A couple examples from India, and every 35+ programmer on the planet is doomed?

We don't need to throw out developers with age and experience, we need to throw out clueless journalists.

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There are two kinds of innovation. One blazes the trail. The other paves the road.

A couple of my academic friends believe that MOOCs like Khan Academy will "invert" the teaching process. Instead of attending lecturers for content, and assimilating the material later while doing homework, students will view lectures offline, and assimilate the material in class, in a more lab-like environment.

Sounds good to me.

> Read below for the rest of what CowboyNeal has to say

No thanks.

I appear to be the only ./er who cares enough to mention that it should be "hear, hear", not "here here".

That said, I agree with the sentiment, if not the spelling. My former employer, who shall go unnamed, is a dynamic Silicon Valley hi-tech company, once one of the best places in America (pre-Google) for bright geeks to work. It is now a sea of H1Bs. A small percentage of them are stars; the rest are merely inexpensive. And the worst part is that H1B managers rarely hire Americans; they prefer to manage other H1Bs.

Unbelievably bad, that is. The light is poor and barren. I have yet to see a "100w equivalent" that was even close to being as bright as a 100w incandescent. Some of them have a power factor of 0.5, which means they're actually half as "energy efficient" as the label says. And "long-lasting"? Not in my experience. But hey, at least they're expensive.

The lighting industry has got to be gleefully rubbing its hands over these regulatory moves.

The building inspector made me replace 160 watts of very nice halogens in my new kitchen with 160 watts of fluorescents because the code says half of the lighting in a kitchen has to be "energy efficient". The overall lighting level went down considerably with this change, in part because the halogens give directed light and decent looking fluorescents don't, and also because halogen light is a lot nicer. Of course the change was reversed the same day the inspector signed off. The $120 fluorescent fixture I was forced to buy now illuminates an area of my home that I don't spend much time in--the laundry room.

I favor a simple progressive tax on capital gains. Tax ordinary capital gains same as now. Tax gains on trades under a day at 50%, under an hour at 75%, under a minute at 85% and under a second at 95%. Preferably on a nice curve instead of by quanta.

Wow, I take it back. Some of this music is pretty awful. A good MIDI performance expert could do better. Oh god, listen to the french horn in the 2nd promenade in Pictures at an Exhibition. Oh, and the violins at the end of that. Shiver. Ouch. Damn.

Possibly the project's initial goals were completed, but that's hardly what springs to mind when one hears the phrase in the context of the classical repertoire.

That said, I'm listening to Eroica, and it actually ain't bad.

WRT the print edition quality, most world-class musicians prefer autograph scores. Heavily edited scores are more suited for amateur performers. An exception is Sussmayer's version of Mozart's Requiem, which has a lot of rough spots, and is usually performed from later fixed up versions.

Received mine (in CS) at 45, 15 years ago. I'm honestly unsure that the PhD was worth it, though it was fun. The Masters was definitely worth it.

The PhD training really only teaches you how to think. Since entering the hi-tech workforce, I've had to learn 3 or 4 new skill sets in order to do a job and have a domain to think about.

I've only seen three of my neighbors often enough to identify them in a lineup, and they all live in the same house.

I've listened to Woz speak. It's pretty clear to me that he is a bright man who did something brilliant at the exact right time. The timing wasn't his fault, but he's been rewarded for it with both money and adulation, and kind of like a Hollywood star he assumes that his success means he is somehow qualified to speak on other areas of life. Woz didn't have much to do with the development of much anything since the Apple II to my knowledge. Lucky for himt he had lots of Apple stock to cash in on no matter what he contributed.

I'll probably get modded as flame for this. Sigh. I actually don't have anything against Steve W., and think he's made a great contribution to the universe. I guess I simply believe that while Steve Wozniak blazed the trail, Steve Jobs paved the road.

BTW, this, and my house burning down, are the two scenarios that freak me out and motivate me. A hard drive failure is almost always addressable by sending your failed hard drive off to a recovery company with a $1000 check; chances are you won't lose any data you care about. But if all your hard drives go missing, you're f___ed.

Very nice point about burglars. Still, you need an offsite copy somewhere, in case they grab every piece of equipment in your house.

I'm glad that works for you, but I'm with the other old-fashioned types. For me, dragging together materials generated by others into a pastiche, no matter how brilliant, does not impart understanding in the same way that having to understand things well enough to write short notes and diagrams does.

When I was in college and grad school, all my notes were pencil and paper. Good notes aren't textbooks, they're pointers into the memory structures you're building around a topic.

My work now doesn't involve much diagramming, so taking notes on an 11" Air works great. But anytime diagramming is required, I go over to the nearest laser printer and grab some paper out of the drawer.