> I agree that the influence of the book wasn't all bad, but I claim the influence of the book did much more bad than good. The so-called "influence on Western civilization" is little more than holding it back.

I am approximately the least religious person you'd be able to find, and I disagree. Western civilization may not have ever progressed to the point that it's in without the influence of the bible. The reason for this is the belief that god has laid down the physical laws of the universe as immutable things. If you believe that at any moment, the spirit of a rock might decide to change itself into something else, or that your god will decide to change the color of the sky, you're going to have a hard time conceptualizing the rules that govern the universe.

As to whether it's holding it back *now*, I might tend to agree.

Totally worth doing! Now if only there were some way of playing that analog record with fidelity anything even remotely approaching a dollar store cd player. Even the most expensive record player has measurable wow and flutter, and driving a needle through vinyl grooves immediately degrades the sound. What's the point of this again?

Yep, it's the same way in Seattle. There is so much competition for good programmers that you can almost write your own paycheck.

> Universities are (for the most part) private institutions,

There are very few Universities in the US that do not accept some form of government funding. Because of that, they cannot legally restrict you from any of your constitutional rights.

Doesn't the Securities Act of 1933 make it illegal to place an order on the stock market when there is no intention of that order being fulfilled?

Quoting the act:

"(2) To effect, alone or with 1 or more other persons, a series of transactions in any security registered on a national securities exchange, any security not so registered, or in connection with any security-based swap or security-based swap agreement with respect to such security creating actual or apparent active trading in such security, or raising or depressing the price of such security, for the purpose of inducing the purchase or sale of such security by others."

Why don't we just start prosecuting these jokers with already existing laws?

As someone who used Visual Studio for years and has recently switched to Eclipse, I have to say that I'm not seeing the major difference. For actual programming, and not drag and drop, VB style 'programming', Eclipse does everything you need it to do.

Also, XCode is an unintuitive pile of crap.

Hell, at 1g acceleration, you could get literally anywhere in the reachable universe in a typical lifetime.

A very, very smart move on their part.

Say China has a massive drought lasting a couple of years. Where, exactly do you think a couple hundred million people are going to go?

Make it a tax instead of a fee, and then you're talking.

I had one when I was in high school, but that was in the 1980's. They never did tell us the results.

Actually, I believe the opposite is true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

"There are some family effects on the IQ of children, accounting for up to a quarter of the variance. However, adoption studies show that by adulthood adoptive siblings aren't more similar in IQ than strangers, while adult full siblings show an IQ correlation of 0.6. Conventional twin studies reinforce this pattern: monozygotic (identical) twins raised separately are highly similar in IQ (0.86), more so than dizygotic (fraternal) twins raised together (0.6) and much more than adoptive siblings (~0.0)."

Who am I to disagree with Linus? :)

Seriously, though, I hate C++ just as much as he does. It feels like a slapped together pile of crap. If you want to write OO, use java.

Maybe they do. What if he/she is a hiring manager or and English teacher?

> You can write object orientated code in C.

You technically could...but why would you? If you want to write object oriented C, there's C++. What's the benefit?