Trey-Jackson

Of course it's the exception. It's a story of the 1% - who else has an extra $7K to spend on their kid's preparation for college?

It's as relevant to daily life as Honey Boo Boo or Jersey Shore.

TLDR

Way too long, meandering, full of anecdotes.

How is it at all surprising that trying to "fix" problems with the body is uber-complicated?

Plus, there's the obvious missing bigger point - all these companies are trying to find a solution that is a pill, as opposed to changing the underlying problem: bad food, bad environment, bad physical conditioning, etc. Billions spent on finding pills, very little money in solving the root causes...

While I have a strong opinion on the topic, what do these polls accomplish? It just seems like navel-gazing at best.

That's a fair point.

Though another way to avoid making the mistakes is to not invent data structures. That's what libraries are for, and anyone not using a library data structure should be able to defend why they're not. Odds are, they've got no chance of writing something better than what the libraries provide (or they'd be a library writer and already know these things).

IMO, 99.9% of the time you don't need the more obscure data structures. And I speak from experience working in companies on software requiring high performance (runs taking 6 hours to two days are not uncommon).

That said, I was disappointed nobody had added the corner stitched data structure - I found that to be a very intriguing idea (and in my world, it turned out to be very useful).

"Reality has a well-known liberal bias." - Stephen Colbert

Ha, funny.

The two statistics you cite are independent.

Purchases are up 50%. period. the end.

Independent of that is the fact that when an artist sells two songs on Itunes they make as much money as if they sold a whole CD. period. the end.

The second fact does not refute first, it is orthogonal.

The point they're making is that purchases are shifting from albums to tracks (as you mention), and because of the higher revenue generated (for the artist) by selling tracks, artists are winning in this scenario and the record labels are losing money.

This point is clearly made in the first bullet of the EFF article.

The larger point isn't about artists at all, but that the old school music industry is waging (and winning) a war using copyright laws, and this is having disastrous effects on free speech. The example in the first paragraph was about the seizure of 82 domains, without any due process, and this was basically because the government enforced (without question) the claims of the music industry.

Imagine if it happened to you, your domain was seized because a company with some lawyers said it was infringing on their copyright. Think you'd be miffed?

Other countries are enacting 3-strikes laws (e.g. France), where if you were accused of copyright violation (downloading illegal mp3/mp4) 3 times (accused, not even convicted), then your IP is blocked, and you can no longer access the internet from that connection.

And the EFF is saying that the music industry is getting these kinds of legislation passed on the false premise that "piracy" is harming artists' livelihoods, when in fact margins on money from sales of music is increasing for artists.

Obviously you can disagree with their points, but the facts they've presented do not conflict.

Jokes are often based on broad stereotypes and generalizations (whether they are based in truth or not). Dumb blonde, nerdy engineer, and guilt-ridden Catholic jokes use the same mechanism as this panel. Are nerdy engineer jokes grossly misleading and do they perpetuate stigmas we could be rid of? Or are they just jokes?

That said, it's interesting that you make the assumption that Calvin had ADHD.

The strip works because Calvin doesn't have ADHD, and medicating someone who doesn't have ADHD is a tragedy.