demiraven

"The Better Angels of our Nature" by Steven Pinker. Highly informative, well-researched and compelling look at the history of violence, and how violence relates to economy, information, literacy, trade, etc. Very enjoyable, if long, read.

http://amzn.com/0143122010

The pacinst.org document is great. Thank you for the link. Your point is spot on about animal agriculture, and well-supported by the PDF.

I might find this more interesting when and if they connect this to brands and products I would buy. Linking this solely to major brands owned by mega-corporations is a significant turn-off.

I want to be able to modify it to buy the things I want, not just from the limited set it confines me to.

It's not so competitive in terms of price to public transit. $6 for a single ride (compared to Muni's $2.25)

Indeed. C (and, to a limited degree C++) are natural choice(s) for embedded and low-level development.

In embedded, there may be other language choices for coding "close to the metal", but they are rarely used, time-costly to work with, and often not well-supported for all platforms. Most micro-controller vendors supply their board-support packages (BSPs) in C, and choosing some other family of (higher level than assembly) language can result in some rather high development costs with few if any benefits in terms of code space or system efficiency.

Not to mention many higher-level languages (and, at least, their compilers or interpreters) are implemented in C (or C++) - Ruby, Python, Lua, etc. Even if one works on desktop applications or web development, C has importance, very likely, at some level in the technology stack.

Those that dismiss C either misunderstand the importance and ubiquity of it as a language and/or inadvertently expose their prejudice towards development at higher levels of abstraction. In any case, C is very likely here to stay, good to know well, and good to know how to code more securely.