If you're turning on the lights, who cares about your night vision? If I wanted to make use of my night vision while walking around in the dark, I wouldn't have lights outside at all. However, since we're not canines or felines or any number of other nocturnal animals, our night vision is terrible for seeing detail. And someone sneaking around the exterior of my house in the dark, I don't much care to preserve their night vision. In fact, maybe I should upgrade my motion sensor to 1000 watt stage throw bulbs.

Yes - at some distance greater than zero away from your house. In the meantime, the area immediately surrounding your house has now been sufficiently lit up to reveal whatever is there in the first place.

PHP doesn't need high privileges to zombie a box via bots/scripts downloaded to /tmp or /var/tmp in one POST request, and spawned via a second.

I just patched this on a half dozen servers yesterday - it's not the CVE vulnerability, it's a Plesk-Apache-PHP configuration exploit.

Plesk installed a PHP-via-CGI configuration that turned an entire directory path into an auto-CGI, and exposed the system path to the php executable. A couple of escape characters later and you had remote shell commands executing via POST.

I thought measuring bullshit was more accurately done by volumetric butts than mass tons.

" I use liters and mL for my liquor bottles and miles per hour for rate of speed calculations."

And pints, quarts and gallons for dairy case, and km/h for driving near the border of Quebec or the interstates in FL and TX/AZ/NM.

We're a damn mess.

If you notice what I said in that entire sentence, and the next - I didn't say get a CS degree. In fact, I explicitly mentioned several non-CS degrees immediately following where you ended the quote.

The point of getting the degree, as many other people also posted, isn't to show your credentials for {INSERT FIELD HERE} . It's to show that you can learn - anything - and follow something through to completion. Newly-graduated college students don't get hired because they're experts in their field, they get hired because they graduated, and as an aside while they were earning their degree, managed to do something that shows they have the ability do do whatever it is related to what they're applying for.

Disclaimer: This all, of course, assumes you pursue and get a job somehow related to your field. Job availability may vary by market. Past performance is in no way related to future gains. Not responsible for direct, indirect, incidental or consequential damages resulting from any defect, error or failure to perform. This information is subject to change without notice. And you "Art History" or "Humanities" majors out there, you should have talked to a guidance counselor before you left High School.

I want to be a web developer, and everyday I ask myself the same question: why am I wasting my time getting a computer science degree?

If your goal in life is to edit HTML files, then don't go get a degree at all. Like the (only 2 at the time of my writing this) other posters have said, build and run a website or 3, get a job as an intern at a company that does technology stuff, do things on your own and build a portfolio.

That being said, a career as a web designer is good for about 1 or 2 steps up, and then you are left as...a very experienced web designer, with a resume of short-term contract-type positions, and no educational background to show you know anything about databases, or actual programming, or business, or being able to make it through a degree program, or being able to deal with being around people, or anything much to give me or any other hiring manager a reason to spend more than 30 seconds reading your resume.

Just last week, I tossed a resume, for a new DBA position we're trying to fill, in the trash. Maybe he was a good DBA, but his resume was 10 years of web development and website administration, with 2 6-month stints at a place being an actual DBA in any sense of the word. Yes, I know any web developer that deals with running websites most likely has run the databases that back those websites, especially at a smaller company (I've done it myself at even not-so-small companies), but I can't suggest hiring someone to manage 2 dozen customer databases in a production environment with 12 months of short-lived "DBA" experience on a 10 year career in technology.

If you want to be a "Web Designer" for all of eternity, then teach yourself and build your portfolio of Things You've Done to show off to potential customers.

If you want a career in technology that might eventually lead to managing and hiring other web developers, or moving into Production Operations, or dealing with technology workers that do anything other than develop web pages, get a degree. Get a business or management or sociology degree if you think a CompSci degree will be a "waste", but give future hiring managers a reason to think you have the ability to learn more than how to monkey with HTML.

I didn't say a C# console app - I specifically said Visual C#, in response to people discussing having the Visual* IDEs generate the UI for the programmers, then filling in the back end.

Using the IDE simply as the debugger/programming environment is fine. But building UIs is putting the cart before the horse. Unless a programmer understands what happens inside the app, they'll never really understand how to make those things hook, affect, and respond to a UI that was just dropped on top of some code.

For anyone suggesting VB, or Visual C#, or any of the other "Click to build the framework then fill in the back end", this is the worst possible thing an actual beginning programmer should be looking into.

I would assume from the OP that we're talking about people with no programming background. Taking someone like that, giving them a button to click to generate a UI, then having them fill in the blanks is #fail. They don't already know how to program. It would be like asking someone to complete a puzzle, in a dark room, where they don't know what shape the blanks are in the puzzle, or what colors they should be, or even where the front or the back is.

Interface builders are nice for people that already know how to program, because while creating UI's is tedious, it's also about the 10th thing to be done when building a program. People who have been programming for years can work backwards (Yes, UI to logic is backwards in all cases except for programmers-who-specifically-design-UIs, but that's not what we're talking about here) from the UI to the underlying program logic and the flows between UI elements, but someone new shouldn't be developing in this direction. They should be understanding how the logic behind the program works, in many different variations, before they go putting a pretty button in front of that logic to show the result in pretty graphical ways via some rendering library call..

BASIC, Lisp, Perl, Python, Java (not javaw or AWT), all are useful for the basic understanding of what a program is, what control and input and output logic is. As people have mentioned, Python and Java both have graphical toolkit extensions that can eventually extend your development to pretty pictures and not input/logic/output. If you really want some sort of "visual" developer to put in front of this person, go look into some of the "Blocks" development tools, like Google AppInventor, for example. These use interfaces analogous to puzzle pieces to represent the code in the application, and you can drag and drop inputs and outputs to hook into control statements to do things - sorta like the virtual programming equivalent of everyone's favorite Radio Shack 160-in-1 Electronics kit.

For the love of god, though - don't "teach" someone to program by putting them in front of a framework generator and having them "go at it".

That wouldn't have been "his school", that would have been just about every high school during the 40's to 70's. Women took Home Economics (a.k.a. Cooking) and maybe Typing if they were on a "career track", and men took Shop.

Of course it look ridiculous for things to have been that way, looking at them 30-40 years in the past. That's because society changed.

Now we all know that you have to "sudo make me a sammich" to get your women to get it done. :)