I am pretty liberal and I can hardly imagine voting Republican again for a while, but even I cannot understand why the email thing isn't a bigger deal. I guess that is because I am not a lawyer. From what I can tell, deleting potential evidence that you even think might be subpoenaed later is a crime. A pretty serious one. And the Republicans have been threatening to subpoena for those records since the scandal started.

This doesn't seem like some little transgression to me. I think the Benghazi nonsense is just that, nonsense. But the email deletions literally seem like a jail-able offense to me. And honestly I think they should be. As far as I can tell the only reason she isn't in more trouble is because Eric Holder is a very political attorney general.

I would love for someone to convince me this isn't a big deal, and considering the media doesn't cover this more I am probably just wrong about how bad it is. I thought the email scandal was ridiculous when it was just about using her private server, but the second she admitted to deleting the emails things just became far less trivial.

I wish when I was faced with a difficult problem at work I could just say "my users can barely use their computer so its their fault they can't understand my UI". Or some other such nonsense.

Teachers do not have an easy job, but it is their job. The teaching profession needs to come up with real solutions to this, or outside organizations will. It is a very difficult problem so far more organizations will fail than succeed, but we will absolutely need to keep trying. And considering many countries have found ways to mitigate these problems it appears to be a very fixable problem. The funny thing is many of these countries just used good ideas they found from the US and simply instituted them on a national scale.

He is not writing a dissertation, he is posting on an Internet forum. Even professional editors let errors into articles and books, so holding up people writing responses in their spare time to a higher standard than professional writers is a bit daft.

Einstein was very well educated and did well in school. He was in the patent office while searching for a teaching position, not because he was some kind of college dropout. Albert Einstein was an academic through and through.

I don't understand how this could work. Would Intel have to access all CRM data for every 3rd party vendor they sell Xeon chips to? I mean if Intel sells a Xeon chip to Sweden's version of Best Buy, and China buys them from that store, how would the US government or even Intel themselves know about it?

Is Intel really expected to track every chip they sell all the way to the computer it is finally installed on, and then track every time that computer is shipped to a new location?

The vending machines are there as a perk, similar to raising wages. They are not there to bolster Skittles sales. If you are saying Ford raised its wages for the same reason companies give health insurance and free coffee, then I agree with you. If you are saying they did it to create a market for its cars, that is where history, and simple common sense, don't back up your claims.

Almost any luxury brand will have most of its workers making wages too low to buy its products. Most companies obviously produce products their employees can buy only since most companies target the middle/working class because most people are in the middle/working class. It isn't a cause / effect relationship.

Not exactly sure why its a false dichotomy. Perhaps its a strawman. It was merely used to both show how silly the Ford myth is and inject some humor. A more apt comparison would be to an Avon lady who buys her own products to make more money. Unless your products have 100% profit, you will always lose money by giving someone money to buy your product. And even then you will only break even. It doesn't really take an analogy to realize how ridiculous the myth is, but sadly many people still believe it.

The fact that the Model T was at a price point his workers could afford was merely a coincidence. His wages were set at a rate which reduced attrition, and his car prices were set at a rate that his target audience could afford. They were not linked in any way.

Don't believe everything you read on Wikipedia. The idea that Ford paid his workers more so they could buy cars is so ridiculous it is hard to believe the myth has spread so widely. Well not so hard to believe since so many people want to find references that "prove" the opinion they already had. I guess by this logic Boeing should raise their workers' wages high enough that each of them could buy a new jetliner. What is Boeing thinking by leaving those potential orders unfulfilled?

This article debunks this silly myth more thoroughly than I could in a Slashdot post.

While I admit my sample size is only a few dozen people who I have helped learn to program, but I have never run into anyone have trouble with For / While loops unless they were simply not intelligent, let alone good at math. The only exception is when the person teaching them is making things needlessly complicated, which is generally why I was helping these students in the first place. Most of the people I helped were not all that smart but they figured it out real fast.

Asking when to use While / For / Do loops is a common intro to programming question, but it has never taken me more than a few minutes to go over the difference and have the students understand and apply the knowledge. But regardless of how easy it is to teach I never look down on people who have trouble grasping the differences on their own because I remember self teaching myself in 5th grade and taking a long time to figure out FOR loops.

I just find it so hard to reconcile this with my own experience tutoring, but like I said I haven't taught that many people. Its almost as if the people you know tried to take some 300 level class as their introduction to programming. Intro level programming is as simple as breaking down a problem into discrete steps and determining a very simple algorithm that only require a very small tool set to implement.

I simply cannot see someone who can understand Group Theory, Numerical and Complex Analysis, and Network Flows who cannot figure out when to use a while loop vs for loop. Even if computer science and mathematics were not related, such a person is simply too smart not to understand an intro to programming class. Unless they are pretty far along the autism spectrum and math equations are in their wheelhouse I guess.

I tutored a few future math teachers in Calc 2 and I can tell you many math teachers can't wrap their head around any math more complicated than the fractions they will teach their 5th graders. The concepts taught in a first year programming class will be easily learned by any competent math major. A math major who cannot understand functions, conditional logic, recursive sequences, or summations is incompetent.

Sending email has as much to do with computer science as beating level 84 of candy crush.

Project/Product Manager, Manager of Software Development, Director of Software Development, VP of Software Development / System Architecture, Application Architect, CTO, etc.

All of these are essentially management level jobs that software developers usually find themselves in by the age of 40 if they continue to progress in their career. Plenty decide to stay as a senior level developer until retirement, but their careers usually plateau if they make that decision. Same as the McDonald's worker from your example who will also have his career stall if he stays as a shift supervisor.

I have yet to see any studies showing a mass exodus from the field by age 40. They usually use similar stats as this article which merely show the majority of developers are under 40 (which is irrelevant for the reasons I mentioned in my original post).

A large number of developers do move into management by the age of 40, but that is true of almost all fields. I would be willing to bet their aren't many 45 year old financial analysts; they are probably VP of Whatever by then. While some people stay as senior developers their whole careers, plenty of others move into Director of Software Development, Application Architect, Entrepreneur, etc. careers by the age of 40. It doesn't mean they have left the field just because they don't consider themselves software developers anymore.

What are you talking about? Googling is almost always my first resort when stuck on a problem. The only exception I can think of is if the problem is algorithmic in nature. Most problems I run into have to do with how to use an API, framework, platform, or third party application. For those I would never waste time trying to figure it out by myself before seeing if someone already solved the issue.

10 years ago the number of technologies I could consider myself an "expert" on at one time was much lower than it is today. I could be an expert at perhaps one or two languages, probably one framework, and a few third party APIs. Today I can be my company's expert on a few languages, a half dozen frameworks and platforms, and dozens of third party APIs. I didn't get smarter. I just have the help of Google and sites like Stack Overflow.

This not only makes me more valuable, it helps prevent me from pigeonholing myself into a small niche market. I can be an AngularJS, Salesforce, C#, and MS SQL developer at the same time. There is no way I could be a senior level resource on all four of these technologies without the help of Google.

I think the most obvious explanation is that older programmers are more likely to remember older and less capable tools which couldn't handle tabs well. Today I cannot imagine why someone would use a tool that cannot customize tabs for each user. Mixing tabs and spaces is still a problem, but unless you are using a 20 year old editor why would you still be using spaces?

Stats don't lie, but conclusions based on stats sure do.

All new fields are going to have their ranks skewed towards young practitioners regardless of any age discrimination. People tend to choose careers at a young age and switching careers drastically is fairly rare. Since the computer programming field didn't start to explode in size until the 90's, it is obvious why there are few people (proportionally) over the age of 40 in this profession.

Take a look at the average age of developers in various countries. The United States was arguably the country where the software developer profession really took off, and it is also the country with the highest average developer age. The average age of developers in other countries will continue to rise, just as it is rising in the US, as this becomes a more established profession.