A lot of people equate "coding" with "building software." Anyone can learn how to code, but engineering a stable and robust system that is easy to maintain is a skill that takes years of experience.

I think its useful to learn to code, even if it's just a semester of Java coding. Most people aren't using that calc class they made you take in college, but it's nice to have some of that knowledge in your background in case you come across it. Coding is the same, many professionals outside of software development are going to see code at some point, even if it's just a vb script in an excel spreadsheet.

Currently using professionally:
Kotlin
Java
Javascript/Typescript
Swift
Ruby

(We went rogue and converted our Java project to Kotlin, against the wishes of the architecture team. Dev team is coming up with some very cool solutions with the language, but it's hard to find dev's who are proficient in the language. We end up taking a few months to train Java devs)

Used in the past, would need to practice a bit to get proficient but it's like riding a bike, right?
C/C++
C#
VB.net
Perl

Currently learning:
Python
Elm

Languages they made me use in school:
Lisp
Pascal

... and nothing of value was lost.

In your requested layman's terms:

Proving that P=NP would prove that mathematically "hard" problems can be solved "easily." Encryption algorithms are designed around the fact that these hard problems can't be solved quickly by a computer. If P=NP, all modern encryption fails, which means most Internet commerce comes grinding to a halt until another solution can be found.

All NP-complete problems (the "hard" problems mentioned above) derived from the 3-SAT problem, so if 3-SAT were proven to be easily solvable (3-SAT is in P), all NP-complete problems are easily solvable.

This is just one real world application of this problem.

I thought only select songs were DRM free? Like I said, I'm not an itunes users so I don't know for sure.

I've never had that impression. I thought it cost around $9.99 to download most complete albums off of itunes (I'm guessing I don't use itumes). I can pay this for most albums on amazon.com to get the physical disc + album art - DRM.

Digital music store releases a new (old) digital product? This is their huge announcement?

Apples needs to get over themselves.

I got my PC gaming start on the Atari ST, and Sundog was a game I played religiously. Way ahead of its time. In the game, you're a captain of a starship left to you by your dead uncle. You can explore various planets in the universe, explore cities within those planets, go out into the wilderness, etc. It had a simulated stock market economy where you could by goods cheap on one planet, and sell them for a higher price on planets with greater demand.

Dungeon Master is another Atari ST game that I played all the time. Very good early example of your 1st person dungeon crawler.

Loved the games on that old ST...

If the burn even works. I have a Compaq laptop that came preloaded with Windows Vista. Tried burning the recovery because I wanted to wipe the drive, reclaim my 8 gigs by deleting the recovery partition, and install Ubuntu. It would get through 99% of the burn and then just fail randomly. After going through half a dozen DVD-R's, I just gave up.

OMG you must be some kind of dirty commie socialist who hates America!!!!!!

There's no room for equilibrium in Capitalism.

You can get a degree in Objectivism, its called a Philosophy degree. You'll learn about Objectivism, along with plenty of other philosophical ideas throughout history. If you want to learn just about Objectivism, save youself $40K and read and Ayn Rand book.

Not quite sure why you're calling pretty much anything other than an engineering class "bullshit." Universities are not trade schools. There are plenty of places around that will teach you a technical field without all of the "filler" you seem to despise. A university is there to educate you. Sure, you pick a major and that is your focused area of study, but you also take classes in the arts, social studies, etc to become more well rounded. In other words, to become an educated person.

If you took classes you considered to be bullshit, that's your own fault. You're free to register for any class you want, pick a better one next time.

I don't know about you, but I'd get sick and tired of taking 100% engineering classes day in and day out. I enjoyed taking classes other than the technical ones, it provided a nice break from the math heavy curriculum of a technical field.

professors' air of sophistication; they all acted like they know something we don't.

Well, they do. You're sitting in the class because you're trying to gain knowledge they already have. Otherwise known as learning. Some profs are smug and arrogant, but so are many people that I've worked with in the "real world."

All the major banks participated in giving out loans to people who couldn't afford them, and selling them in the securities market. They had to, because everyone else was and the money was too good.

I enjoyed Pagan, but after enjoying the epic game that is Ultima 7, it just doesn't measure up. I loved the setting and backstory of U8, and I think the magic system was great, but the game as a whole just wasn't executed as well as past Ultimas.