Imagine what terrorists could do had they infiltrated the government!

I don't think real programmers are in that industry only to earn money. You need to have passion for that, otherwise you will quickly move on to something which requires less work and brings more (or at least comparable) money. The abstraction level of the language you use is a measure how much passion you have - if you prefer higher level "lego constructor" languages like Java and whatnot, you are probably not that passionate, you are in just for money - or maybe you are a latent mathematician who sees programming as an uninteresting "implementation detail". If you aren't afraid to go down to bits and opcodes (or even wires), then you probably are passionate about computers and can qualify for "real" programmer.

Money is a good thing to have, but if all I wanted was to earn money, I would be "programming" people, not computers.

Well, uncontrollable empathy sounds dangerous. E.g. people who survived the war tend to be ones who were the meanest, not ones who had the most empathy towards their enemy (my personal impression after reading war veteran memoirs). Granted, war - which is "race to the bottom" empathy-wise - is not considered to be a "normal" condition anywhere except Freeciv...

Maybe normal people just have that switch broken - the same way as we lost controls over our ears :)

As far as I know nuclear plants are built to withstand an air attack (e.g. jet crashing into it). Meteors can be much more powerful though.

Fair enough, although I think that marginal commercial value is somewhat offset by anger resulting from excessive/unsolicited spam, and I am not sure that the net result is positive.

Why don't we hire people to break windows using the same logic?

And why teaching functional languages is an advantage? I actually see it as an academia's disconnect with real life. They could have been very well teaching liberal arts.

CS student that cannot program in C/C++ probably cannot efficiently use other languages as well.

Real humans read hex.

Does Google have a tool to backup Gmail data? Asking seriously, would like to use one. (I am aware that there are third-party tools and you can also download everything to your mail client yourself).

Try Russia. They substitute Yandex for everything Google.

You have picked a wrong site for such a comment. We are computer geeks. I, for one, don't mind turning more "dumb" things into "smart" ones.

45 cent light bulb? You probably live in America. Europe (and then Russia) banned 45 cent light bulbs. We're now using energy-efficient ones that cost about 10 USD on average. Buying incandescent bulbs is a challenge.

Creating advanced tools (even equal to us in all regards) will never eliminate "who will want to clean the toilets" question. There were societies that used slave labour (which approximates "self-sustaining intelligent machines") to avoid menial jobs, yet they still had the same motivational problems.