I'm a software engineer with a MS in CS and over 20 years of experience in industry, mostly in research and design.

Computer science and programming are not needed by the general population and will go to waste for the vast majority of people.

Deductive and inductive logic and proofs should already be covered in math courses. Applying proofs to algorithms would make for a nice subtopic in math.

Math courses should be buttressed and CS topics can be used to help do that, but requiring a course of study in CS or programming as a requirement for graduating from high school is stupid and self-serving baloney from code.org.

I'd be interested to hear what sorting problem gets transformed from O(N^2) to O(N!) by use of linked lists?

I would think that in the worst case, a linked list should only give a factor of O(N) worse performance over an O(1) array or hash table lookup.

So, I could see a O(N^2) algorithm becoming O(N^3) but would be very interested to hear how it becomes O(N!) instead?

This would be like deciding the 2nd amendment doesn't apply to modern guns because they are much more advanced and capable than the muskets and rifles of the late 1700s.

This would be like saying today's guns aren't arms.

How was 'broadband' ever not a telecommunications service?

Today's internet packet switching communications services are just an evolution and massive improvement on our older circuit based phone systems.

Internet communications definitely and obviously fall under the umbrella of telecommunications.

Toyota has been talking a big game on batteries and EVs for more than a decade now.

Until they actually start producing something new/impressive at scale with a reasonable price tag on it, ignore the hype.

To decipher a type in C you often have to read it backwards starting from the name. E.g.:

int const * const x[10];

x is an array of 10 elements of constant pointers to constant integers.

The point being, C is probably one of the last languages to which you should look for guidance on typing variables.

Toyota has been making similar questionable claims about their development of solid state batteries for more than ten years now. It's all vaporware so far and this PR announcement doesn't sound any different either.

Toyota's announcements about their battery tech should be ignored until they actually demonstrate it, put a price tag on a vehicle with one inside it, sell it at some volume, and 3rd parties can independently evaluate it.

I had this exact scenario happen to me -- albeit only once so far.

A mildly inebriated young man and his friend rang my doorbell late at night claiming that his phone was somehow in my house. I politely sent him away. He actually came back a few minutes later re-asserting his claims. I told him to call the police if he believed I had his stolen property. Mercifully, that was the last I saw of him.

This idea has no merit whatsoever. It points to a real sickness in our society that such a looney idea can raise millions of dollars in capital.

To clarify, there are two independent issues here:

1) Disciplining clocks to mark the passage of time on Moon the same way they do on Earth in a synchronized fashion -- effectively ignoring / compensating for relativistic gravitational effects.

2) Choosing a particular Earth timezone that (all) people on the Moon will use.

To me, doing anything other than 1) is just plain crazy. I don't see any good reason for not keeping in-sync with the passage of time on Earth. The relative relativistic effects are tiny and completely unnoticeable to humans over the course of a day. The only exception is scientific measurements that need a highly accurate and precise measure of the passage of local time, which should use local atomic clocks.

On 2), who really cares? People should just specify the TZ they are using if there is any confusion. I imagine a Chinese mission would likely use Beijing TZ, whereas an American mission would use Eastern, and so on, as their sleep schedules should likely tie to their support people on Earth. There is no strong reason to try to force any one particular choice for everyone on Moon.

Yes, but within every gravitational field time flows "normally" according to the SI definition of a second. It is only when you try to compare clocks running in different kinetic and gravitational frames that strange things start happening.

You definitely want to synchronize the passage of human-scale time to UTC so that all humans have one common clock based upon which they can all accurately coordinate their actions.

If you instead allow human-scale clocks on the moon to run at their natural rate according to the SI definition of a second, then you will simply be creating heartache for everyone else down the line as calendars on Earth and Moon slowly become dissociated from one another. Please don't do that without very, very good reason.

Obviously, scientific applications that truly need to accurately measure the passage of time should stick to the definition of SI seconds in their local gravity well.

That's not true at all.

Most programming competition questions are about solving a known problem with a known solution -- potentially with some minor twists or recombinations thrown in -- quickly. You practice a bunch of those and you will know a bunch of the known problems and their known (decently efficient) solutions and how to recognize and apply them quickly to a problem at hand.

That's all about gaining knowledge, problem recognition, and application. It won't make you a perfect programmer or anything like that, but it will certainly expand your base of knowledge at the very least.

Basic logic and proofs go together very well with programming and CS more generally. A good program is made up of logic that you can prove achieves some desired purpose. Programming can be a hands-on way of learning how to manipulate logic and how to consider and tie up all the loose ends and edge cases.

Basic deductive and inductive reasoning along with probability and statistics don't get nearly enough attention in K-12.

All of those topics are vastly more useful to most people in their lives than the usual algebra -> geometry -> trigonometry -> calculus high school pre-college track. People going into science and engineering need that pre-college math track too, but everyone could benefit from understanding fundamentals of logic, probabilities, and dataset analysis (and metrics) better.

How long will it take to recharge that giant battery pack with existing recharge technology?

Sure, someday those megawatt chargers they are talking about here might be deployed nationwide, but that day won't be for years from now.

In the mean time, how much downtime would you need to "refuel" this thing?