The problem isn't so much that new grads are missing some specific piece of technology or some specific piece of information. It's that new grads are typically missing, quite frankly, everything.

Programming and software engineering are -hard-. If you're a couple standard deviations above the average IQ, you can become barely passable in four years and reasonably good after ten. 'Reasonably good' is ideally the minimum standard that most companies would prefer to hire at, and the percentage of new grads which meet that standard is quite low.

Your best bets are two-fold: maintain one large personal/open source project for many years to demonstrate that you understand software engineering, and work on many smaller projects to gain diversity of experience. Optionally, you can pour your effort into the large project if it supports sufficiently diverse requirements. As an example, my large project was a mud server, which exposed me to everything from web server management, volunteer team building, and customer support to memory management, unix sockets, reference counting and coroutines.

In short, nothing substitutes for experience and breadth.

Stuff like this can help, but keep in mind that nutrition is, in the long run, a dead end. Even the best of nutrition and exercise will see you very lucky indeed to reach one hundred years old; for an indefinite lifespan, we will need actual repair and maintenance techniques. http://sens.org has more information on what will be necessary, and areas where research is (at the moment) particularly weak.

It's not at all that I don't care. It's that I care more about the hundred thousand people per day dying terrible deaths in pain and fear due to completely preventable and repairable biochemical failure. Taken in isolation, yeah, I'd prefer privacy - but when weighed against that level of suffering and death, it's not even a contest.

I'm actually shocked by the shortsightedness of the slashdot crowd on this one. I expected at least -some- positive responses to be moderated up. Instead, I see a lot of misconceptions and ignorance of the actual problem Page, like Aubrey Degray, is trying to address.

We have a hundred thousand people worldwide dying due to various medical problems and the diseases of old age. These medical problems and diseases are complicated. They consist of tens of thousands of interlocking subproblems, so many that we often take several thousand specific issues and lump them together to call them something like 'cancer'. Fixing these problems - all of them - isn't something that a single drug company, or a single nation is going to do.

It's going to take everybody, everywhere. And in order to fix all these things - cancers, diseases of old age, genetic problems, and more - is going to take research, time, and data. Lots of data.

Lots and lots of data.

People whine about privacy, oh no the bad guys are going to steal my information, ignoring the fact that a hundred thousand people a day die and that thier information could help. All of these medical problems are tractable, all of them are soluble, but they'd be a hell of a lot easier to solve if researchers weren't hamstrung by ridiculous information privacy restrictions.

I don't want immortality in good health just for me, I want it for everyone, and this idiotic fear of having information released is standing in the way of that. A hundred thousand people a day dead, because we fear someone might discover an abnormally BPH score, HIV, or a genetic propensity for Alzheimers. What a steaming load of shortsighted crap.

My point still stands.

Frankly if teachers are only contributing 1-14% to test scores then I have to wonder why we employ them at all. That's an abysmal number. We could replace them with scarecrows or hobos and still get those numbers.

Also, as I said before, I'd much rather have guesses based on data that is "fraught with error, inaccurate, and unstable" than guesses based on nothing. And right now, we have nothing.

For all intents and purposes, yes, the car salesman can be fired for it. Regardless, the salesman loses the commission: no loan = no sale = no commission. This is why salesmen are good at sniffing out people with money and people without.

The real difference between the salesman and the teacher is that if the salesman can't make his numbers, he doesn't eat, wheras the teacher is just disappointed.

When collecting and analyzing data is difficult, the solution is not to stop collecting data. It's to collect more data, and try harder. Further, I'd much rather have guesses based on some data, than guesses based on nothing. And lastly, if teachers only account for 1-14% of test results, that tells me that we need some dramatic improvement in teacher quality.

While I can at some level understand refusing dropouts, refusing GED graduates is stupid. The GED is basically the outer 'catch' block of the primary school system, and without it, there's no legitimate way to get a diploma if you have unusual circumstances. The fact that some kids use it to 'escape' primary school should tell you that there's either a problem with primary schooling, or that the GED process isn't sufficiently strong - but in both cases, the solution to the problem is NOT to make the GED worthless.

I really like the idea of a two stage mechanism, where the patent has to pass an initial review to be issued, and has to pass a more thorough publicly visible review when the first lawsuit involving the patent reaches some particular stage. The number of single-patent suits is actually fairly low and even a comprehensive review wouldn't add a lot of workload to the patent office, while the number of suits and patent applications would drop off due to the increased uncertainty of success.

Don't be a troll. As I said, the evidence for global warming is unambiguous.

> The problem is, by the time you start seeing serious climate problems it will be far too late to prevent things getting much worse.

I have a really, really hard time thinking that climate engineering won't be possible in a hundred years, and climate change doesn't happen fast enough to wipe out humanity in that time frame. IMHO we'll be able to put the climate wherever we want it.

> And what would the next most important concern be? Maybe the horrible pollution and environmental destruction being wreaked by our quest for more fossil fuels - fracking, strip-mining of pristine wilderness for tar sands, etc?

Nope. These are extremely low priority to me.

> Or maybe reducing the threat of global violence inherent in having our economies dependent on relatively rare fuel deposits while our need for energy to adapt to a changing world steadily increases?

This is also extremely low priority for me, as it's already happening anyway, and while some part of global violence is related to oil money, there's plenty of other reasons for people to blow each other up. Subsaharan africa and north korea are cases in point.

> This century is going to see a *lot* of geopolitical stresses as agriculture becomes far less reliable due to the already inevitable climate destabilization.

Agriculture has always been extremely unreliable, and yearly swings in weather dominate it, not climate change. Climate change is far more gradual than the time needed for agriculture to change.

> And perhaps most importantly - even if we had fusion mastered today, it would still likely take several decades to migrate the infrastructure.

Why is this any different from getting any other alternative energy source going? If anything, I'd expect continuous fusion plants to integrate just fine as they're similar to fission nukes, and ICF fusion plants to integrate just fine, as they're similar to gas turbine generators. Compared to what's needed for wind and solar, it's nothing.

Regarding population growth, most of the growth is in poor countries, where life extension will be less available, and where other dangers still cause a lot of death. While life extension does raise the projected plateau, how far it's raised depends on how fast it hits, how cheap it is, and how stable we're able to make the rest of the world. I'd bet 50/50 odds that the population in 2050 doesn't exceeed ten billion.

> assuming that neither you nor anyone you know would get the chance of being immortal, what arguments would you offer in it's favor? What rational reason do we have to extend the length of our lives?

Let me pose the same question to you, with a couple modifications:

- Assume that neither you nor any you know is dying of cancer. What arguments would you offer in favor of researching a cure? What arguments would you offer against such research?

- Assume that neither you nor anyone you know has alzheimers disease. What arguments would you offer in favor of researching a cure? What arguments would you offer against such research?

- Assume that neither you nor anyone you know lives in poor africa, where the average lifespan is barely above 40 years old. What arguments would you offer in favor of trying to help the people in this region? What arguments would you offer against it?

Aging is a horrible thing, something which frankly should not be tolerated in polite society, any more than cancer, alzheimers, and ebola. To simple take it 'off the table' as though it were uncurable and shouldn't be cured is reprehensible.

I am extremely certain that 1) global warming exists, and 2) global warming is mostly caused by mankind over the last few hundred years. As far as I'm concerned, the evidence there is more than sufficient, and deniers are nutjobs.

However, I don't really see much ecological damage that I care about at the moment, and that includes 'global warming' ecological damage. It's not that I don't see ecological change, it's simply that I don't care about most of it. It's also slow enough that mankind will be able to easily adapt going forward - easily compared to the other stuff we do day to day over the course of a century.

As for SENS, I'm not saying 'cure death'. I'm saying 'delay indefinitely death due to old age'. Why would you think we can't do that? It's a hard problem, but it's not unsolvable. At its core, life is just chemistry.

As for a ballooning population, current population estimates put a peak at under ten billion around the year 2050. There's every reason to believe that the population can be held finite.

I want to know how exactly changing out the electrode material type is supposed to get a 10k multiplier on plasma focus density. The web site and what I could find were remarkably short on detail, and I'm inclined to believe that while the beryllium electrodes are important, there's some serious confusion about what is being funded and the problems that funding is supposed to solve.

Either way, I'd much rather the money be donated to the SENS project instead. We don't currently have a power crisis, so to speak - however, we do have a hundred thousand people dying per day of age related diseases, and that seems a smidgen more important to me than dropping the cost of electricity.

For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, easy, and wrong. Bootstrap/init is a complex problem, and systemd covers more of that complexity than previous solutions.

As for the three digit UUID observation, that's because those people where there at the beginning. If they're still active today, of course they would have strong opinions - they have a lot of experience to draw on.