use haskell;

We get about 300 days of sun a year in the Bay Area. If you choose Stanford there is a non-negligible chance that you will become significantly less interested in algorithms, and much more interested in things like hiking, cycling, partying, etc. Stanford has a much greater "normal person" component (athletes, dumb rich kids) than MIT. Consequently, you will wind up a little more normal as well. Based on the people I know who went to MIT, if you choose that route almost the exact opposite will occur. You will exit a significantly better engineer at the expense of learning social niceties and basic grooming. Both skills (engineering & people) can take you far in life. You can't neglect either.

BTW, something tells me you know your USACO score by heart. :-)

Yeah, I have to say I was pretty on the fence between MIT and Walla Walla Community College (go Warriors!). But this has really sealed the deal.

Anybody who is nerdy enough to write in to Slashdot bemoaning the probable demise of these shows is going to have no problem clearing up their busy Friday night social schedule in order to watch them.

Who's objecting? There's a difference between naysaying and simply pointing out the downsides, as well as the upsides, of some potential solutions.

Ignorance is what got us into this predicament in the first place, sheesh.

That is definitely the CW, but I wonder about it. It seems like it was much more the case before Adobe came along and started crushing QuarkXPress into oblivion. The UI for Mac and Win InDesign is practically identical now. What's the argument for spending extra money for a Mac as a publisher or designer nowadays?

I thought the same thing, but then wondered why MSFT would be so stupid as to put cheap Macs into the hands of users. I mean let's be honest, the Apple tax is the only thing keeping an additional like 25% of the Windows user base from switching.

I therefore posit that Steve Jobs is actually financing PsyStar. Although he would never be down with such a retarded name.

People who take the time to search out and install ad-blocking software are not interested in clicking on banner ads anyways. I can probably count on my right hand the number of times I've (purposely) clicked on ad in the 15 years I've been surfing the web. Anyone who is annoyed at the mere act of having to look at a banner ad is highly unlikely to click on one. Thus the marginal impact on ad revenue is probably low.

And, just like every discussion ever about torrenting, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference what anyone thinks about it, because the practice will continue regardless :-) Moreso for ad blockers since they are 100% legal. So might as well stop crying.

I think "little effort" overstates things a bit. Real names seem like a large-enough keyspace if you go outside of middle America and take the entire world into account. The name of a famous world leader, properly capitalized, hashes to 82f028fc9a88d87445a91190400a5516c55e8973. If anybody can identify it, I'd be fascinated to hear how they did it. And to save you the trouble no this hash is not found in Google :-)

Contribute using the SHA1 hash of your real name as your anonymous nickname. If you ever want to be identified you can verify that it was you who made the contributions.

As someone who is starting a math grad program next year and got an 800 on the GRE verbal, I can't tell you how happy I am to hear you say that :-) Boasting aside, I have always felt that people miss out on the distinction between mathematics and computation. Performing mathematical operations sequentially to arrive at an answer, a la a computer, is what you do on the SAT (and I assume the ACT as well.) This is a very different feat from sitting down with a math book and trying to wrap your ahead around a theoretical concept. To me, writing a proof has always felt like far more of a right-brained activity
than a left-brained one. When I'm thinking deeply about something mathematical, the feeling I get is akin to what I experience when playing music or drawing--completely different from performing addition and subtraction. I theorize that this is why a lot of math professors are crummy arithmeticians.

We have way more arable land than we do water to irrigate it. It takes 50x as much fresh water to grow a pound of beef as a pound of rice or soy beans. The fresh water constraint will bind long, long before we ever run out of places to grow or graze--in fact it's already being reached in the developing world. In your terms, we could stretch this planet a lot further as vegetarians than as omnivores.

I hate to be that guy on /. who can't take a joke, but... brine shrimp have a really important niche role in the food chain. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but basically without brine shrimp and things like it, there would be none of the larger tasty fish that we like so much to eat so much. This is why it drives conservationists nuts when people bitch and moan about environmental regulations aimed at protecting something which seems insignificant to the layperson. You fail to see the interconnectedness of it all.