvious and such collection would have been a larger fool's errand than the original article's content.

He doesn't seem overweight for me.

While I feel for the family, to say that he is not overweight shows just how much society's perception of being overweight has changed.

Take a look at this picture, for instance.

And take a look at the body fat visual chart for comparison.

With the overhanging belly, he is easily 35-40% at least. While the majority of people today are fat (especially in the US), that is not healthy. If anything, until recently, 20-25% used to be average.

Above 25-30% is the fat territory, and that's when you start increasing your risk for heart attacks, diabetes, and strokes. Mr. Goldberg may have had a lot of things going for him, but he is most certainly more than a little overweight.

Assuming he's ~6 feet, I would argue that he is probably ~30-40+ lbs overweight. That is not at all healthy. I'm not arguing everyone should have abs, but there's a happy medium here. Mr. Goldberg is very clearly on the unfortunate side of the medium.

Maybe because Net Applications is the only counter that tries to correct for known skewed sampling.

They have to correct for skewed sampling because their sample size is so small, especially for non-U.S. sites. Of the big metrics sites:

StatCounter monitors over 3 million sites (reports page hits)
W3Counter monitors over 70,000 sites (reports unique visitors per month)
Net Applications monitors over 40,000 sites (reports unique visitors per month)

Net Applications is the only one which reports IE still in the lead. Which given the sample sizes I think more calls into question their correcting algorithms than it does StatCounter's sample.

This isn't an errant bill or anything. The person called long distance that much in two months.

Wow does that bring back memories. For those who weren't around in the dialup days, certain malware would change the default dialup number for your modem to a 900 number (where you're charged per minute, like phone sex services use), which would then redial to AOL or whatever number you were trying to connect to. So you wouldn't notice anything was amiss because you'd still connect to AOL like usual, but you'd be racking up phone charges at $3/min.

After the government cracked down on phone companies which provided the 900 numbers used this way, the problem mostly disappeared for U.S. numbers. The malware switched to making the modem dial the equivalent of a 900 number in a foreign country.

It sounds like he got hit by this type of malware.

This also brings up something I've always wondered about. The power companies I've worked with seem to bend over backwards to get you onto the plan which most benefits you. When the electricity consumption at my business changed dramatically, Edison sent a guy over to talk with us to figure out what caused the change, and how to adjust our equipment and power plan to minimize our cost. Why does the power company do this, while the phone company seems content to leave you on a plan where you're paying more for worse service? I type Woodland Hills, CA DSL into Google, and it says that 6 Mbps AT&T U-verse/DSL is available there for just $34.95/mo.

Yeah, it's nonsensical because they're assuming the higher price to Chicago is correct, and you're doing something "wrong" by paying less. It's actually the higher price to Chicago which is wrong.

The root of the problem lies in lack of competition. Chicago is a United hub. So they control a plurality if not a majority of the flights to and from Chicago. That gives them quasi-monopoly powers when it comes to pricing. They've bought landing/takeoff rights for all those flights and control most of the gates. So even if a competitor underprices United, they can't increase their capacity to handle the extra tickets they'd sell. Their lower price just means they sell out their seats quicker, rather than sell more seats. Faced with selling x tickets for the same price as United, or only a few more than x tickets for a lot cheaper than United, most competitors just match United's pricing.

Consequently the price of flights to/from Chicago are higher than the market would dictate with adequate competition. And you get the perverse situation where a flight form L.A. to Chicago is more expensive than L.A. to N.Y. even though the latter flight stops in Chicago. In other words, you're not saving money by using this trick to fly to Chicago. You're just not paying the extra money United would've made because of their quais-monopoly control of Chicago. (They're still making more money than they should because you're still paying for the Chicago to N.Y. leg.)

Skiplagged.com exploits a leak in the airline's quasi-monopoly control of fares at their hub airports. The airlines can't plug that leak logistically (since their connection flights have to go through their hubs), so they're trying to get the courts to plug it for them.