My mother's dead, you insensitive clod. So's my step mom. And all three grandmothers. Divorce did have the benefit of adding extra grandparents and they were awesome.

Shhh! You'll give away the twist.

Hey, I like my AMD A8 laptop. Paid $305 for it 3 years ago. 17.3" of quad core HeaP glory.

The original cost estimate of the infrastructure was $30,000,000,000 and that it's now up to $68,000,000,000. The rail system doesn't just pop into existence. It has to be built and the debt incurred during construction should be repaid. That's around 800,000,000 riders at $84/ticket. Nevermind the cost of operating the trains. Approximately 5,000,000 people fly that route every year. Even if they pull 100% of air travelers, it's obviously going to be a huge money pit.

...shouldn't the price of the ride be based on the cost of delivering the service? What if it turns out to cost $300/person to transport someone from LA to SF on the new rail system?

My last 3 phones (I still have the old ones somewhere), two tablets, my old GPS navigation unit, a bluetooth GPS receiver I used with a laptop, one of my quadcopters, a USB GPS receiver...I think that's about it. And I've had several more that are long gone. I've been GPS navigating since the late 90s when I plugged a Sony Etak PCMCIA GPS receiver into my Libretto and fired up SkyMap. These days, I use the GPS in my current phone most of the time.

I always upgrade my android devices as fast as the updates are available through normal channels. I don't root my devices and load custom ROMs. I'm too old for that. I just want my shit to work without spending hours messing around. But the manufacturers and carriers are not pushing updates in a timely manner, even on their flagship devices. My Nexus 10 tablet got upgraded to Lollipop last fall. My S5 phone didn't get upgraded until 2/4. My Tab S 10.5 didn't get upgraded to 5.0 until 3/23. By then, my Nexus 10 was already on 5.1.

Despite being Samsung's flagship devices at the time of purchase, my phone is still on 5.0 and my Tab S is still on 5.0.2. Meanwhile my creaky old Nexus 10 (also made by Samsung) is running 5.1.

No, I can't. I started out and I sucked. I got better eventually through experience. In order for it to be truly bimodal, people have to start in either camp A or camp B and end in the same camp they started in. Because if you transition from one to another over time, any point in time will capture a group of people in between the modes. Now, you can argue that people don't spend much time in between those modes but you haven't presented any evidence for that. What's more likely is you have geocities coders on one tail and John Carmack/Linus Torvolds on the other tail. And in between are people like the presenter and I. And since I'm not instantaneously going from bad to good, the reality of the situation is most likely some degree of a normal curve filled with people trying to get better at programming or even just getting better though spending lots of time doing it and learning a little along the way.

For all your attacks on the presenter, your argument of a bi-modal distribution sounds more flawed to me. I would love to see your study and hear your argument.

To be fair, you can spend a great deal of time talking about something and make progress on the issue without solving it.

For example the current metrics are abysmal so it's worth explaining why they're abysmal. I just was able to delete several thousand lines of JavaScript from one of my projects after a data model change (through code reuse and generalization) -- yet I increased functionality. My manager was confused and thought it was a bad thing to get rid of code like that ... it was absolute dopamine bliss to me while he felt like our production was being put in reverse. KLOC is a terrible metric. But yet we still need to waste a lot of breath explaining why it's a terrible metric.

Another reason to waste a lot of time talking about a problem without reaching an answer is to elaborate on what the known unknowns are and speculate about the unknown unknowns. Indeed, the point of this article seemed to be to advertise the existence of unknown unknowns to "recruiters, venture capitalists, and others who are actually determining who gets brought into the community."

Perhaps ... but that would imply that one does not transition over time from one hump to the next or if they do, it's like flipping a light switch. When I read this I assumed that he was talking only about people who know how to program and not "the average person mixed in with programmers."

But you just said there's no way to measure this ... how could he have collected data? What data set could have satiated us? The answer is quite obvious and such collection would have been a larger fool's errand than the original article's content.

As punishment, lets leave all the "Warp Deniers" on Earth when we travel to Alpha Centauri.

I think you give humans too much credit in your last sentence. Careless, absolute knowledge claims are the default position of the human brain. Fortunately we have developed the scientific method and it works moderately well at counterbalancing that natural human predisposition.

My grandpa was the most flexible-minded elder I ever encountered but even he didn't want to change the way he did things once he learned how to do something. He made the transitions from Windows 3.11 to 98se to XP well enough because I minimized the impact by using "classic view" setups and carrying forward as much of his software as possible.

He wasn't afraid to explore new things. Just that, once he learned them, he wanted it to be static and unchanging. Why would you change something that works? One weekend, I came home and he showed me the radio-fax kit he'd bought. Say what??? It was a receiver that plugged into the headphone jack of a shortwave radio on one side and the serial port of the computer on the other side. The software would record and decode faxes of weather maps that were broadcast over shortwave then print them on the DeskJet 500c. But, when this kind of thing became widely available on the internet, he wouldn't switch until either they stopped broadcasting or the software didn't survive an OS upgrade. I forget which. He didn't like using websites to get weather maps as much because they'd make small changes to the websites once or twice a year and he'd have to hunt for what he wanted. As inefficient as the radio-fax thing was, the process didn't change.

And he was doing online banking back in the 90s. No urging or input from me. I didn't think he'd be comfortable with it. But one day he was telling me how I really needed to look into this online banking thing. "It's great!" Heck, I only beat him to it by a few months.

I don't know if it's really just old people who are like that, tho. Way back in the before time, I signed up with a temp agency to get some quick money while I was looking for a permanent job. I did the Word and Excel tests because that was the software I'd used. Then I realized they wouldn't send me to a job where they used WordPerfect or Lotus123 unless I took and passed those tests. It seemed absurd. That would be like "Oh, we can only send you to jobs where you'd be driving a Toyota. You didn't take the Ford test." When I passed every word processor and spreadsheet test they had, the woman looked at me like I was a wizard. "Why didn't you say you knew those programs?" "I don't. I've never used them in my life. But a word processor is a word processor. They all do the same thing and have the same menus." "Wow. I'm not going to have any trouble finding you a job!"

I've worked with people in almost every age group who learned by rote and have no comprehension of what they're doing. I used to say most people 5 years younger than me or older are hopeless with a computer. And that was back in my 30s.