Most of the things we are willing to give our money for were once only a thought in someone's mind. Going from mind to finished product is a long and hard road, filled with failures implementing even very good ideas. Do you really think mankind could have progressed as it did in the last 100 years if those insightful people could not profit greatly from their risks and efforts?

Yes, and like the music industry, if a pirating corporation only has to pay a "fair" price when caught there would be no incentive NOT to rip off the artist. There must be a penalty way over and above what should have been paid in order to keep would-be pirating corporations honest.

Rust is just the new language Servo is being written in. Servo is meant only as the core of a browser engine, not the browser itself. I really don't care about Servo, but I am excited about rust. I have a proof-of-concept product written in Perl. After watching a dozen or so later dated rust videos, and reading 1/4 of their nightly book, I have decided to convert my product from the Perl proof-of-concept code to a final product written in rust. I was going to do it in C.

Rust has constructs that automatically prevent things like dangling pointers, race conditions amongst multiple threads and so on. Rust also promises to compile to C/C++ efficiency and near-speed. Rust has some higher level constructs, too.

On the other hand I know from experience that things will not go as smooth as the rust group thinks it will. Nothing ever does. It will take 1-2 years for me to code, test and market my product, so I am okay with rust's newness.

I agree wholeheartedly with your comments for reinventions of C. However, I believe rust is going to be the surprise language of the decade. First, the fact that rust is changing does not bother me. It is a new language, after all. I just think they used the word "stable" too early. I am about 1/2 way through the rust book. I've had to learn some very new (to me) concepts but I would expect that from a language that claims genuinely new capabilites, and I now see how the promises of no segfaults and easy concurrent programming can actually be obtained. As for the community standards, some anonymous person above linked to the rust moderation team, calling them an attack squad. If you browse through their questions/answers area you will see an absense of strife. The questions are all answered in a very friendly manner. This will be a very interesting language to watch.

You obviously know nothing of the process. I lost my first patent attempt after years of work and numerous back and forth rejections from the examiner. I later obtained a patent in a different IT field after 7 years of hard, expensive work, and again numerous rejections. It is very difficult to get a patent.

You will be much better off waiting a year till the Windows 10 bugs are worked out.

I upgraded to Windows 10 five days ago on one of my Dell GX960 Core 2 Duo machines. Windows 10 will *NOT* drive the HP LP2475w monitor that was working fine with Windows 7 at the recommended native resolution. The lowered resolution it will drive it at is distorted. I had to replace the machine with a different Windows 7 machine. I do not have any monitors smaller than 24 inch, and I do not have any Windows 7 disks, so I sat the trial GX960 on a shelf for now.

As a retired QA guy, I can tell you that checking that no files can grow without bound is standard fare. Same with exercising all code for long periods of time, as you pointed out. That means there was not a single experienced QA guy on the team.

By the way, CSV was the golden standard for many years. Given the tight compactness/memory budget that space projects have, CVS with it's small foot print might well be the logical choice.

45% of boys who took the test passed. 27% of girls who took the test passed. What if, dare I say it? Perhaps boys and girls don't like the same things?

If a site banned the sale of goods stolen from your home, would that be censorship or refusal to join in with the thieves?

This was played out already, albeit in a different scenario.

Over 25 years ago I was admitted into the SUNY Binghamton (NY) CS masters degree program. I had no CS training at all and did not qualify. However, their affirmative action program included something like extra entry points for veterans so I got in. I was required to take tough summer long CS course, along with many African American and female students. It brought us up to speed enough to compete next semester with those who were already knowledgeable . Otherwise we would not have made it.

Affirmative Action students spent their own money and their own time. The reward for America was a raising of the skills level for a lot more people, white (me) as well as black. I don't know if AA like this is still legal, but what Google is suggesting - the effective sequestering of unprepared individuals until they are ready - is a good idea.

PS: I finished 11th of an original 100 on the MS overall final

I mostly agree, but let me add an additional idea.

Eaton Corp (large and small electrical controls devices) moved their HQ to Ireland a few years. They can claim the higher US expenditures and the lower Irish tax rates. Smart for the investors. Terrible for America as a whole. I tend to be right of center, but I see what the British are doing as a step in the right direction.

The real, permanent solution would be to eliminate corporate taxes altogether. Buildings and piles of corporate paperwork do not have feelings, for example "enjoyment of less taxation", so jealousy should not be aroused at this idea. Instead, just tax the profits of the people who own the corporation at a slightly higher rate. If those people want to move to another country to avoid the personal income taxes, so be it, but the majority would stay right here, and there would be no more Eaton style HQ transfers.

Good critical thinking. Yes, indeed, you are right. Reminds me that NASA touted a Mars rock a number of years ago, and even suspected it had the remains of life on it. It turned out that it was not that old, but there were remains of life, early earth microbes.

In the pdf, the University of California studied the effect of programming languages on software quality without including Ada, the one single language that is designed for software quality. That says more about the U of C than the study says about it's intended topic.

Keeping 1G of records on disk virtually free. Checking each and every record periodically for the 5 year limit costs money. It is all about deniability.