Exactly. You're not supposed to pacman -Syu without looking. Part of your duty when you choose to install Arch is to take a few minutes every week to keep on top of what's new. Call it basic hygiene.
When I was an undergrad, I found very early issues of Dr. Dobb's in the medical library of my university, the name of the magazine having fooled the librarians. I remember spending many happy afternoons there reading about 6502 single-board computers and porting Tiny C to various machines.
Interesting. I don't get this at all from his message (that he is depressed and frustrated). I understand that this is painful for an entrepreneur to read, but Notch doesn't seem interested in using his fame to project his vision, or change the world, or any of this big Jobs-y stuff. He doesn't owe it to anyone, and people have no business telling him to do it or else he's a traitor, or grumpy, or a fake.
Those of us old enough to remember the early days of the Macintosh know that this is nothing new. Apple programs used undocumented calls to QuickDraw and did all kinds of yucky stuff with the upper 8 bits of the address (in the early days, the Mac processor used 24-bit addresses but the registers were 32-bit), which lead to the "32-bit clean" problems that plagued the first Macs to use 32-bit addressing.
Apple also did this in the Apple II days, calling undocumented ROM monitor routines from their own programs and operating systems. In fact, several companies made a list of those entry points and considered them "semi-official", the reasoning being that Apple wouldn't change entry points used by their own programs.
That could well be it. My bank enforces similar short passwords, but they're not such a big security risk since they lock the account after three mistakes, and require you to visit a branch in person to reactivate it.
I guess that means they're wide open to denial of service attacks, but that's another story.
To continue the author's music analogy, what do you think music class would be like if it were taught by teachers who have never listened to an orchestra in their life, are barely aware of the existence of different music styles, and cannot play any instrument? That's right, it would consist of drawing treble clefs, memorizing note positions, and transposing music.
Many high school math teachers actually have no idea what math is about. It is illogical to expect them to teach what they don't know.
There is no incentive for people who would make great math teachers to go into teaching in America. No social recognition. Ridiculously low salaries. Internal pressure to conform and avoid making bad teachers look bad. Who in their right mind would willingly do that, when they could be doing mathematics?
Is there a country where it is usual to put the percent sign before the number? I sometimes see things like "%100 performance increase" on English web sites, and I wonder where that comes from.