Total program cost divided by number of units delivered.

Any other number is bullshit.

Unless that one man happens the CEO of a publicly-owned corporation with a $5.6B market capitalization, who is speaking on behalf of that corporation's (very wealthy) investors... investors who also happen to give giant campaign contributions.

[No person shall] be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law

Independent clauses. Learn what they mean.

THIS.

Maybe with some hard, government-sponsored and -approved research to back it up, we'll stop using torture... I don't care if the government stops condoning torture because it's been proven to be ineffective or because it's morally wrong, just so long as they stop.

All *viruses* are immune to antibiotics, because antibiotics affect *bacteria*, not *viruses*.

Antibiotics are only used for viral infections to stave off secondary (bacterial) infections.

Not even remotely true. Many, if not most, catastrophes have plenty of warning - most people just ignore the warning signs until it's too late.

FYI, building your house (or factory, or other critical infrastructure) on the slope of an active volcano or on top of an active fault line is "ignoring the warning signs".

You could also argue that it was his duty to inform the higher-ups that their lawbreaking was obvious. You have a moral as well as a fiduciary duty to inform management of risks that could impact the business. If you know of a situation that could cost the company millions/billions in fines, civil judgements, and bad PR, and you *don't* report it, you're not doing your job.

(AFIK) Under Sarbanes-Oxley, not reporting illegal activity to management could wind up costing *you* your freedom. A paper trail will cover your ass when the shit inevitably hits the fan.

Tolkien wrote about (and used) his invented languages in his personal correspondence as well as in his scholarly (non-fiction) work.

Don't forget that he was a linguist first and foremost. His invented languages were object lessons in linguistic theory.

C is a perfect language to cut teeth on if the goal is to become the best programmer one can be.

Then explain to me why the best engineering schools on the planet (MIT, Stanford, CalTech) now use Python as their instruction language. Prior to that they used Lisp. At no point did they ever use C.

Just because you *can* do something doesn't mean you *should* do it. A good engineer uses the best tool for the job, period. If you worked for me and spent hours writing a C program that could have been done in minutes in a dynamic language, you'd get a reprimand (at the very least).

2 problems with that statement:

1 - in the real world, there's never enough time to design, code and test everything properly. I've been programming professionally for 23 years, and I can count the number of times I've had enough time to do something on one hand.

2 - Efficient, yes. Reliable, not necessarily. Even highly experienced C programmers write code with buffer overruns, memory leaks, etc. Those kinds of bugs are basically impossible to create in a memory-managed language. Using libPCRE in C it takes a dozen lines of code (if not more) to duplicate what you can do in a single line of Perl. How much additional code would you have to write in a C program to duplicate the behavior of turning on Taint mode in Perl?

Exactly. When you are writing code for a living, time is money. The tool that lets you do the most work with the least effort maximizes your RoI. Time to market is a competitive advantage. Programmer efficiency is almost always more important than execution efficiency.

On a decent Linux distro, virtually all of the Perl modules you need are installable through the package system.

That said, I'd rather wrestle with CPAN than JVM classpath issues.

Dynamic (scripting) languages are no less "real" than compiled languages. Both have their place, their strengths, and their weaknesses, which is something a "seasoned developer" should know.

An instruction language should just get out of your way and let you concentrate on doing stuff and understanding the CONCEPTS, instead of concentrating on making the compiler/interpreter understand you or doing routine housekeeping (eg: memory management). This is true for real-world development, but is especially relevant when teaching someone how to program. For this reason, Python is an excellent choice as a first language -- even MIT uses Python as a teaching language. (I can't think of a better endorsement than that)

The advantage that Python has over other dynamic languages (Perl, Ruby) is that it is designed for readability and clarity. Even as a die-hard Perl programmer, even I can admit that Python is an easier language to learn and explain, and is probably the first language I'll teach my children. Whether it's (IMHO) dumbed-down syntax is an advantage or a disadvantage for doing serious work is a subject of debate (if not holy wars).

C is a wonderful language for a specific class of problem, but it has lots of problems that make it suboptimal (if not completely unsuitable) for other tasks. Knowing *when* to use C (and, more importantly, when *not* to use it) is as important as knowing *how* to use it, if not more so. It is not a good teaching language for a beginning programmer, any more than it is a good language for general application development. Someone who doesn't understand this has no business calling themselves a "seasoned developer".

The States Rights argument was killed on April 9th, 1865, and it's tombstone was erected on July 9th, 1868.

If the objective is to keep kids from seeing Pr0n, the better approach is a .kids TLD. This way you can have contractual requirements (and penalties) that the content there must be kid-safe. Of course that opens the debate as to what is "kid safe"... I don't want my kids exposed to evangelical Christian propaganda anymore than the religious retards want their kids to find out about birth control and evolution.

It's never going to be safe to let your kids out on the wild, wooly .com internet without supervision. It's a pipe dream by lazy parents, a textbook example of the low-effort thinking that promotes conservatism.

Ron Paul's strength is that he accurately identifies a lot of problems.

Ron Paul's weakness is that his "solutions" to those problems are dangerously naive, based on long-discredited theories, or are just downright crazy (or all of the above).

Any enthusiasm about RP has to be tempered with the realization that even a broken clock tells the right time twice a day.