I'm imagining you trying to turn on a car by swiping your fingers on the dashboard.
Repeatedly.
It's hilarious.

It's not "a swipe to start using a touch interface". It's deliberately moving an image, with a gesture, across a touch interface, to verify that a "swipe" isn't accidental.

Exclusive rite? You mean, like a Masonic order?

"Frankly, if the world standardized on C tomorrow, and we just used extensions thereof for different platforms and purposes, we could all concentrate on getting useful work done and quit dicking around with learning the latest obscure and allegedly more elegant syntax."

FTFY

It's about time we started subjecting the complexities of society to science and computing on a massive scale. For the younger geeks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series

I work internationally. This means that I don't get to pick where keys are on a given keyboard. This also means that touch typing is worse than useless, because it teaches something that is *WRONG*, but habitual.

Bullshit. I got competent in PHP not because I had a job, but because I was willing to volunteer for the project. I got competent in PostgreSQL not because I had a job, but because I was willing to volunteer for the project. I got competent in OpenLDAP not because I had a job, but because I was willing to volunteer for the project. (etc)

FWIW: Timur Dykes (the perp in the news for the 18.5 million dollar penalty) was Mormon, and the Troop was a ward (church area, for you non-LDS-jargon-speakers) Troop. He confessed the abuse to his bishop.. The mormon church settled quietly out of court, the Boy Scouts decided to roll the dice.

China, is that you?

* Making code run faster
Every fucking day. If you don't do this then you're a dweeb who might as well be coding in php.
Your php comparison is broken. I specialize in writing (or, more often, re-writing) PHP, Perl, Python, Java, and Ruby web-application 'code' for scalability. The language used isn't the problem, people who don't care to write fast code is the problem. They will write shit code, regardless of the language.
In short, your comparison is also true for the following statements: "you're a dweeb who might as well be coding in C++", or "you're a dweeb who might as well be coding in Java", as both are equally true, but equally meaningless.

Does access to the books require a cart, driven by a buggy whip, as well?

They'd like the sales taxes for your regional affiliate/salesstaff.

Do you use sealed CPU's? How about hard drives?

For that matter, do you know your cell phone's OS? (Can you edit and audit it?) How about your microwave, your car?

I guess you *can* chuck your CPU, drives, microwave, your car, your cellphone, and only go with open source and hardware that you can manually figure out "when it breaks", or you can leave some things sealed "because they work", and have other things open "to fix or replace by qualified people when they're broken".

All that being said (and you did bring up a car analogy on slashdot), if you don't actually know how to operate a simple welding torch, maybe you shouldn't be trying to open your car hood, and the people that *do* know how to operate a torch are those people who should be doing those repairs.

When I see pen-test as a career, that's generally a heads-up for me that a person doesn't really have any idea what they're doing. They're script-kiddies, nothing more.
OTOH, if somebody writes exploits, and detection scripts (snort's a good place to start), that tells me that they're not sitting around running nmap and expecting to be paid for it.