For support of this "get lucky" philosophy, I recommend N Taleb's book "Fooled By Randomness."

People get rich by working hard, yes. People get insanely rich by working hard and getting lucky. But they tend to over-attribute the outcome to working hard and discount the effect of chance. Lots of not-rich people work very very hard, but not everyone can be lucky.

Read the book.

This idea seems like a non-starter. Motherboards and chips are manufactured outside the country already. They don't have to be exported.

1. Buy AMD stock.
2. Short Intel stock.
3. ??? -- Send the kill signal to thousands of Intel computers
4. Profit!

HP calcs are my favorite as well. But I will say that the 28S was not a durable calculator. I think I've broken at least 3. But I loved that calculator model. If they would have just done something to improve the battery door, they could still be selling them.

"I'm sure I'll get modded troll or something but I'm being serious. Some software is really expensive like matlab. But it always works."

See, and there's where I have to disagree. MATLAB sucks. But it only sucks because of the license servers, etc. If it weren't for having to deal with licenses, I'd be right there with you. The program was completely brain dumb about running in a 32 bit environment if you have a 64 bit kernel (even if you install the 32 bit version of MATLAB), but I suppose that is a small thing.

I will say, the customer support has been excellent and very patient.

Or maybe he's got a concealed carry permit and a gun. In my state, that comes up in the computer records, so there's pretty good odds that the officer knows you might be armed. Traffic stops are one of the more dangerous things an officer does, so an officer is bound to be a bit on edge. I would describe the post as understanding of those facts and acting in a way such as to keep the situation as safe as possible for everyone.

I'm sure as hell going to let an officer know if there's a 357 magnum 3 inches above my wallet before I go to pull my ID out and I'm going to keep my hands in plain sight in the meantime. And it's not to make the life of the officer easier. It's to ensure my own safety.

If you have enough sense to browse the comments, you'll find common themes:

1. The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act is pretty effective at helping you deal with collectors, so go read the law.

2. You can usually get a good response by writing a letter (and you'll see why if you read the law). At the minimum you can make them comply with a "do not call me" request and make them correspond by letter.

I will add a bit of my own wisdom. Find out the laws in your state and record your telephone. I happen to be in a "one party knows" state, so I can record my calls without saying. I always ask the state the collector is in and look it up to see if it is compatible (otherwise you may need to inform them if you want to use the recordings in court).

Review your telephone recordings. Sometimes collectors will say things that don't mean quite what you think when you are on the line and under stress. I found reviewing the recordings left me with "ah ha" moments, especially when I took the conversation in the context of the FDCPA.

Despite some other commentor's opinions it was my experience that debt collectors are often professional thugs. It makes sense, thugs have to work somewhere too, and you do what you are good at.

If you have to pay a collector (I owed for a legitimate claim one time when there was a billing mistake), I recommend a one-time use credit card number. It can't be double billed if you set a limit at the correct amount. Believe me, you don't want to try to collect from a collector who owes you money because they screwed up. You can be successful, but you won't enjoy it.

Remember, you want to be polite but firm. You want your recorded voice (remember, you're going to be taping this) to sound reasonable. If you take this collector to court, you want them to be the asshole. You want the judge to get pissed on your behalf and zing them with a judgment.

Actually, insertion sort is just as good in those situations. You learn bubble sort because it is mathematically significant (i.e. you prove theorems with it).

I can't tell you whether to use Latex or some other writing platform. Personally, I use Latex. It's what I wrote my (math) dissertation in, and it is what I use for the courses I teach. I recommend that my math students become acquainted with it, because it is the standard in our academic domain.

What I can say is that if your document is large, you should use version control, whether you have collaborators or not. I used CVS for my dissertation, and I wasn't collaborating with anyone but myself. It made it devastatingly easy to have full revision histories both at work and at home. No losing _my_ work because the building burned down (that totally happened to some English students during my tenure as a grad student).

Most important though, I wrote faster because I had a history. I knew that if I screwed up my document I could go back step by step and get valid versions. If I gave a copy to my advisor, I could keep working and when he had comments ready for me 3 days later or a week later, I could pull up that specific revision to compare. I can say that revision control was possibly the difference between finishing and not finishing.

If I were to do the same thing today, I would use git for the same reasons that some of the earlier posts cite. One, it fixes many of the little things that are broken with CVS. But the big thing in my opinion is disconnected work. My pattern of work was usually to write for several hours (often disconnected from the net) and then connect and submit my work. With git you can write and commit work without a net connection, and sometimes you want to commit as you are working (whether there is a net connection or not).

It is also trivial and fast to make branches and move back and forth between them. Branching at the versions my advisor had is very fast and convenient with git.

So use revision control of some kind. It has tangible benefits.

"The fact that getting good random samples is so hard explains why pollsters nevertheless do get it wrong from time to time."

Actually, the fact that they use 95% confidence intervals is why they get it wrong from time to time. In fact, they expect to get it wrong 1 time out of 20....

1. IP RIGHTS. Teachers/Professors claiming IP rights in their lecture materials has come up a few times in my recent recollection. The theory is that they own the copyright in the material that they teach and your notes are derivative works. In the US, derivative works belong to the copyright holder, regardless of who did the works. Thus, if you write a song and I do a remix of it, you generally own the remix despite my hard work.

I think you oversimplify here. It is true that the original copyright holder has a claim on a derived work. But so does the author (in this case the student). So although it might conceivably infringe on the teacher's copyright to redistribute notes (although I'm not fully convinced of this, and I'm a teacher), the teacher doesn't automatically "own" the student's notes either.