"she later told me that I was anti-authoritarian and more likely to do what I thought was right rather than what I had been instructed to do. I am still baffled to this day about how that is an undesirable attribute"
Pretty much sums up everthing that is wrong with Corporate America, American government and American society in a nutshell. Your betters (aka "leaders") want solders, not moral people. This is social Darwinism in action, and it's not going to lead to a good place.
One of the funniest things, to me, is that the military is having a lot of problems shifting mentalities. The "Shut the fuck up and do what you're told" model works for a draftee military, but it's complete garbage for a professional military. Today's soldiers are faced with circumstances that require improvisation, creativity, and original thought. Literature on the subject focuses on the "strategic corporal," the squad or even fireteam leader who is forced to make autonomous decisions.
Unfortunately, things are pretty slow to change in the military, so basic training is all about the STFUDWYT Model.
Then, when it actually comes to promotion time, they have to find the people who haven't been completely brainwashed. It's awesome to find that the kids who were seen as shitbags in boot camp tend to end up doing far better than the kids who wholeheartedly drank the Kool-Aid.
I have both in my shop right now. I can use the brainwashed kids, but I can't make them leaders because they have no capacity for original thought. They'll be minions forever.
That being said, I also have a kid in my shop who is certainly not brainwashed and is also completely intolerable to work with.
I cannot pimp John McPhee's Assembling California [1] highly enough. It is fantastic, and contains a wonderful section about the '89 quake. Really, anything John McPhee writes is worth stopping whatever one is doing and getting started. He's a national treasure.
I'm in the readability camp, I'm one to comment my code even if it's something simple and I also like to use verbose variable names. I always keep in the back of my mind that if someone had to pick up my code without knowing how anything was implemented they might appreciate my efforts (even if it's just a personal project that I don't plan on anyone seeing). You can't please everyone I'm sure for as many people that like it compact there are people that like the whitespace.
The virtual size of a program includes all shared objects (shared libraries, shared copy on write memory pages, the read only executable pages and other shared memory) that a process uses in addition to the memory that only that particular process is using (its resident set size.) Shared objects like shared libraries can be mapped into memory by multiple processes and thus don't use any additional physical memory for each additional process that uses it.
The RSS thus usually indicates the amount of heap and stack a process is using that is unique to it.
Politicians already make a lot of their wealth from insider information. Even if you somehow stopped all donations, corporations would just trade more knowledge for favors.
Politicians should be prohibited from direct investment, both during and sometime after serving. Doesn't stop someone from enriching some partners who agree to pay him back at some later date. There probably is no end to the corruption.
I think that letting foreign companies shape our legislation is such a manner ought to considered at best a stones throw from treason.
I think you may have missed what I think is the most important point made in the article:
"It is also interesting to consider that students in the treatment group spent approximately half of the summer working on pre-algebra skills. Because the Khan software is individualized, it identified that most of our students had significant pre-algebra skill gaps and delivered instruction and practice problems to address these deficits. Students in the Khan/treatment group therefore spent up to 50% less time than the control group on the algebra content that the MDTP exam measured. The treatment group, however, still performed at a similar level the control group on the algebra measures."
That says to me that these students spent most of their time filling in gaps in their knowledge and still managed to keep up and even get ahead of the other class in a very short amount of time. They're basically saying flat out that these students learned as much of the advanced material in half the time as the other group and probably have better foundational knowledge.
How do you tell a file from a directory without stat()ing it? The d_type field is not portable. Since find and other tools like it need to recursively descend a directory tree, a stat() for each file to determine its type is unavoidable.
Yes, you just split the current view (vertically or horizontally) or open a new window. Any change to a file will be immediately updated in the other views/windows.
I think regardless of the reasons why, people who want to be leaders, on the whole, clearly shouldn't be. Since these people comprise a small subset of the total of all people, simply choosing randomly will tend to not choose them. I doubt it has to do anything with fairness.
Maybe "leaders" aren't as necessary as people think, and actually are a drain on productivity.
Pretty much sums up everthing that is wrong with Corporate America, American government and American society in a nutshell. Your betters (aka "leaders") want solders, not moral people. This is social Darwinism in action, and it's not going to lead to a good place.