Please don't compare insurance companies to casinos. In casinos the odds are completely computable and known beforehand to everyone. Not so with insurance which deals with real life.

Does taking input from the outside (e.g. internet) change this?

AFAICT, "good engineers are productive in X" doesn't imply that they wouldn't be yet more productive in Y.

Also the Facebook mantra being "move fast and break things" (that anyone working with their API appreciate), it's easy to have a high productivity in most languages.

This should become a law, like Brook's, Sturgeon's or Greenspun's.

30 credits doesn't equal 30 hours as far as I know. But still, I think GP should just suck it up and finish his degree, he has only a very limited amount of time to lose by doing so, and possibly much to gain from having a degree. In other words, he has limited downside and almost unlimited upside.

In the US, credits are typically by "Credit hours", which I believe is in reference to how much instruction time you have per week. A 3 credit hour class may meet 3x a week for 1 hour, or 2x a week for 1.5hr. So saying 30 credits is the same as saying 30 credit hours, which is 30 "hours" of course work. Wall clock time is higher because you have homework and other stuff, and of course a 3 hour class goes on for at least 12 weeks of instruction.

At my alma mater, Georgia Tech, they assumed 2-3 out of class hours for each in class hour. So that's 2 terms of 45 hour weeks basically

What makes you think that proprietary software doesn't have good commit messages?

I mean commit messages accessible to a large potential audience that could review them.

I hope you learnt something about using magic numbers.

> Plugins for printf()/scanf()?? Not even remotely the kind of thing that needs to be in the core language libraries.

Where then? As far as I can tell, there's no sensible way to extend the functionality of printf()/scanf(), and compilers special-case their format-strings.

I don't see how unions could save space, care to explain?

If you have multiple items of which you're only going to store one at a time but want them in the same "structure" then you use a union. (i.e. temporally disjoint)

All I can see is confusion about what is deemed "non-intrusive" and by whom.