Well I'll confirm the OP's POV. The reason being that most under 40s have never seen a dissembler, nor worked with a real debugger (that thing in your web browser is not a real debugger) nor have they dealt with the internals of data structures and pointers. In fact, I actually had to stop asking pointer questions when someone answered "I use a green laser" when asked "how do you use a pointer". If you don't understand pointers, how do you understand how multi-dimensional arrays and other data structures are handled, even in languages where such pointer manipulations may be hidden from you? Anyways, yeah, those under 40s generally don't know shit IMNSHO.

I've seen the exact opposite - no one interesting is using .NET anymore, and those that were using .NET are running *nix/Java now.

The only reason I'd choose to write COBOL is if it paid about 5X the going rate for any of the other fields that interest me more. That way, after a year or two, I could spend time doing what I want for a while with no fear.

It's Amazon's seal of approval, which should mean something, and it is implied Amazon has stuck their name on this product. If it's counterfeit, then Amazon bears at least some of the responsibility of promoting it. After all, they had a choice to label it "Choice". Why should they be exempt from counterfeit laws?

How often? Do they still?

I'll go on a nice little side tour with you here on the depth of Amazon's shittiness as it exists today. Recently, I wanted to buy some CL2 or better speaker wire. CL2 is a rating that allows for in-wall placement of the cable so that if a fire happens, your insurance can't say "oops - substandard speaker cable in the walls, it's your fault. We don't cover you". So, here's the thing, looking at various options, including Monoprice, I say hey, this here Amazon cable is definitely the best price. Well, turns out that Amazon's own Amazon Basics cables advertised as CL2 cables don't meet the CL2 standards, nor does it say it does anywhere on the cabling. At best, that is false advertising. At worst, they're going to get someone's house burned down. If they send you fake monoprice cabling which has as its only benefit speed of shipping, that would be really bad. But how many people would know, because how many people would order more than 1 spool/box of 500 foot of speaker cable, and then split that order across monoprice and amazon?

It's gotten to the point that for anything meaningful, all I use amazon for is product identification and potential sources of supply if I don't already know those. Then I order direct from them, which almost always is cheaper in the end.

You're apparently missing the detail that in Java, this is a feature of the language. (See Garbage Collector) We grokked it just fine, and passed all that boilerplate code off to the underlying VM. Problem solved.

Over time, I've come to the conclusion that Gosling was right, both on multiple inheritance and operator overloading. Yes, it makes some things inconvenient. Yes, it means you have to write a little more code. However, you never have to wonder what your code is doing and can hand it off to someone else that can easily follow your thinking, provided you're even moderately skilled at writing code. The worst code I've ever seen was a 100K plus line "class" in Java that was written as a static class with multiple internal static classes. Procedural coding pasted into a class. And that was only 1 class in a codebase with many hundreds of classes. All written by the same group. You can only imagine how bad this codebase was. It did provide a few years of work to clean it up though.

I've got to admit - that sounds like it could translate really well for a large portion of the American audiences.

I think it's more along the lines of talent vs no talent. A lot of the popular "music" today is rote factory produced crap. Very little of it will be played in 5 or 10 years, as it is immediately forgettable. Then there are those acts with actual talent that will live on and on and on, and in 30 years people will go "Why are they playing this old crap again?" ;) After all, we're still hearing Dylan, the Beatles, Elton John, Queen, Beach Boys, Elvis, Johnny Cash, etc. Yet hundreds of their contemporaries, both 1 hit wonders and the equivalent of today's manufactured music are completely ignored.

Really? You're going to give credit to that 1 out of 10 or more songs on an album to the producer, who also worked on the other 9? I'd like to produce all your music. If 1 song hits, I'm responsible, you're just along for the ride.

Those rules allowed for mass ownership of radio stations in a given market, and expanded allowed ownership across the country resulting in effectively single stations broadcasting across the country. So where you might have had 50 radio stations in major markets, you now effectively have 3.

Something I've looked at is staying power of a song - i.e., is it going to be played next year or 5 years or even 10 years from now. There's got to be a hook that makes that happen, whether it's a catchy rhythm, some meaningful lyrics, or something different about the song (21 Pilots comes to mind as something different, for example) There's very very little music that originated from bands originating from 2000 onwards. The list is short. Very short. Especially when you realize most of these types of hits are all from bands or main members that all originated in the 80s or 90s, or even earlier.

That just reinforces that the factory generated electro pop autotuned crap being pumped out across the airwaves really is just that - crap.

Finding talent is hard. A few producers were really really good at it (check the top 100 list of all time for the top producers, and you'll see a few names up there a lot esp at the top) but it seems those folks that would take risks today are few and far between, so you get Band B that sounds almost exactly like Band A, so much so that given a new song, you can't tell which one sang it or if it is Band C. Individuality has taken a beating these last 20 years.

You probably have heard of Lady Gaga? Ariana Grande and Cristina Aguilera also seem to be doing just fine.

You're a late stopper, if you stop. It's less likely now though.

But, this phenomenon is something I've witnessed among my friends. They listen to new acts then essentially "freeze" in their musical tastes. Some as early as mid teens, but most between 20-25. There's only a couple of us still actively looking at new music, and I personally actually don't like a lot of what I listened to when I was younger.

That said, there's a group of new artists that I find interesting, but they sometimes get drowned out by the crap artists, or the Disney kids, the rapper wannabes, etc. Auto-tune is an almost immediate song killer for me. Yet voice manipulation itself isn't the issue, as I like Robert DeLong. It's that auto-tune being used to cover for the fact that you have no (vocal) talent to create an "interesting" artifact in the song just turns me off completely.

Thanks for almost making me spill my coffee. I'll just refer you to Bohemian Rhapsody (the movie and the song's history) and point you to Cheap Trick's In Color (a truly terrible studio recording that was the basis for Cheap Trick at Budokan, a great recording), the rejection of U2, the Beatles, or Lady Gaga. Then you can look at a list of mistakes made on B sides where the filler was "the" hit.

Yeah, those producers really know a good song from a bad song. /s

There's a few diamonds out there, but the number of them in the last 2 decades are a paltry handful. I blame the FCC and the deregulating Republican Congress for the downhill trends in music, circa 1996 or so. That's when the rules were put in place so that no more than 3 corporations could own ALL radio stations in a major market. And you wonder why there's no variety anymore - it's really just a couple of stations playing the same dreck, nationwide. No local influence, no local bands being found. Just distributors finding "talent" (suckers) that they can sign and own, then payola takes care of the "popularity" question.