For a more general purpose online learning platform Moodle is certainly worth looking into. I haven't used it in anger for a few years now but it appears to be active.

Waterloo Fortran IV - now THAT is an obscure reference. Pretty sure that I only ever coded a couple of programs in WATFIV

Commercial airliners are pretty close to being robotic already of course

Remember going to the class? I didn't go.
My second year Math exams were very interesting
Full of ideas and concepts I had never come across before
Whoops

Learning to programme should be completely trivial if you've got any talent.
Learning a whole eco-system of development tools which is what you'd need to do to hold down a serious job is a much bigger task of course.
A decent CS degree from a good school won't teach you how to code - they'll assume you know that pretty much as an entry requirement

He's probably first level support for some package

Correct

The default position will be that nothing and I mean nothing in the corporate domain will be able to open a TCP connection to anything in the SCADA domain.

and the guys in charge of this will take it all the way to senior management if you even look like you are thinking of breaking this rule.

and you'll have to sign some serious career limiting documents before the guys in suits will sanction this.

or at least that's how it's been at place I have worked where they have SCADA networks and my specialist topic is data integration so I tend to bump into these issues fairly often

SCADA networks are usually on a completely separate domain from the corporate network. It'll be behind two sets of firewalls controlled by anal retentive engineers

No survival of the fittest is actually survival of the fittest gene. Read Dawkin's The Selfish Gene - nothing new here that hasn't been written up in pop science for 30 years as far as I can tell

Back when I was at University my supervisor was doing Natural Language research using LISP.

They would type in short stories then ask the computer questions about the stories

One story included something about John's driving his car and crashing into Mary
This uncovered a bug in the code where they were try to access the first element of an empty list

The LISP engine errored with.... drum roll....

"Illegal CAR usage"

Nope re the mindset back then. I was coding for living back then and the ratio of good developers to bad developers is still pretty much the same now. Go and read the Mythical Man Month. What's sad is not that 'we were better at this stuff in the good old days' but that we, as an industry, haven't learned how to do things better having had 30 years of practice.

A friend of mine led the development team that built the onboard software for the Huygens probe. The QA cycles they went through would be insane for any normal project.

For example they gave the compiled code to a completely separate team and got them to reverse engineer the specifications.

This uncovered a Y2K bug in the ADA runtime that the code was built on

As the test driven development mantra goes - test until you aren't scared any more
Knowing that your code will be run once and only once in production, there's no second chances and that the box it's running on is some 10's of light hours away makes you rather easily scared

Read Fielding's Thesis - for me the most interesting part is where he discusses and suggests a definition of an architecture. If I recall, he defines an architecture as a set of design constraints chosen to achieve a set of goals.

as there were a few hints that she might have been learning to act ;)

I think that it depends on the enterprise.

Last year I was doing Java CAPS work and you don't get much more enterprisey that that. Under the hood JCAPS uses lots of open source stuff,. For example, if I recall correctly it uses some of the Apache Commons libraries and it certainly uses stuff like Ant.

However, the powers that be wouldn't let me use them, their logic being - if there's an issue in an Apache Commons lib then Sun (now Oracle of course) have the horse power to fix it but we don't. If we have an issue with one of the libraries Sun sure as anything won't fix it.

And I found it difficult to argue against this stance.

On the other hand in some enterprises the difficulties, costs and time delays of going through formal procurement procedures can kill you. Sometimes the politics play out so that you can use FOSS because it doesn't need to be procured and actually deliver something before hell freezes over.

Different types of enterprises and different types of politics but it's not, in my experience, in my experience because FOSS is cheaper than alternatives it to do with support and internal procurement policies.