Yeah either that or booze. Or both as in rum -n- coke, which I enjoy on rare occasions.

I believe there is a constant quantity of junk food but the variety varies by decade. When I was a little kid we had a whole aisle of cake mixes and frostings, which has imploded down to maybe 15 lineal one sided feet and at most 10 different flavors of frosting. I was actually kinda depressed last time I wanted to bake a cake from a mix. I had to "settle" instead of picking what I wanted. The energy drink category and bottled water category have exploded in size since I was a kid. Also, tea. You couldn't buy canned/bottled tea when I was a kid, just poisonous tasting instant powder mix and bags. Now they've got looseleaf in the store, and an whole section of different types of bottled (heavily sugared) teas. Another category that's exploded: refrigerated ready to bake "stuff", when I was a kid they had ready to bake rolls in tubes and thats about it, there is now a 10 foot wide section of ready to bake cookies etc. We have almost nothing to chose from anymore WRT jerky and nuts, which is too bad because I like those snacks.

I think its more a chronic issue. 5% less fructose doesn't sound like much, until you think of a hard core addict drinking 3 cans/day thats 1000 cans/yr or about 5 kilos less of fructose.

Kind of like "low tar" cigarettes. Yes quitting smoking is the best "low tar" solution, but its better than nothing.

No coincidence. Real programmers (or at least real old programmers) program in 36 bits.

911. The bad guys won.

The body count in the war on drugs is pretty high too

Its interesting that the LAPD has shot at more innocent civilians than Dorner has. The primary difference is that the LAPD is so unprofessional they haven't successfully killed as many innocent civilians as Dorner, at least so far, although they're trying their best to even up the score. I have faith in the LAPD, they'll catch up soon enough.

But the excursions from the background are also not actionable data. Right back to my original example, OK the important part is not that 15% of the dirt villagers like Bieber, its that 85% actively dislike Bieber. Still not actionable because the subject of discussion is useless from a military tactical / strategic / logistic perspective.

I will say that you could see a meta-pattern of peoples behavior when they know they're being monitored. Like if you have people faking data, poorly, to make it look like an empty booby trapped dirt village is currently populated, but it only contains poison gas cylinders. Of course a IR satellite shot would be simpler and we've already got that tech deployed... Basically a psyop detector would be kinda interesting. Somebody could make a synthetic flash mob artifical data generator that makes it look like we're gonna riot at the west gate, but we're all actually going to the east gate... That kind of thing.

Look at it from a hard science perspective. You're running a really big complicated experiment and have one (of many) really noisy input streams and there may or may not be a signal buried deep in the noise. Stick a 10x amplifier on it is not necessarily gonna help the SNR. In fact "demodulating" that noisy input stream may very well be impossible because there's nothing actually there. If you're smart enough or have enough AI maybe you can make a demod, maybe... Or maybe there's just no useful data from that source because its a junk source.

Yeahbut... if the "best match" for 5 popes ago is actually the one liner officially for 20 popes ago (roughly) then the "last pope" is actually about 16 popes in the future. so something like our grandkids get to hack the planet. Kind of like seeing Babbages original difference engine parts live and in person and realizing you're not gonna live to perform a buffer overflow on a 386, but... maybe your grandkids....

This goes back to at least ancient greece, regardless of your goals, what's a "better" leadership style, oligopoly or dictator? Nobody was ever come up with better than a temporary local maxima, so there likely is no truly "correct" answer.

Back to the original topic, a fixation on the theological meaning (as if there is any....) behind the moral and ethical equivalent of teabagging your enemies after their (temporary utter) defeat is looking for something overly profound in something overly base.

This is hardly a rare combination of adjectives. I could say the same thing about slashdot, reading classical literature, ham radio, and pr0n.
At least those do it for me. Not necessarily in that order or individually. Although ham pr0n initially sounded pretty icky I thought back to some pics I've seen on 20 meter slowscan TV and ...

In my extensive personal and observational experience a CS degree does not lead into flexibility WRT job titles or opportunity to advance as you state, it just pigeonholes into a different set of jobs, mostly developer-type roles.

If you really wanna "eventually lead to" management or production or sales, don't get a CS degree and try to transfer and compete with people who actually got degrees in that specific field. For example, if you wanna be an accountant then get a degree in accounting, don't argue if a CS or MIS degree is better before you transfer into accounting. Maybe MIS would be 1% better, but a degree actually in accounting would be 100% better.

Check your job requirements. If HR carefully and methodically filters out everyone who's honest on their resume, leaving nothing but the liars and cheats, you're not gonna be very happy with your interviews. There's not enough jobs out there for everybody, but I hear constant complaining on /. that once you filter out everyone who's honest, and everyone over the age of 25, and everyone who has kids, and everyone who has a spouse, and everyone demanding more than $30K/yr, you get nothing but whack jobs. Which can lead into a death spiral, where the solution to too many whack jobs is even higher standards. Leading to job reqs that should be pretty noobish getting tightened to ridiculous levels... 25 years experience with windows 2007, leading to even bigger whack jobs who pass the HR filter, leading to even tighter requirements (damnit I'm gonna require 50 years in server 2007 next time!). I've seen it happen.

I will add a disclaimer that the existence of one way to poison the applicant pool does not imply no other ways exist.

Not just "web development", but "women" also.

Not trying to make a value judgement or insinuate anything, that's just the facts.

If you can only learn in a classroom format, you're doomed in a fast moving profession. Switch to something slower moving or you'll be back to school in 5 years or less.

If you merely need knowledge from a classroom format and don't care what corporate HR thinks (aka you're ok with never being hired and being a contract worker, because HR gives zero respect to associates degrees) then my local tech school offers:

Web and media digital design aka online graphics artist.
Web and software developer from the school of business

You can also pay 4 times as much per credit hour and take 1/4 of your credits in liberal arts electives and 1/4 in math and learn about the same thing for a 4-year degree, which HR more or less respects, so you could end up an employee as opposed to lifetime contractor. If you actually looked you'd probably find some manner of graphics artist class in the art department and surely the b-school has something you'd like.

Or just switch schools if what you want isn't offered.. I went to 3 schools. Its really not a big deal this early in your schooling. Note that if they rubber stamp all incoming (for example) calculus transfer credits as denied, that doesn't mean you can't sweet talk a dean into a special exception, or follow the appeals process, or demand the right to test out (assuming you actually learned the topic...) or just F it and get the worlds easiest "A".

Amusingly around dotbomb collapse time I was attending a private college at night for CS, and they theoretically offered all specializations at night but in practice only offered your "web developer" classes. Needless to say the job market stank and I didn't want to do "web developer" anyway, so I simply moved to an online local university (a local university where practically the whole CS curriculum was available almost every semester and online 24x7 so I had no problem working full time).

If you're a noob, unless you've already experienced a "higher calling" to do webdev, you really do owe it to yourself to try electives like business analysis class, database design, maybe a networking, project (mis-)management, and the CS you're already complaining about. Maybe you think you're a future frontpage jockey but you're really unknowingly a DBA or router jockey. Won't know till you try it.

Time for a forest and tree analogy. On a rounding basis, the masses have historically never done anything terribly exciting, important, or relevant. So paying intense attention to them is a waste of resources. Its always the 10% or less who actually influence history. If we made all predictions based on the median joe 6 pack couch potato, we'd still be british subjects, we'd still be in control of independent south vietnam, iraq and afghanistan would be fully pacified, blah blah blah.

I don't think that knowing 30% of the population liked the most recent american idol episode is actionable intelligence information in either the short, medium, or long term. Imagine a squad about to deploy on a mission in Iraq being told that the best help intel can provide today is that 15% of active facebook users like listening to Bieber. Umm, thanks guys, on to the next briefing.

Its a self blinding technology, not an enlightening technology. I'm sure its highly profitable for contractors of course.