Actually I have a lucrative C++/Linux contract

The client just tonight said "We want you to own the code".

When I hesitantly asked for permission to do some things that upstream might find offensive, he told me to go to town.

I expect the reason I've been homeless is that I quite prominently link Living with Schizoaffective Disorder and My Deepest Fear quite prominently at the top of every page of my site - including my seven page resume.

Word seems to have also gotten around that I have very high ethical standards, and so regard my half-dozen or so protest resignation letters as among my very finest written works. One of them is online somewhere but I don't recall the link.

It is true that I am unlikely to figure out how many times I have been in mental hospitals. I really am that crazy at times. However I have only just once been in one for more than a few days at a time. I got three extra months for spending twenty solid minutes quite lucidly explaining to a Court Commissioner who was quite clearly out of her depth when attempting to determine whether the mentally ill should be held involuntarily, that she was a seething idiot.

She started shouting at me. Repeatedly. I mean she totally blew her stack. She then locked me up in Western State Hospital in Lakewood Washington. They wouldn't let me have my Macbook Pro there, so I continued the development of my iOS App by hand, on paper, with a pencil.

I'm old enough to know that there was a time that that was the only way you COULD write software, as keypunch machines and trained keypunch operators were such scarce and expensive resources.

Quite commonly social workers and case managers try to force me onto the disability check, or into government subsidized housing. Always I refuse; despite being mentally ill, I am in reality not in any way disabled.

Look man: half the reason I'm a coder, is that I can still write good coder while I am floridly psychotic! That is G-d's Gospel Truth. The NAZIs used to hold Panzer manuevers in the parking lot of my old office. I'd just shut the blinds, turn out the lights, tell myself I was hallucinating, then continue with my code.

YOUR.
MOVE.

Sigh.

Kids these days...

It was several years ago that I read this in the news. I don't recall where I read it, but it was in a dead-tree newspaper.

Given that there is opposition to teaching evolution in some states, and that some state legislature tried to pass a law that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter be exactly equal to three, how is it that you assert that the opposition to critical thinking on the part of the right wing is just my imagination?

I should have mentioned that my father is also at fault, but only in his own way.

Were I to have ever asked him for an allowance, he would have just said "Go ask your mother".

Now in many ways he was a wonderful father. That's how I got accepted to study astronomy at Caltech.

My father taught me to pound nails the very instant I was strong enough to hold his hammer in two hands. I had to wait a long time before he would trust me with his circular power saw. Now I own HIS father's contractor's table saw, I am very good at carpentry so if coding ever doesn't work out I could do construction.

He did that in much the same way as little girls were taught to type, you know, in case their husband ever abandoned them. :-/

Anyway:

"Dad!!! Dad!!! the ice cream man is coming!! Can I buy an ice cream?"

He would just whip out his wallet and hand me a few dollar bills, without counting them, without ever expecting to be paid back.

That was nice at the time, but to this very day I have a problem with binge-purchasing. It is very difficult for me to keep much cash in my wallet for any length of time.

Really what should have happened, is that THE TWO OF THEM should have agreed on some reasonable allowance, then if I wanted an ice cream, I would be expected to pay for it out of my allowance.

For example, just the other day I saw an ad that said something like "AAPL! Could you turn one thousand dollars into one hundred thousand dollars almost overnight?"

That's known as a "Pump-And-Dump Scheme" Arguably such an advertisement should be illegal, but this is America!

To teach critical thinking, would be for example to teach schoolchildren not to trust advertising.

The right wing quite forcefully opposes such forms of instruction.

Actually that is precisely what the US Federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration is for.

Perhaps money changed hands.

The key words here are "PER UNIT".

I expect you know very well that just about all software costs less than a penny per unit to deliver into the hands of customers.

As I recall, in 2002 the Oxford Semiconductor OXFW911 Firewire/IDE storage bridge chip cost eight bucks apiece, when purchased in quantity. It was a little small than a dime.

For eight bucks, you got a 32-bit ARM7TDMI microprocessor, 64 kB of Flash for your firmware, 1800 bytes (yes, really: BYTES) of RAM, an IDE core for talking to your disk drive, a Firewire link-layer core (for talking the logical 1394A protocol), and a serial UART that was thrown in just for grins.

Now that was in 2002. What would that same chip cost now, if it were designed and manufactured today? Probably about ten cents.

However I expect the logic diagram, the physical design of the chip - that is, the mask pattern that is printed onto the silicon wafer - the verification of the design before manufacturing, a few rounds of bad silicon and design revision, cost tens of millions of dollars.

So in reality, it is quite possible that DARPA, or one of its contractors, could blow a billion dollars on the design of a chip, that when actually cast into silicon was a very small chip. The price of manufacturing just one chip is, for the most part, it's "real estate". That is, the physical area, like one square centimetre.

The wholesale price of the chip is then determined for the most part by how many you make. There are HUGE economies of scale in silicon manufacturing.

You are correct to the extent that you are discussing the proposed Pay It Forward plan, in which tuition is free, but one pays a fixed fraction of one's income for twenty-five years after graduation. One does not have to pay if one does not have income, and one's debt is forgiven after twenty-five years.

But to the best of my knowledge the Pay It Forward plan has yet to actually be implemented anywhere.

Student loans are funded by banks, and guaranteed by either the states or the federal government. The government pays the interest while you are in school, but if you are not enrolled - even if you haven't graduated - you have to start paying, even if you don't have a job.

A while back I calculated that student loans are actually just welfare for the banks. For the government to pay the interest while you are in school, as well as to guarantee the loan, so that the government pays if you default, costs the taxpayer more money than if the government just gave you the money outright, say with the Pell Grant that I received starting in 1982.

However if any legislator were to propose that we eliminate student loans, but then used the money saved to give outright grants, the banks would see to it that that legislator loses the next election.

When I was six years old, I figured I was old enough to ask for an allowance.

"Mom? Can I have an allowance?"

"No Mike."

"But Mom! I want to buy my own candy bars."

"No Mike."

I begged and pleaded for like an hour. Finally Mom agreed to twenty-five cents a week. That meant that every two weeks, I could buy my own candy bar!

The following week I asked for my allowance. "What allowance?" Mom replied. I broke down in tears. "But Mom, you said I could have twenty-five cents a week." "No I didn't."

She did finally give me just that week's twenty-five cents. After that I gave up on even asking.

I have an older sister. When mom would treat the two of us to a movie, she would give my sister the money for both of our tickets. Mom pointed out that because Jean was older than I, she was more responsible with money.

I was down with that. Jean was three years older than I; the maturity difference between six and nine years old was obvious to me even then.

But when I got to be nine, Mom would still give Jean the money when treating us both to a movie. Even when I was in high school.

The end result of my own mother not trusting me with money, and not wanting to teach me to handle my own money, is that I did not finally figure out how to handle money ON MY OWN until I was a half-million dollars in debt! I am not fucking kidding.

Even the IRS, while the hassled me quite a bit, wrote me off as uncollectable. The California Franchise Tax Board, Maine Revenue Services and Canada Revenue Agency didn't exactly write me off. They just stopped calling.

I expect Citibank would like to know where I am. If they ever find me, I will declare bankrupcy.

But now, I'm a wizard with GNUCash, OpenOffice Calc, Excel and Quattro Pro. I don't have no accountant. I don't need no stinkin' accountant. I know how to read financial books.

However it is quite unlikely that I will ever purchase a home again. If I ever do it will either be because I scored options with a successful startup, or a start a successful business myself.

If you have a child yourself, you could save them - and yourself - a lot of trial and tribulation if you buy them a piggy bank at the very first opportunity. That would be when the could be trusted to handle a penny - yes a one cent piece, or your own national currency equivalent - without sticking it in their mouth and asphyxiating.

Get one of the ceramic piggy banks that does not have a cork stopper, so you have to break it open with a hammer.

When your chillun sees what has become of his financial management upon cracking open his or her piggy bank, raise his allowance to a nickel.

Do this the right way, and they'll put themselves through college, as did a close friend of mine from high school. He was promoted to manager at McDonalds when he was eighteen, and had only just the week before graduated high school.

It occurred quite a long time ago, but at the time no solution was proposed.

Regular steel bolts have hexagonal heads that are flat on top. Bolts made of high-strength steel are marked with three - if I recall correctly - radial lines.

You can see that it would be easy and cheap to mark a regular steel bolt with those three lines, then sell it for the high-strength premium.

This caused at least on death: a worker who was torquing a bolt while building the first Saturn car factory snapped the head off a bolt and fell to his death.

An Army general commented that when he took his battalions tanks out for training in the desert, their tracks were littered with bits of broken off bolts, as well as the occasional tank tread.

What they actually did about this was to test samples of bolt shipments, but such testing was very expensive and so could not provide good coverage.

However it has been years since I last heard about it. Has the counterfeit bolt problem been solved? If so how?

That's why, if you watch TV, you should use broadcast, or watch streaming media over the internet with The Onion Router.

If you have cable, or your use Dish network, your provider can tell what shows you watch and when. In principle they could tell when you change channels in the middle of the show, either because you dislike or disagree with what you are watching, or are excited about something else.

Obama already experimented with individually-targeted TV ads during his 2008 campaign. During this year's congressional elections everyone will be doing it.

I will be writing up a submission about it but if you want to do it yourself, be my guest. I read about it in The Columbian the other day, the Vancouver Washington paper.

... to prevent malaria. That's more or less an amount of ladies' nylons, just enough to cover your bed, but many in the developing world do not have that much cash. Really they don't. So they die in a horrible, cheaply and easily preventable way.

- out with soap!

• IBM's Watson computer has parts of its memory cleared after developing an acute case of potty mouth at the RISKS Forum

It seems that Watson learned some bad words when IBM turned it on to the Urban Dictionary.

I only have a vague understanding of databases.

Actually I was heavily into scientific computing when I was in school. I'd like to get back into that.

I don't know whether it's changed any, but in 1993, the FORTRAN code used in high energy physics was an awful rat's nest. There was a movement afoot to rewrite it all in C++/

Plenty of them are coldly rational, yet completely unaware that they are floridly delusional.

Almost forgotten these days is that CERN wasn't established to discover anything. Much like the Olympics, it was established to give World War II's former enemies something peaceful to do with each other, in hopes of preventing World War III.