The only Tetris movie that ever needed to be made has already been made. Any further attempts will necessarily pale in comparison.

The problem with being obvious about it is that there's a very large overlap between the populations of people who would spike someone's drink and people who turn psycho when they see drinks being tested. Without the ability to be discreet, merely performing the test puts a person in danger.

It's more discreet than using a special straw, which seems to have been the predecessor (at least in spirit) of this new method.

What you see at that link is only the last panel. The story was revealed frame-by-frame over a much longer period of time.

I do think it would be nice if xkcd made the whole thing available, but others have managed. The Wikipedia link above can point you at some of them.

This is Vine we're talking about. Wouldn't you need like six of the videos just to capture the announcer shouting "GOOOOOOOAL!!1!!!"?

What effect does the userland have on the TCP/IP stack?

Give me something that opens from the side into a nice, wide QWERTY keyboard, like LG's en-V or Octane, or Pantech's P7000. None seem to be in production at the moment, which is going to make me really sad when my current one dies.

Google has deliberately killed more technologies than Microsoft ever just let wither and die, and Mozilla has been burned by this more than once. At this point, I'd say it's quite reasonable to demand that Google provide some assurances that it's not going to flake out this time.

I don't. But if you seriously think that that's all there is to even rudimentary programming, then either you've forgotten far too much about your own learning experiences, or you're a prodigy (in which case you shouldn't be generalizing your experiences at all).

I don't have to reassure people that it takes too much time and energy. They convince themselves of that easily enough, and frankly, the widely-available evidence favors them quite strongly. If you want to convince them otherwise, you're going to have to prove to them that this is easy to pick up. Good luck with that. I certainly haven't managed, and I've come to a conclusion as to why I can't prove it: it's simply not true. Your arguments aren't very compelling either.

Actually, my next step is to claim that your two steps are already too complex. Not because people are stupid, but because these two steps require a greater investment of time and energy than most people can realistically be expected to make. The moment you mentioned taking a class, you had already failed.

You seem to imply that programming is, at its core, a relatively small set of simple and easily-grasped concepts, but I can't say I've ever found compelling evidence that this is actually the case. Could you please list these basic skills that are so easy to master? I'm afraid I have to ask for a thorough list.

I'm not interested in excluding people from programming. However, there seems to be an underlying assumption from many of the coding-for-all types that programming "should" be much easier than it currently is. I'm putting "should" in quotes here because when many people see that word, they start thinking in ideological or moral terms. That's not my intended meaning. I'm talking about the logistics of programming: specifically, the idea that we have unnecessarily heaped huge amounts of complexity on top of something that is actually quite simple.

In order to open up programming to the masses, it must necessarily be simple and easily-grasped at its core. This is not because most people are stupid, but because most people cannot afford to spend a great deal of time and energy learning the concepts behind it. As currently understood, programming requires a large investment of these things, and most programmers today, by far, are people who have made that investment.

Can that time investment be reduced? To some degree, it probably can. But there are limits to how far something can be reduced, and I'm not convinced that programming can be reduced to a degree that would bring it to the masses. My reasoning for this is that I'm not convinced that the core concepts are as simple and easily-grasped as they're often made out to be. They seem simple to me nowadays -almost second nature, in fact- but I've been programming for years, I studied for years before that, and things didn't really start to click until I was a few years into my studies. Even nowadays, I still get moments where something suddenly clicks and my skills take a noticeable leap forward. This is not a hallmark of a simple field.

I believe that most of the people who set out to "simplify programming" are not too different from me. They might have learned certain concepts at different rates, but the things that seem simple to them now did not seem so simple when they first began. This is, I propose, because they aren't simple.

I am not "elite." All I did was allocate my time a little differently, and in ways that not everyone realistically can. I don't begrudge them this, because a lot of them allocated their time in ways that I couldn't, especially not after I made my choice. I respect and appreciate the skills they have that I don't, and I don't think I'm out of line in asking for the reverse. What makes this state of affairs unacceptable?

I'd like a strawman with a side order of false dichotomies, please? Oh, wait, no I wouldn't.

Nobody with any wit thinks that any given piece of technology is going to be well and truly flawless. Not even the technology used to land a plane. That's why we design them with multiple backups, failsafes, and alternatives. Rather than blindly trust the things we designed, we instead design so that we don't have to trust them. Even if something goes wrong, there's always another backup or alternative.

That's what this particular design fails to do. By hamstringing the last-resort failsafe (i.e. the pilots), it requires blind trust in the technology. That is simply not a sane approach.

Is there really no room for any other sort of reaction, in between blind faith and knee-jerk opposition?

From time to time, technology fails. This is a simple fact of life, and normally, the people making the technology will be the first to tell you this (the people selling the technology, not so much, which is a source of tension between the two). It doesn't take a Luddite to see that one needs to have failsafes in place. This is, in fact, what the word "failsafe" means.

It's unlikely for any company to get the "best qualified" in absolute terms, because every one of them is competing for the best qualified. But you go for the best qualified among whatever is available.

But ultimately, that's not the only factor. You need someone who will provide a decent value for what they're asking. If the best qualified person is asking well over the value of their work, then you've got to take that into consideration as well. People who you cannot afford are essentially unavailable, and so you're back to looking for the best-qualified person who is.