fr0sty

Plenty of rather poor people were going to college 50+ years ago. They worked during the summers, or took a year or more off first to earn money and then went off to school.

The graph in the article show college costs up 300% in the last 21 years.

The economist[1] reports an 11x increase in college tuition from 1978-2011.

The problem is definitely _not_ that people can't get loans but rather that college is so expensive that it requires loans in the first place.

[1] http://crimsoncavalier.blogspot.com/2010/09/who-says-theres-...

In what way is gaining or losing the spread "random"?

Buyers pay the offer, sellers the ask. If you want to save the spread you can leave a resting order and wait for someone to take you out but you have no guarantee of a fill (or at least a timely one).

by that metric commercial airliners are not HC (human controlled) planes either as they do >90% of their flying while on autopilot.

> Isn't it much more intuitive to say to the computer "play 10 random country" than enunciate a succession of commands / menu items?

Have you ever tried to interact with one of those "natural language" telephone systems? I loath the whole experience. Discoverability is either painful (waiting for a read-through of your options) or futile (guessing blindly and not knowing whether it is your word choice or enunciation that is to blame).

I like the premise of the article, but I feel there is an unspoken assumption made by the author that most people can touch-type or are willing to learn how.

Consider this command:

    play 10 random country then "Teenage Dream"

A proficient touch typist can rattle this off in < 10sec but a "hunt and peck" or other ad hoc typist will be essentially trading pecking at the screen with a finger on the mouse to pecking at the keyboard with the same finger.

Agreed. Title is pure link-bait.

The only VCS I see mentioned is git in one of the footnotes regarding rerere.

Do you actually mean "revert" there or are you talking about rewinding?

using "git revert <merge_commit>" is very nasty[1]. using 'git reset <before_bad_merge> is less so.

[1]http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/howto/revert-a-f...

If your workflow or VCS doesn't allow rebase natively then people will implement it in the filesystem by never committing.

Git's approach to committing is: "commit early, commit often". The coro;lary is: "don't worry about perfection, we can fix it later". Such flexibility to me is very enabling and allows for a lot of very beneficial experimentation in the process of developing features.

Honestly, I don't understand your fascination with the sausage-making. If I were to give you the pre-rebase and post-rebase version of patches I would wager you would find much more value in the latter. And if not. Even if seeing the wandering, hacking, slashing, typoing, re-indenting, etc. is instructive to you, any future maintainer of the code will be far less pleased.

> It can help for git bisect

Not if the first commit doesn't compile.

Indelible history is good for public projects (and no one is arguing about that) and for change control systems but less good, in my estimation, in cases where mistakes are easily made, have small to non-existent consequenses, and serve no historic purpose.

I've been a Napster subscriber from some time and they are actively engaged in a version of this. They have two tiers of music: "free to stream" and "purchase only or :30 preview": they have gotten into the habit of moving tracks from one category to the other as they get popular or in some cases pulling entire albums from their catalogue for unexplained reasons.

While I'm sure what they are doing is legal it still is a shady "the first hit is free" type business model. So far the annoyance has been minimal as my tastes are not too mainstream but it still pops up far too often.

This line of argument hinges on the assumption that braking input is the only means by which to avoid an accident. Cars have steering wheels and swerving is often an effective maneuver when attempting to avoid an accident.

Incidentally, heavy breaking reduces a car's ability to corner which may end up causing accidents which could otherwise be avoided.

1. There is no built-in copy command in git.

2. What is confusing about "git push <remoterepository> <localbranch>:<remotebranch>"

> If you go outside that, you get business service,

Actually in this case you get banned for a year without recourse.

It baffles me why they didn't just try to upsell the guy.

>Your water and electricity utilities most likely also have caps on how much water or electricity you can use before they cut you off.

They do? Where is this the case?

My water and electricity usage have no monthly cap and are only shut off if I fail to pay the bills.

The analogy only holds if there was only one insurance company you could buy from who only offered a very small range of policies (none of which fits your needs).

> Likely it will be a little worse than break-even

Only if you are marking against the current market price for bitcoins, which is not necessarily the best way to look at this.

1. Conversion Costs: Converting USD->BTC is currently very cumbersome so it may be worthwhile to go USD->Mining-Rig->BTC instead if only to avoid the hassle (as well as securing a low-cost source of BTC going forward after the Rig has paid for itself.

2. Market impact: Buying BTC on the open market will put short-term upward pressure on the price which is bad if you are trying to accumulate a position (especially in the aggregate). Mining them nets you an increasing BTC position without this impact.

3. Pricing against expected value: Many miners likely believe that the current market price is artificially low and are not 'marking' their mining efforts against this. Unless the miners are simply churning their BTC into other currency at the spot price this is entirely reasonable[1]. If/When the exchange rate goes up to the effective price the mined bitcoins will be 'worth it'.

[1] This only really holds if you don't have an alternative way to convert USD->BTC (see #1) or don't have any USD to convert. If you did you would buy the cheap BTC with cash instead of paying to mine.

It isn't right. It would only be true if every miner was immediately liquidating the bitcoins they were awarded. Such a massive oversupply would likely overwhelm demand and push the price much lower.

In reality this is not what BTC miners are doing (from what I can see). They are mining and hording BTC for later use meaning that the mined coins require $0 to enter the system to maintain equilibrium.

One other thing to point out is that Gitosis is abandonware (last commit was made in September of 2009).

Gitolite on the otherhand is under active development, the documentation is great, and the author is generally available on the #git channel as are many other active users of the software.

> how big of a risk is this?

google "Steven Linscott" as an example[1]. He dreamed he saw a woman be murdered, told the police about and ended up serving 3 years of a 40 year sentence for murder.

[1] http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/Steven_Linscott.php

> Have fun merging...

I just did. As long as the changes in branches B and C are to different regions of the file the merge is completed automatically. If not, conflict markers are places in foobar.foo.in for you to resolve there.

Not sure what more you could ask of your Version Control System...

I just tried this btw,

If you merge B and C you will only have a conflict if the changes in B and C touch the same regions of the file.

If not the merge is made automatically and the changes from both branches are reflected in the new file.

Can you point to a version control system that won't fall all over itself in this case?

Also, what would an "ideal" VCS do in such a situation? Btw, have you tried this with git? What happens?

I'm also suspicious of these numbers...

Can you really harvest 70lb/wk from a 10x10 plot? For how many weeks?

> pass the buck onto your customers (even as a credit card usage fee),

Visa and Mastercard expressly prohibit surcharges for transactions made with their cards so that is not a workable solution.

1. He only loses to other shops in the case where customers dan't or won't pay with cash (this is a subset, and probably a minority, of customers). In return he saves money on a computer kiosk and the merchant fees on his transactions.

2. If he does not take plastic, then people who only pay with plastic are not his customers. Their needs are consequently irrelevant.

3. the $.25 donut is a loss-leader to sell the $4 cup of coffee. Or you could look at it as a bonus of sorts. Compare: "Buy a $4.25 cup of coffee" with "Buy a $4.25 cup of coffee, get a free donut."

Not for $300 they don't...

Since you mentioned Audi:

A quick search for "CVT reliability" produces pages of horror stories related to the Audi (and other) CVTs.

The CVT is only available on the A4 and A6 (not the A3, A5, A7, A8, Q5, Q7, et al). Also, the CVT is only available with the smaller engine options. Finally, the CVT cars are front wheel drive only, no quattro available.

That is what I mean by "not mature".

This is technology that looks very promising but is not, from my research, mature.

I would appreciate counterpoint instead of (or in addition to) the downvotes...

Unless you create a transmission that reads my mind, or can see the road and surrounding traffic it will not shift "better". Faster? yes. More smoothly? yes. Better? No.