I had some programming background when I took CS101. I found that being good at writing spaghetti code (or even simple OO code) that works is not something that puts you ahead of other students in a computer science course, and that you actually have to learn the course material in order to pass. Who would have guessed!

If people like me don't have to take CS101 then we're slowly but surely going to end up with a community of programmers/engineers who don't have a firm enough grasp of basic concepts in computer science, and they'll be worse at their jobs for it.

A better solution is to have after-school workshops for high school kids where they can prepare for a degree in CS. They way it ought to work is that math teachers in poor neighborhoods should keep and eye out for kids who are talented at math and recommend them for the CS workshops.

Now, I imagine this sort of discrete sorting of students will probably get you sued in the US, but it would work in most other countries.

The Ariane 6 sounds like it would entail a lot of pointless duplication of work that SpaceX has already done. Skylon should be funded, but there is no guarantee that it'll work.

I think the best way to get the European space launch industry back on track might be to take a hint from how the Chinese go about things and buy something like 100 Falcon 9 launches at above the normal going rate, with a special requirement that the rockets must be built in Europe.

Then SpaceX could either turn down this giant deal that would give them financial security for years, or they could accept it and build a factory somewhere in Europe, which would then cause knowledge and technology to seep out into the European space industry.

What the hell is wrong with Millennials?!

Same goddamned thing that's "wrong" with every other generation ever. Greed, selfishness, etc. The difference in outcomes stems from things like cheap air travel, which makes it possible for local idiots to literally go global. I bet these Greenpeace activist could have never afforded to fly to Peru in say 1964.

Of course, the boomers and their Soviet counterparts came pretty close to inadvertently wiping out civilization during Able Archer, which no other generation has managed to repeat since then.

Yeah...

First they came for TPB, but you didn't say anything because you weren't running a piracy torrent tracker, then they came for, uh, TPB again. And yeah, next they'll probably raid Spotify.

Yeah, I got a similar price on a 256GB drive back in June/July.

I'm more irritated by the bringing price down-part of that sentence. SSD:s are already about $0.55 per GiB and have been at that price point for several months.

I hope the $0.55 price will turn out to be more like $.40 once production is in full swing.

Nah. It's in your interest to stay as much off the radar of the Dear Leader and his buddies radar as possible. The second one of them perceives you as a threat you and your family is up for disappearance.

They will go to great lengths to treat famous people well, because you can't disappear those discretely. Random nerds, not so much. One of these elite hackers will be killed the second the leaders perceive that person as a threat.

Maybe there'll be a conservative version too...

Google Search: gay marriage
Did you mean "may marriage"?

Google Search: abortion
Did you mean "adoption"?

Google Search: the big bang
Showing results for "Genesis 1":

Whether you use metric or Imperial measurements is really a minor side issue.

The important thing is that you use a good steel ruler and compasses. None of that plastic crap.

That is mainly a problem if you sign up to get something for free. I don't expect that a company that makes 50 bucks net profit off of a fridge is going to risk their reputation in order to make a tiny bit more money by selling my data.

I'm more worried that the NSA would hack into an accelerometer intended to detect vibrations of the compressor and use it as a microphone to spy on my kitchen.

It's that too, but that's not what the (more serious) suits are excited about. The suits are typically excited about increasing profits for stuff that already exists, or about new business to business inventions.

Imagine for instance connecting everything in a factory in such a way that you can sit at a screen in a control room and detect or predict problems ahead of time. You could also have a risk function that quantifies risk. Sensors might for instance detect weak but unusual vibrations in a machine. Other sensors might detect that you only have spares in stock for one repair of that machine. The risk function has a model of how the factory works and the model shows that the machine is vital and that production will be significantly reduced if it breaks down, which means that you're looking at a fairly high economic risk. The system could then suggest potential fixes, like stocking up on more spares, or running the machine more slowly until the next scheduled maintenance.

I think this sort of setup is already in place in many factories, but it will get more common and more advanced in the future.

Yeah and there were virtual machines talking to other virtual machines and abstracting away resources long before anyone thought of the word "cloud".

Simple shorthands like "cloud" or "internet of things" are needed because the suit-wearing people who decide where money gets allocated often prefer fuzzy thinking.

You don't get it. IoT is a shorthand for the idea of having lots of networked sensors and actuators. In layman's terms: setups such as self-driving cars that warn each other about road hazards.

If this is the shape of things to come then there will obviously will be plenty of work for security experts.

We have to distinguish between the onset of mental illness and the prevalence. The onset is often between age 0-35. Look here for stats on schizophrenia http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/202/s54/s5.full Also note the comments about depression and anxiety. If you haven't had these before age 35 you're not likely to get them before retirement age.

I'm surprised to see the suicide figures, that the onset is basically constant with age. I guess I've been getting information about the <i>relative</i> risk compared to other causes of death.

The average age of onset of alcohol dependence is 22.5 http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/jul2007/niaaa-02.htm Look at page 11 of this paper for age of first use for "other drugs" (as in not alcohol, cannabis) http://www.qucosa.de/fileadmin/data/qucosa/documents/11009/646_PP.pdf There does look to be a small peak in the 45+ bracket too. Medicine / opiate abuse, I'm guessing.

On the other hand, younger people are more likely to have a baby, develop a debilitating mental illness, develop a debilitating substance addiction, commit suicide, or die in a violent accident. All of which will drastically impact their ability to contribute professionally.

Employers take that into account too.