Wars don't decide who is right. Only who is left.

if you are talking about optimizing one's social media experience, I agree, of course. I don't think even the people who use one strategy for ordering their gif's, vs another strategy, would think of it as a technical issue. At least, I hope not. It's a dumb article.

No, I am just observing it. I am neither a millenial nor a baby boomer.

if it didn't, we wouldn't about it.

grand kids. Gen-X is the generation in the middle.

everyone else becomes collateral damage.

Not as a hallmark of a generation... unless it is a generation in which it is so exaggerated.

Because boomers and millennial are 2 largest generations. This made both generations obvious targets for marketing. As a result, both have exaggerated egos. Millennials vs boomers is a battle of the egos.

Well, millennials are hated just like the baby boomers once were. For the same reasons, too. Because they are a large generation, a lot of commercial endeavors are geared at marketing to them. So they have an exaggerated sense of self-importance and not enough self-awareness.

Optimizing your social media is Slashdot material now? Stuff that matters? This is so dumb.

High quality public education is not seen as a possibility in the US. The "right wing" approach is to go for the highest quality education by any means possible. Allowing public funds for private education initiatives is a means to the end of improving education. In public education there is often inverse correlation between funding (per student) and quality. A number of current left-leaning initiatives are actually directly aimed at reducing the quality of public education by removing advanced classes even when they are funded.

So I would not agree that high quality public education is a left-wing agenda anymore. The left wing agenda regarding schools seems to be highly-funded public education regardless of its quality. It's not that surprising given that the 2 highest donors to the Democratic Party are trial lawyers and public school unions. Unions are just doing what they should be doing -- fighting for more pay and less responsibility for their members. But in the case of public school unions, less responsibility means ignoring poor quality when distributing funding.

Will over-count because of hardlinks. But hardlinks are not really in vogue, so you'll probably get the right ballpark.

In Windows, right click on top-level directories on each drive and select properties. The resulting dialog box will tell you how many files are in those directories (altogether -- not just just directly underneath). You will need to add them up across all top-level direct. But most (sane) installations don't have too many top-level folders on each drive. You will need to do this as an administrator user with elevated privileges or you won't have the rights to view/read some of the files.

Slashdot is obviously a site more likely to be visited by engineers than it is by former English majors. And yet its bent is clearly left-leaning. Which is at least one data point for thinking that engineers are more likely to be left leaning than right leaning. A counterargument would be that if it could be shown that slashdot editors (who do get to get pick the content) have more writing than engineering background. But I don't know if that's the case.

BTW, infinity can be treated as a number if you consider a projection from the top point of circle hanging over the line. All point on the circle will correspond to some point on the line, except for the point from which you project. But you can say that this is the point which corresponds to infinity. This 1-point compactification of a real line allows treating of infinity as a number because it consistently obeys arithmetic operations. If you start talking about -infty vs +infty as being different, it does not obey basic arithmetic operations because 1/0=infty. But 1-point compactification works. 1/(-infty)=0=1/infty. -infty=infty is consistent with 1/0 = 1/(-0) = -1/0.

There is an interesting interplay between closure-under-an-operation and look-there-are-objects-which-can-be-described-by-the-abstractions-we-just-invented.

We start with integers because it's most civilizations needed to invent to deal with having a scale of more than 100 people.

But then we need to divide integers into equal groups, so get an operation of division. After realizing that this division is doesn't work as we expect, we sometimes invent the closure of the division operation and call it fractions. And then we discover all the uses that fractions have. Greeks practically worshiped fractions as all-encompassing.

Sometimes we also realize that the operation of subtraction isn't close and it maybe useful to have numbers which are a closure of subtraction. So we get negative numbers.

By a complete accident, while studying the science of measuring areas of land, Pythagoras' school (and it's questionable whether it was Pythagoras himself) discovered that the operation of taking square root meant that there are numbers which were not rational. So irrational numbers were created as a closure of rational numbers. But the pattern is broken there somewhat. He knew what it was a closure of, but not under which operations. Well, technically only algebraic numbers were created by this process, but that didn't really matter because Pythagoras didn't know algebra. But the Greeks also knew what pi was. I am just not sure if they knew that there were non-algebraic irrational numbers, but to this day we call all the real numbers which are not rational "irrational."

Well, now that we have a square root and we have a clear understanding of negative numbers, someone ponders what if we look at the closure of all "real" numbers under the square root operation. Seems entirely abstract because they don't "exist." But the mathematical operations are consistent, so why not? Until someone (Euler I think) has realized pretty quickly that multiplication by i=sqrt(-1) is actually the same as rotating by 90 degrees in a 2-plane. And then all rotations can be described as multiplications by powers of "i". Which quickly (btw) answers the question "if i is a sqrt(-1), then what is sqrt(i)?" It's the 45 degree point on the unit circle (of course). AKA 1/sqrt(2) + i/sqrt(2).

So if the "imaginary" numbers don't exist, I suppose rotations don't exist, either.

By the way, go ahead an eat -3.23 apples right after you observe -4 birds fly by.