Ok, but Dijkstra would be the last person to use a go to statement in step 3.

I should point out that the conclusion of the linked study is complete bullshit. It claimed that poor people are more polite than rich people. What it should have claimed was that poor people who went to Berkeley are more polite than rich people who went to Berkeley.

Poor people who go to Berkeley are likely to be moving up in the world relative to their families; their eyes are being opened to a whole new world of knowledge and power and all that, and they are humbled by it.

Rich people who go to Berkeley are likely to come from prep schools, and feel vindicated by having been admitted to a top school, and therefore are snooty.

The conclusion doesn't jibe at all with my personal experience, either, and I think this is why.

I made $2 million from a typewriter! All I had to do was use it to write a best selling novel and pitch it to the right publisher!

While he might be correct by saying he made it "with this blog," that entirely misses the point.

Truth. I got my start in programming with BASIC via DOS. Today, I find that the biggest mental block to learning a new language is the difficulty of setting up a development environment.

It's at least a little bit surprising that platform developers don't put more of an effort into making coding for their platforms more accessible. One might assume that Microsoft would have a lot to gain from a generation of young programmers learning to develop for Windows.

That's a rather big caveat. I wonder how they train people not to eat.

What I don't understand is why every single startup has to be around some web 2.0 software idea. There are thousands of industries outside of software for MBA students to pursue. If you're a good businessman, you shouldn't pigeonhole yourself into a position where you have no expertise, that's just bad judgment.

Studies which confirm intuitive truths can be valuable, especially when that truth is cultural or contradicted by other popular wisdom (i.e. "it is better to keep silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt;" or contrast this American study's results with the common idea of Japanese as valuing the humble, quiet type).

In my opinion, he made over 2 million dollars because he owned the name weblogs.com, which Verisign bought for 2.3 million.

I don't think it has anything to do with his weblog. It has to do with the success of Blogger, and after that, blogging in general. If I had never maintained a blog, but owned the name weblogs.com, I would be 2.3 million dollars richer right now too. I seriously doubt that Verisign wanted weblogs.com because of their pingback system, seeing that it was becoming less and less relevant as Technorati and other similar sites grew.

But I do agree with his main point that his blog made money, and Dan Lyons is wrong.

The ultimate header is produced by a newspaper. Try running this line and see. It is a random line, so you might want to try it a few times :-)

   curl -i -s --head http://www.vg.no/ | grep N