A working programmer and a computer scientist are two different things, but the computer scientist should be able to write a basic program:

For programmers, this is a basic test, but when a computer scientist can't do something this fundamental, it calls their higher-level qualifications into question; and even if it doesn't, it makes you worry that their architecture or design will consider real-world issues and implementability.

Well, the survey really only considered scientific literacy in moose and beavers. I think that was mentioned in a footnote.

The additional research you did is definitely very valuable, but it's going to take a lot more than a simple 'sorry' to make up for all the self-posting so far, Bennett.

huh-sorry-what-did someone say Ukrainian oil interests? Oh, sovereignty -- never mind ... zzzz ...

Are we sure about this? In the end, cops are individual people, and they're interacting one-on-one on the ground with people in their own community, most hopefully for the better, some for the worse. This looks like a step towards involuntary ubiquitous surveillance for the individual, civilian cop or regular civilian, while visibility into decisions and actions of larger organizations, those that affect large groups at once, is still hazy or completely unavailable:

• basic text of US legislation before voting
• lobbyist discussions with legislators
• international agreements like the trans-pacific partnership
• centralized government surveillance via NSA

Along those lines, were paleolithic human diets composed of foods that suited an organism with a paleolithic human life span?

Those are both true, and there's even a generally applicable term for them: filthy casual

So she's, what, a grad student?

Pfft, that quote is so old. We have much newer, more relevant ways of describing your relationship to your cable/internet provider. Get with the times!

I recommend you start your own, with blackjack and hookers.

Google provides me with free, high-ish-ly-available:

• spam-culled email with high-performance web/IMAP access
• online calendar with shareable events
• online Office-lite document editing and collaboration
• phone/text forwarding with online voicemail access and transcription
• photo management application and storage
• maps
• search

as well as sync of all of these with tablets and smartphones for no extra cost. So I'm getting something more from Google than the rest.

I don't see how they can tell.

One thing that keeps coming up is the constant inflow of rookie (and intermediate-level) programmers making rookie mistakes. There seems to be an unwillingness to treat software creation, from the academic level onward, as a controllable process towards a working, reliable, secure, usable, maintainable result. It's still being treated from day one as a sandbox with a rigorous theoretical mathematical underpinning, but cowboy coders and fluid design-level rules in the day-to-day.

Examples of this are that the nuts and bolts of code standards, defensive programming, code hygiene, technical debt, refactoring, and at a higher level, revision control, automatic builds, code review, and static analysis are considered best practices by some, but are nowhere near ubiquitous.

It may not be an unwillingness as much as growing pains, or that the field lacks a requirement for a P.E. certification that can be used to push back on unreasonable business pressures. Don't assume that you're entering or working in a field that has a well-established set of rules that you can rely on, and if your gut tells you that cult of personality is overriding a technically-based meritocracy, that may very well be the case. The process of software creation seems to still be changing, evolving, maturing.

You can still learn those best practices and apply whichever of them you have the power to in your own environment -- just don't assume everybody will abide by them, or even agree as to what they are.

Overreaction, indeed. If they were US citizens, I'd like to see them testify and hear what they have to say the next time Congress wants to weigh in on violence in video games.

For some reason, what goes through my head, is that on return they'd want to write a war simulator from the civilian perspective.