Do tigers have stripes for the same reason? If not, how do we know that Zebras don't have them for the same reason as tigers?

I think that the chance you get hired depends on your own skills and attitude only. Most programmers stop keeping their skills up to date when they're forty. They shouldn't be surprised that that diminishes their chances to get hired. Attitude is important. You won't fit in if you missed out on Twitter or Instagram or whatever the kids in the team do. You won't fit in if you play golf and people you work with bring their skateboard to work. I'm sixty, I love snowboarding, I ride a super fast motorcycle, I have purple hair, I wear short skirts. I work freelance mostly (yes, that I'll give you, freelance works better) and I get plenty of jobs and projects offered. It helps that the market for Android developers is very good, but then, it was my deliberate choice to switch to Android programminig in 2008.

I've been an Android developer for over 5 years, I've been using Eclipse for Java development almost since it came out. If Android Studio is better, I won't argue, I don't know. But i'll stick with Eclipse for a while, before I spend considerable time on changing my IDE. Maybe I'll give it a try on my next Android project, or maybe not.

Actually, as a programmer, you don't want to learn new tricks. The "trick" you should master is to write decent code and to be curious after the tools you can use to write that code. It doesn't really matter what programming language you use if you have the skill to quickly learn the specifics of that language. Once you know a few, you see the general pattern, and you know them all.

:-)

I don't see myself as an old programmer. I started programming in 1978.

I must agree with this. It's possible for some, but you need to have an explorative mind, that apparently you don't have if you have to ask here.

I first learned to program in Fortran, way back, in university. In my first job I did Cobol, then I switched to C and C++. After that, from 1995 on, I did Java, and now I do Android and Java. On the side I did Prolog, some php which I hate, and all the other stuff that you run into and you try out for a while. I'm sure I'll make more switches before I retire.

Our civilizatin wouldn't be the first to collapse, and disappear. Roman civilization rose and fell. Chinese same. Several civilizations in the Middle East. So, no, I wouldn't be surprised if our civilization would go to hell, and be replaced by another in a few centuries. And as every new civilization in history took civilization further than the previous one, the next guys will be wiser than us, richer, smarter, and better off. Until they go too.

Of course, parents can be held in no way responsible for handing their phone to their kids and having their credit card emptied. Same as when I hand my credit card to my kid, it's not my fault when my kid uses it to buy stuff online.

What are these people thinking?

I know, most of you can't do that, but would that be a misdemeanor?

Why does Canonical keep fixing things that aren't broken, things that everybody's happy with? Ubuntu doesn't want to be Apple, nor does it want to be Windows. Ubuntu wants to be Ubuntu.

Everybody knew computers could never beat humans at chess. Now they do. In much the same way, computers will beat us at every single intellectual task, at some point in time. Technology revolutions go faster every time one occurs. From 10k years for the agricultural revolution to two years for the internet and mobile phones. I see no reason why computers can't outsmart us in 2025.

F*ck, I get so angry about the stupidity of politicians. They don't care about the kids that have their lives destroyed. They just care about percentages and seats. F*ck them. I have seen the pics, I have seen the videos, and I still dream about them, even though it's been many years since I was actively involved in Meldpunt. As a police officer from Canada said on an Interpol conference about online child pornography in Lyon many years ago, "a person who gets murdered dies once. A child who is sexually abused dies every day for the rest of their life".

No, it would not. It would mean that "ordinary people", the average internet user, would not be aware of pictures of child abuse. The pedophiles have access to them anyway, and with public opinion being totally unaware, they can happily continue to abuse kids and publish the pics on their secret proxied servers. The best thing to do is to show every horrible picture to the public, to journalists, causing public outrage leading to funds being made available to put the abusers in jail.

I'm one of the founders of melpunt, the Dutch equivalent of the Cybertipline and Internet Watch Foundation (that were created after our example). I say, don't filter, don't censor, just put the pedophiles away for life. The kids who will never ever get their life back, deserve that.

Does it? My espresso machine gives me one fresh cup of espresso for one serving of freshly ground beans.