Yep -- they've made it so that the "healthy" "real food" stuff is pricier and more expensive so those of us from the lower socioeconomic strata cannot get them so easily. And that's also where the greatest levels of chronic disease are found -- not surprisingly.

Yes, but if you are taught the subject wrong you may learn to hate it, in which case you won't enjoy it. If your introduction was not a good one, you won't like it.

So are you saying a major portion of programming ability is actually _communication_, not just reasoning and writing code?

I would want to point out though that some people may need the right teacher. If they don't get it they may also not have a teacher suited to them. I think several different types of teachers would need to be tried before they could say they just can't get it. Not everyone can do with the cookie-cutter education we have now. Of course this requires the person to have enough motivation to try enough before giving up.

Well if it's genetics, then there's no hope at all we can ever change it for the better, is there? Remember, it's not blameworthy how much "mental resources" a given person has.

(I am adding a response because Slashdot doesn't allow comment editing) In addition to this, I'd want to add my own experience and elaborate. At my college, I am going for a degree in Computer Science. But many of the people in this class are only majoring in Computer Science because they want the money, not because they are passionate about the subject, apparently. That is a problem. University should be for those who are passionate about the kind of intellectual fields it teaches, plus the necessary talent (though I tend to think those things are correlated, if you're no good with something you'll probably give up on it). I consider myself in this category. It should not be used for people who have no passion. For those who just want to earn a good wage, vocational school is better and should be a solid option. For those who want to pursue an intellectual topic in depth with passion, university is better. That's how it should go, and the society should accommodate that instead of either demanding university degrees for everything or swinging too far the other way toward some anti-college sentiment, and people should be able to go into the path that suits them best.

Yet other people are interested in those things, and that's not a bad thing. The real answer here is that (gasp!) there is no one-size-fits-all blanket answer for everybody. Some should go to university; others shouldn't. It depends on the individual. Of course, that also means job requirements need to take that into account.

I'm curious: what is the exact and thorough research on how bad this "waste" problem really is? How could a slow "seepage" of waste over geologic time from an imperfect repository really be that much of an "uber" threat that it would present a threat to the future generations which would dwarf all the chemicals and crap we are spewing out into the atmosphere all the time now? Esp. considering the stuff that would persist for geologic time would be the long-lived lower-activity materials. And if someone breaks in and brings a piece of the material home? Well people would learn real quick not to do that again.

What's so butt-sex stupid is just how much higher the price-point on those diets is compared to the junk ones, often pricing them out of the range of those who need them the most -- the poor and lower classes who cannot afford expensive treatment and so for whom prevention is paramount. 200 years ago, the "good" diets were all you could get (at least insofar as food types were concerned, not everyone could necessarily get the right food amounts so there was malnutrition in many places). Yet all the "junk" stuff which takes more steps between the ground and the consumer costs less.

So a truly socially-inept person could not be a good coder?

Whether the skills are suitable or not is beside the point. THE more important factor is not as much those skills themselves but what it took to get them: DISCIPLINE and the ability to WORK HARD to do the practice even when it felt BORING. With that, if the skills they have are not adequate, they can LEARN the skills they need. Discipline is a skill that we should build our culture around instilling. It shouldn't be limited to a few "whizzes" - it should be the standard. Whatever our talents may be, programming or not, they cannot be realized without that fundamental skill. So I would see nothing wrong with hiring them.

(This from a person who lacked the DISCIPLINE to develop mad coding skills during his youth years despite having perhaps as many as 21 of them to do it in (depending on if you count to the present or to the realization) and only realized the crushing implication of that in the past few years and just recently realized the value of DISCIPLINE.)

Why? How do you know what "women" do? There are about 3.5 billion of them on the planet and I seriously, seriously doubt you've met even a thousandth of a percent of that.

I think we shouldn't be trying to terraform Mars anyways until we've first ruled out the possibility of the existence of any native life. Evidence keeps coming in that makes the odds look better and better there may be something there, yet we have nothing to be able to say conclusively and decisively one way or the other. I think we should get that out of the way first.

If we don't, and there was life and we destroyed it, well, for one, is that moral? Even if it's only simple organisms, is it right to just blow them away? Especially we want to claim to care about, say, life here on Earth. What kinds of attitudes would we be putting out into the universe that might get us into trouble in the more distant future when maybe we could actually travel somewhere else with real, intelligent life? More "tangibly", we would be doing science a HUGE disservice by destroying an example of a second natural biosphere, something which would be of enormous scientific value in its own right to study.

The ruthless ideology of exploitation is what created a lot of the problems we have right here on Earth. Why should we continue it?

So I think we should get that down first. If there is life, we should try to find a way to preserve it. That may mean sacrificing terraforming, or even colonization at all, although I'd imagine that if we actually worked on understanding that life once we found it, we might be able to figure out a way to live on the planet without also denying it life.

And even evidence of past life could be vulnerable. In that case it's not so much a moral issue as an issue of scientific value. I think we need a prudent approach to Mars. I don't think we shouldn't go; I just think we need prudence and a measured plan.

Personally, I think the nukes should be used to resurrect Project Orion and send a manned mission to the Jupiter or Saturn system, or even further to Pluto or even Eris. THAT would be awesome.

So when is it OK or not OK to use a "goto" to handle errors, and what are the alternatives? When you have multiple steps which can fail and you have buffers allocated, for example? As this is where it would seem most tempting to use a goto. But as you say, rules aren't meant to just be "obeyed", so if the goto lets you have a common return statement and save from duplicating the deallocation code, sounds like a good idea to me.

I note all these comments about whether or not girls are "interested" in it. But: 1. do you know WHY some may not be interested? Are you absolutely sure that cultural factors have nothing to do with it? 2. perhaps more importantly, there are some who ARE interested. Do you agree that a discrimination-free (actually meaning, "same as what 'boys' get") environment should be given to them? You better. 3. assuming someone is not interested because they are a girl, no matter what you think about how many or few are interested, and then acting on that assumption, is a form of discrimination/prejudice in its own right. Do you agree? You better.