The answer is to teach them COBOL. That seems to keep running and running.

If you teach a 10 year old to write "code", that won't help them in 8 or 10 years time when they try to apply for a job. The "code" technology will have moved on in that time, so the stuff they learned a decade ago will be obsolete. The knowledge that a professional programmer has, has a half-life of a few years: maybe as long as 5 years in some areas - possibly as a short as 1 or 2 in rapidly developing fields of work.

Since nobody can tell what skills will be needed in the next decade, learning a particular coding language, the "learning to code" is almost certainly teaching the wrong language to children. It would be far better to teach them basic maths, basic logic and how to think in abstract terms - rather than focusing on tangible, here and now, stuff that will produce children who can blink an LED on a Raspberry Pi today, but will have no clue about hw to deal with the "AI on a chip" they might be faced with when they start their professional careers.

When I started my first job after graduating, the job description didn't even exist when I started my university course. So what is the chance that teaching 5 or 10 year children a specific computing skill will be relevant to their career prospects in 10-15 years time?

About 10 hours too long.

20% effectively useless jobs? The number seems to be on the low side as in my place there are more than that who have the word manager in their title. When you group them with all the other time wasters and incompetents, it must be nearer 50%, as a lot of those individuals only work to feed each others' roles.

There may be only three categories, but there's nothing to say he only fits one of them

History is written by the victors. However for this guy to proclaim "victory" by starting to write the history already, before the "battles" have even begun, is a little presumtuous

I'd like to see sites develop password policies that reflect the value of information the passwords are guarding.

For example. if a password unlocks access to a bank account, it's reasonable for the bank to require more secure forms of access: including ones that are better than mere passwords, themselves.

However if all a website visitor has at risk is comments about stories. Comments that can be, and often are, as banal as I lik [sic] catz then even a 1 character password seems like overkill. As it is, the website owner often has a highly inflated idea of the worth of his/her/its website and maybe even an unbalanced paranoia towards security in general - maybe passwords aren't actually their biggest security problem. So I'd suggest the answer is for users to vote with their feet (or their passwords) and feed back to the admins what THEY think is the right level of annoyance they should be put to, in order to access websites' "riches". It might be a lot lower than the owners think it should be.

From the article: The most light-polluted urban areas typically hit eight or nine on the Bortle scale

Ha! An 8 or 9 corresponds to a VLM of 4 - 4.5. That's not a "city sky" - that's open country in most, errr ... developed countries. If you want a city sky try a VLM of 0 or 1 - where there are more lights from planes than stars or planets visible.

Oh, and having a dark sky is nice, but meaningless if there's cloud cover. A much more useful tool would be a Google Maps overlay for the number of clear nights per year.

Pretty easy to explain. That monitor is there (on Amazon). I'm here. Ergo, 4k monitors aren't here yet.

When I have a 4k monitor here,in front of me, then looking at 4k video will be a sensible thing to do. But until there's a 4k monitor here it would be pretty pointless.

Actually snob snobs (those who rate snobbishness in different categories) are worse.

Probably the biggest contribution to terrestrial astronomy has been the CCD,

It's now possible, common even, for an amateur with a 20cm telescope to take images that were beyond the capabilities of a chemical photograph from a few decades earlier. And so far in advance of what could be observed before there was any photography at all that it's almost a completely different scientific discipline.

It also makes you want to question other effects that would appear to trivial to even mention: like whether the room has fluorescent or incandescent lighting. Is there a lot of vibration from being near a road. What colour are the walls painted and the smell of the cleaning materials used by the janitors.

And I thought it was only the social sciences who had so many variables that they simply ignored 99.99% of them: and couldn't even identify the rest.

Well, that'll go nicely with another year of commentators who don't read the articles (and sometimes don't even get all the way through the headline).

Apart from the rather simplistic notion of counting heads, are there any studies that can quantify the proportion of <insert group here> who HOLD any given position, in any particular company / government office / religion / whatever and compare that with the proportion of that same group who actually would wish to rise (or fall) to that post?

All the studies I have seen on gender, race, sexual leanings, age or any other attribute all make the basic assumption that all the qualified individuals, from all groups, all want the same things and are equally motivated to get it. And therefore any discrepancy between the number holders of those positions and the size of the group they came from *must* be due to some sort of discrimination or favouritism.

Has anyone seen any contemporary (within the last 10 years or so) studies that can assert the validity, or otherwise, of this basic assumption?

Security is a pain. It slows you down. it gets in the way. It makes you jump through hoops and it is inconvenient. If I had to spend as much time unlocking my front door as I do to log into some websites: ones that don't even contain any information I value, I'd probably leave it open a lot more often.

So until the software (or hardware) necessary to make systems more secure improves a great deal people won't use it. I can't say what the nemchmark is for user tolerance / acceptance, but if I had to guess I'd say is was about 1 second of "automatic" activity, zero intellectual input and one simple mechanical movement. Implement that and you've probably invented computer security.