Well in fact they do end up hiring programmers, but they might call them something else and they might not be employees: they might call their job "customization" or "configuration" or whatever.

This is the whole thing that bugs me about ERPs and other "enterprise" packaged software, encapsulated in the "buy vs. build" debate. It's never "buy" vs. "build": it's always "buy and build" (in the form of integration, customization and configuration--you always need to supply the logic yourself), or "build".

I think your expectations are unrealistic.

First of all, you need to distinguish between people who are professionals, and who have a professionals' responsibility and duty of care; and those who don't. You can't lump dentists, doctors, lawyers and other professionals in with service people like cabbies and sales people. In the latter case, there's no reasonable expectation of "trust".

It's realistic to expect that most people (professionals aside) who get money based on what you spend will try to get you to spend that money, and as much of it as possible; and dealing with them in ignorance is very much asking for a fleece job. This is true whether it's a mechanic or a repairman or a computer or mobile phone salesman.

What I find strange is that dear old grandpa probably understands this very well when dealing with mechanics and plumbers and car salesman. I don't understand why people expect the rules to magically change when they're buying a computer.

Thanks for pointing this out. I also don't know City of Heroes very well, but it seems like there's a need for an OOC zone and a PVP zone that are separate, as exists in almost all of the multiplayer games I've played (admittedly, all MUDs and MUSHes, no graphical MMORPGs). Similarly, if there were a single opponent-beating tactic like Twixt's, that points to a mechanical problem with game balance.

These career path selections are never made in a vacuum, either. If you're interested in two or three career paths, and one is full of sexist bullshit and one is not, more women may go into a second choice.

I don't know why you would bet that. It seems as likely to me that it would be called "entangled replication" or "time drive" or "teleportation"; or perhaps be named after the yet-to-be-discovered phenomena or law that allows us to do such a thing; or originate in a non-English language. Fact is, we don't know and I actually think conventional notions of driving something through space propulsively are likely as not not to apply to such a thing.

Science fiction can further science by inviting us to imagine the not-yet-possible, but I think we need to be wary of the ways in which the demands of human narrative can limit our imagination as well.

Why would they need a way out? NASA had the chance to honor a scientist or engineer, but decided not to--Serenity doesn't honor anything but entertainment, and neither does Colbert, or Tek Jansen for that matter.

This is a really interesting perspective, thank you. I don't know a lot about schizophrenia but now that you point it out, of course this would be a problem, because as a schizophrenic it would be hard for you to know what is reasonable for someone to be saying and what is not.

A poster below asks, "how can you detect sarcasm in writing?" It's the test of reasonability. It's harder with strangers but it is part of reading comprehension to determine from tone and context what it would be reasonable for someone to put forward.

I'm not sure I can agree with that. Remember that WoW was very late to a market that had already been developed my many MMORPGs--EverQuest, notably, and AC and others. I think that sometimes being first to market isn't an advantage at all, and Google of all companies is in a position to appreciate this, as Google succeeded largely by being very late to the search engine market.

WoW and Google succeeded so dominantly because they were better, and a big part of why they were better than the established players was because they learned from the existing market, and because they had no established customers they were worried about losing.

Many of the ones with "experience" are not so hot, for that matter.

I like this! Consider it stolen.

The question's not bad but the evaluation is busted. What you want is someone who can have an intelligent conversation on the subject, and who understands that what type you need for a zip code is a more subtle question than it might seem at first.

For one thing, it's certainly a compound type: the zip and the +4, even just in the USA; and I can't imagine an application that stores addresses that would never need to store an international one. About this time I'd be online looking around for post code standards.

I can tell more experienced people a lot by their reactions to things like time zone handling or unicode. If you grimace and start mentally listing a lot of thorny complications and considerations, then it's something you have probably thought about before. If you start saying something glib that starts with "All you need to do is..." then you haven't.

Funnily enough, I've had the opposite experience: people who are younger, in terms of experience or age, are a lot more positive in their opinions and close-minded than older or more experienced people. I don't have a lot of theory around this, except that a more experienced person has had a lot more opportunity to be proven wrong about their preconceptions.

This matches my own personal experience. I can really only compare my "old" self with my "young" self, but I would say that the young me was more confrontational and irritatingly positive (you can use Perl for everything!), and more willing to do a lot of pointless after-hours work and be oncall. He was a lot less reflective and somewhat less rational regarding his decisionmaking. He had little broad perspective and familiarity with a few technologies that looked to him like all there was to know.

The older me is more knowledgeable, certainly, and more familiar with lots of "allied" tasks associated with programming. I'm a lot better at handling people. I'm a lot more willing to experiment or investigate new technologies for something rather than relay what's already in my toolbox.

This might seem paradoxical, but it makes sense to me. An inexperienced person has probably had few revelations like the hg example you give or using a functional programming language on a real project. An experienced person has a good feel for what kinds of tasks are no big deal and what takes a lot of time.

All that said, I dislike very much the idea that programmers are characterizable by their languages, their age or experience or their domain. Frankly I would leave that out of it and just do a straight interview (though you may be interested in analyzing differences after the fact).

The actual evidence we have is that, as a rule, for organisms on Earth, extinction is the norm rather than an exceptional event. The history of life on Earth is one of repeated mass extinctions, and continuous extinctions otherwise.

The idea that humans are "special", that in some way the rules of life on Earth do not apply to them, is attractive, and it probably has some merit. But in order to counter the actual evidence of Earth's history, all you really have is a sort of narrative about what humans are like and would do. It's as related to the real probability of human extinction as verbal arguments about "what you would do in a fight" are to actual combat.

A billion years is a very long time, and it's easy to imagine scenarios which, however unlikely, cause human extinction. A genetic disease which disrupts reproduction, that we all already have and so cannot isolate. The astronomical cataclysms you mention. Heck, our understanding of the structure of matter is pretty basic and dates to within the last 100 years--do you think that perhaps there are possible material instabilities that we don't yet understand that could somehow result in such a cataclysm?

We humans have exterminated many other species. Other forms of life we encounter may return the favor, for their own inscrutable reasons.

It even remains to be seen whether human beings can live in a self-sustaining way on planets that are not inherently habitable. When we have a thriving population on Venus, you can make the argument that something that makes Earth uninhabitable (for example, an atmospheric revolution by novel organisms, as has already happened in the planet's history) won't cause human extinction. But until then, you just can't say. And "I don't know" is a lot different than "I know it can't happen."