Facebook's alive and well. Hell, tghey make more money than ever, mostly because:
1. Users have no control over the narrative (to anything outside their social group)
2. Everyone and their dog (but not me) uses it
3. You can send each other useless (fb monetized) links to crap nobody cares about
4. Its an amazing diversion for people with no lives (don't forget pinterest / buzzfeed / instagram)
5. Its an amazing way to post how cool you are by posting all the amazing things you do, and like the amazing spread on the toast you just bought in Paris or something

Yes, because you know, rampent speculation is much more interesting than just hearing it from sources. The sad thing is, the Internet has manifested MOB justice just like we had hundreds of years before from uninformed emotion driven people. How many corpses will the internet leave in its wake before people can act sensibly? Oh well, good luck with -whatever new site- you depend on to spring up and be your nmew sounding board. But hell, it'll go the same way as this one beacuse people too busy tearing down others for a living rarely make enough money to pay the bills..

Anything to do with Uber (which is 99.999% about 'business freedom') attracts the libertarians who are far more active on slashdot than I've ever seen in the real world. Whenever you have libertarians espousing dogma, it turns into a holy flame war and only the victors are the ones who skimmed past the story (damn it!).

Yes yes, your libratarian rhetoric is nothing new, and your singular bile won't be winning any minds. But hell here's one.

You piss your neighbors off so much that they decide to deficate their pets in front of your house (lets say just outside of your property, another 'government established' boundary I may add) multiple times a day, why not. Your options are: assault/kill them, you could attempt reconsiliation, you could call the police to enforce laws and structure that you have no belief in, or you can put up with the reems of crap flowing over your lawn.

1. That is Europe, the home of angry mobs that get shit done, unlike the US where protestors wimper in the corner and accomplish essentially nothing (blame / support your political systems for reenforcing said outcomes)
2. They were protesting the lack of enforcing a law on the books, so its hard to complain about their reasoning.

If you want to complain about banning uber or supporting them, then for fuck sakes do it.

Its nice to see that there is some social progression being made in a country that has had such rocky times lately. Good luck to all the gay couples that can now be 'equals under the law'.

That's a little disengenuous. There's just fewer faculty worrying about that pesky 'teaching thing' and they can worry about what's really important, like Academic research, or not.

Frankly, I paid maybe $1000 / semester (+1k for books) at my state sponsered school and got a great job. 15 years later, I look back on the pathetic state of 'educational inflation' with outright distain.

As a professional java developer who's 'led a number or fairly large scale Java projects', you never realized the JDK includes a fully functional JRE without ad-crap installed? Color me suspicious.

It's not hard to figure at all. People with shitty family lives in school underperform regardless of their innate abilities. Black and Latino groups are some of the poorest racial groups, so it follows that on average, they'd test worse on enterance testing (given with a grain of salt).

Grand scheme though, 10,000 is a pretty small number given the millions of people currently in the field. Obviously the end number of individuals who make it to the professional world will be far less, but I'm glad to see there are some programs in place to help those that need the hand.

For myself, I started out with a lower-middle family, but my Dad was lucky enough to be in a union job where they contributed to childhood post-secondary savings programs enough so that when I ended up going to post-secondary, most of my bills were covered by the program, and a few scholarships/bursaries offered through the schools / donors. If I didn't have the small amount of savings my dad had saved for me, I'd very likely be doing a quite different job (and a far worse path) than I am now.

To be honest, I haven't had to touch the registry since begrudgedly getting Windows 7 for gaming. Even using it for pretty much day to day tasks, there isn't much reason to dig into the registry unless you can't find off the shelf util's to do it for you. Ex. I WOULD use it to make windows look like Windows 2000, but thankfully all of those lovely settings (and lots new code) exposed through Windows Classic Shell. In order to make my ideal desktop functional without haivng to dig around in obscure systems file settings, I get an out of box experience which is straightforward and expressive enough. Looking waaay back, Windows Power tools would've been a similar example.

Does this have more to do with 'evil chinese hacker swarms' or more to do with poorly secured networks being abused by parties unknown? Seriously, I'm no hacker but I'd have enough brains to never launch attacks directly from my loc when there are perfectly weak targets to channel attacks through. And lets forget entirely about TOR because systems attacks through TOR could never be a thing.

Separating desktops and servers (which in this case is quite relevant):

Servers can be Windows / Linux / etc. and it doesn't really matter. if I wanted windows, I'd spoool up a windows VM. If I wanted a Linux server, i'd spool up a Linux server instance in a VM. I ONLY WANT Windows/Linux because of the applications that run on them. Server dev environment choice in that respect don't really matter unless you're deeply entrenched in a given vendor's server API stack. I've personally never seen companies do anything OS-specific services outside of a few DCOM based components like 15 years ago. If you have customers that want your server offering, they'll spool up whatever OS/hardware necessary to run it.

For desktops, this certainly matters a lot, since most consumers don't have multiple desktop OS's unless you're dancing with tablets/phone OS's as well. All that said, I see little interest for 'windows apps' or 'Linux Apps', 'Mac Apps', etc.. The web has really gutted the native platform applications market. Never eliminated obviously, but significantly maimed in the consumer space.

Lastly, desktop applications for Enterprise are generally still thriving, and .Net/Java/C++/etc.. zealots in companies still fight tooth and nail for the next project.

Sorry, some people want to have real discussions about things that matter instead of being bombarded with mail chains from Mom and Aunt Betsy.

Spoken by a true pragmatist. I'm glad you're not my hiring manager (though sadly there are many who work under the same broken assumptions). I hate programming languages as much as the next zealot, sure. To assume a systemic bias against those with a specific set of language skills (disregarding experience/domain knowledge/people management/customer interaction/raw productivity/hipster hat collections) may be a little short-sided to the extreme.

Realistically speaking, you'd be truely astonished about how much code actually gets written behind the scenes that never show up in 'things you see'. It makes a big difference when determining the true scope of software development as a whole. According to Google, there's around 18 million software developers in the world. They all aren't writing front-ends to your latest social media web site.

Its not surprising that PHP is a popular deployment platform for one painfully obvious reason: Hosting. Well, and some very well maintained popular PHP software platforms targetting said hosting environments (Ok, thats 2).