I voted green (although technically now I'm registered as democrat, as I had to switch in '08 to vote in the democratic primary). I would be willing to bet that there are many other people who are aligned closer ideologically to the green party, but vote democrat

They were denied the iPad because they expressed intent to send it to a family member in Iran.

It largely depends on what sub-field of computer science you go into. If you do any DSP work (or more specifically, image processing/computer vision) there's going to be a ton of math. Some of those papers will make your eyes bleed. More to the point, if you're implementing some algorithm, even if you're using a library to perform say, an FFT in the actual code, you still have to be able to grok the paper to know what to do, and that will require some strong math skills.

They married after she graduated. The IPO date was variable, and seeing as she graduated from UCSF, I doubt she cares that much about the money.

It's true that In single player it would take a long time, but on battle net with a friend rushing, you could get to 70 in a day or two.

It's certainly less dark and gothic than D1 and D2, but they do still have the characteristic diablo effects (i.e. bloated corpses that explode, disemboweled bodies, blood, bile, etc). The art style is different, but not necessarily in a bad way. It grows on you.

I didn't like the art/feel at first either, but as you progress past the stages available in the beta the art grows on you. At least, it did on me (got to play for a few hours before the servers went down again). And to be fair, I don't think anyone liked the beginning stages in D2 either, i.e. for the past decade or so on battle net you'd just have a friend rush you into hell mode. People might play through for the story the first time, but beyond that the levels from 1 to 70 or so were just a stepping stone to getting to the end-game stage. The fact that you feel unenthusiastic about the early stages of D3 aren't particularly surprising. But based on what I've seen, it looks like it'll be a worthy successor to D1 and D2.

Yes. C/C++ are inherently predisposed towards being buggy and unsafe, relative to more modern languages. They trade runtime checks for minimal runtime overhead (and I'm not saying that's a bad thing), but they don't make any effort to assist the programmer in the area of code correctness. Even the few compile-time systems in place to prevent programmer error (i.e. the type system) is pretty easy to circumvent. Take for example assigning one struct to a (completely different) one (which is an illegal operation); type1 t1; type2 t2; t1 = *(type1 *) It's as easy as that to completely subvert the type system. This is because C assumes the programmer knows what they're doing/is always right, which more often than not is not the case. However, if as you say, people who write unsafe code "shouldn't be allowed near any programming language anyway", then we'd have precious few (i.e. zero) programmers. You can never tell that there's a security vulnerability in your code until it's been found, and you can never conclusively prove your code to be security-hole free. In addition, very often in industry software security is an afterthought, as it's not as tangible as implementing new features. As a result, no one spends any meaningful time on detecting vulnerabilities (which can be very subtle). This is why having a language that makes it easy to write good code and hard to write bad code is so important. C will always have a place in embedded systems and OSes because of its flexibility and speed, but it's high time that we moved away from such low level languages in other software contexts.

I'm not sure that IQ is a very effective metric for gauging someone's intelligence, seeing as the average score for IQ tests have been steadily rising since their introduction (see the Flynn Effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect). With that said, all things being equal, I would much rather have someone smarter than me calling the shots than someone dumber, the smarter the better.

Jesus, as if killing your own people isn't bad enough, you also use one of the worst passwords of all time for (multiple) government passwords. Maybe he wasn't so far off in his Barbara Walters interview; "No government in the world kills its people, unless it’s led by a crazy person” - Assad

Not just Fortune 500 companies, I have to VPN into my school network (a public, UC school no less) in order to check out license files for certain software and to access scholarly journals when I'm off campus

Agreed, more funding would go a long way. In high school my sister had a history book (for AP European history) that was written before WW2. It left a lot to be desired, to say the least. And our school district is considered one of the good ones in the area...

A minor quibble, the president was advocating manufacturing jobs (more in line with what you're saying) while the New Yorker story was the one making the case that our future is in software.

Actually her family had been homeless since she was young, but were able to move into a house recently for some time. Then the parents got into a car accident, and they had to leave. So yes, she has been homeless for much longer than 13 days. (this information was included in the yahoo article about her, which was on their site a days or two ago)