No, I think it's apt. "Programming" (ideally) involves the discipline of being able to plan out how to approach a problem, testing, best practices, etc. "Coding" is just hacking away until something seems to work and then moving on to the next thing. We use the term "code monkey", as in "a million monkeys with a million typewriters" saying, but the term isn't apropos in layman circles, so "coder" and "coding" suffices.

95%+ of the kids that come out of these classes will not be budding programmers. A good programming class will include the basics of planning/bug catching, but most students will be "coders" at best.

We had a similar thing at my workplace. We have a number of network drives assigned by GP, to all accounts, but over time most have become obsolete. Two years ago we migrated to from WinServer2003 to 2008. In 2008 or an update installed shortly thereafter, you couldn't assign a username/password when making a network connection through GP due to it being a big security hole, and without that one of the network drives always failed to connect. However, that drive was not used anymore, so it wasn't a problem

What was a problem was the "Could not connect all network drives" message that every user got every time they logged in. Some people actually did ask me about that (I'm not really IT, but I do a lot of IT-ish stuff) and, while I reported it to the boss/owner who does oversee all of that stuff, nothing happened. Now it's white noise to the end-users. I finally convinced her recently to disable the GP, just to have less white noise, and hopefully in time the other employees will become unused to that and report when they actually have a problem with network drives. (It also put entries into the Event Log when the connection fails, making it more annoying to track down problems.)

We have other problems like this, but one at a time. Of course, it won't stop people from just hitting OK: I had a guy who was trying to remove a password from a PDF in Adobe Acrobat. He would clear the password and it would show him an error message. He asked me what to do and I had him to repeat his steps; the second paragraph of that message explained exactly what he had to do, he just never read it and hit Cancel instead. Too often non-experienced computer users assume that if there's an unexpected message of any kind that they are completely incapable of dealing with it, and so will ignore it or send a non-helpful report to the support desk.

While I agree in general, I don't think that yearly installments are necessarily a bad idea, they've just been handled very poorly for the reasons you mentioned.

Consider Marvel's Cinematic Universe: We're getting multiple movies per year for the same universe, each of which costs about the same as a AAA video game to make. Video game franchises with established or potential enormous universes could go well, if approached correctly:
1) Games would have to be made by different studios on a rotating basis[1]
2) Games cannot be mere iterations off each other (this is the main failure of Battlefield/CoD in their yearly releases)
3) Games should explore different aspects/facets of the universe they reside in to avoid fatigue (another failure of Battlefield/CoD)
The benefit is that the plot/universe could be built up and maintained by a small handful of people, so the devs only have to focus on the smaller details. Having such a setup also makes it easy to expand into other things, like books, comics, and "graphic adventure games" (like Telltale did with Borderlands). Going back to Marvel, I'm sure someone has a giant Word document/Wiki that has the basic overview of the universe and how all movie plots will progress through at least 2017.

[1] Battlefield (I think, might be CoD) is on a three-year rotation now, one dev per year, with Hardline as the first game from this new rotation. Prior to this, both Battlefield and CoD were on two-year rotations, which crunched the devs quite hard

Changing it to a percent of wealth or income would encourage more rich people to hide their assets overseas.

These days it seems the wealthy will hide their assets overseas if someone so much as farts too loudly, so I don't see this as an argument against.

They have plenty of money to hire fancy lawyers and accountants to make sure their wealth remains in tact.

And they have to pay these fancy lawyers and accountants, which means that their wealth still decreases and the money is spread around. If they have to pay another, or pay an existing one more, in order to avoid these fines, that seems like a good outcome to me.

Meanwhile, the middle class would probably get hosed because they have enough to be hurt by higher fines, but not enough to defend against it or hide their assets.

Fines are supposed to hurt at least a bit; that's how they're a deterrent. There's also no guarantee that the rough amount would increase for the middle class, either, depending on the fees already in place and the equation that replaces them. A proper equation would leave fines about the same or slightly less for the middle class.

And what happens to the poor? They'd get zero fine because they have nothing and earn nothing?

The class tiers aren't "Upper, Middle, Zero". Someone with no income is extremely unlikely to have a car in the first place. You can be poor and still have some discretionary funds, though quite small; or do you think that not a single person below the poverty line has a TV? So, while the rich are paying the lawyers, Joe Poor isn't tossed in jail for failing to pay a fine that is onerous to his income, a fine he got because he didn't slow down enough on a steep downhill slope.

But wait, there's more! Fines that are more in line with your income make them a more effective deterrent for the poor, too! Imagine that you only make $2K/mo. Something happens and you get a fine for $500. You get the fine, laugh, and throw it away; there's no way you can pay this fine, you're on a shoestring budget as it is. If there was some long-term payment option maybe you could pay it, but AFAIK this isn't a common thing. In a risk vs. reward scenario, it makes more sense to keep the $500 and hope no one tracks you down (which is incredibly unlikely for that amount.)

Now imagine the fine is only $50. The risk vs. reward balance changes greatly now: It's not worth the risk of getting arrested over $50 if you can realistically pay the fine, even if that means a bit more ramen and a bit less McDonald's for the month. It not only becomes more likely to pay but also to avoid offending in the first place.

I do agree about many driving laws being too strict, or the attention paid to them imbalanced (speeding is the common stopping reason, but tailgating and failing to pass in the left lane are more likely accident causes), but even if those were improved fines would still be a problem.

The government is going to touch the money at some point in order to collect the fines, even if they don't hold onto it, so you can't completely remove government from the situation. The way I think it should be:
1) Fine as % of income
2) Put each amount into an emergency relief fund, to be used in "Act of God" disasters
3) If unspent after a year, remove the amount (and any interest generated from it) and use it for one or all of the following:
A) A public work, such as a park (something that is a nicety but not necessity)
B) Lottery for those who have registered vehicle in the area, that are not government employees, that have not gotten a single citation during the year (this gives an extra incentive to drive well in addition to the disincentive to not break the law )
C) Equal tax refund/credit for all citizens

The reason it's not kept for more than a year is because the area would become reliant on it as a primary emergency fund; instead it's used as a boost, if available.

Alternative medicine guaranteed that he would die sooner than later.
Routine operation, while it did have risks of a quicker death, at least had a good chance of extending his life.

I imagine there will be some sort of two-factor authentication. The car can recognize the lights or, more reliably, a standardized signal from the police vehicle. It begins to pull over and, while it does so, contacts a standard system to verify that the copy signalling is a legitimate one. If not recognized as a police vehicle, or the police car sends a "move past" signal, it would just move over/slow down to allow the emergency vehicle to pass.

There are layers involved, of course, and wouldn't be fool-proof, but I think this is one of the easier problems to solve with self-driving vehicles.

While it's true that this isn't a test of a fully self-driving car, solid, long distance driving is going to be the "kickstarter" for getting full self-driving automobiles into people's homes. Families are going to love setting out on the highway, setting the car to "maintain", and then everyone (driver included!) can just sleep or play games or whatever. Car alerts when it's running low on gas, there's a potential problem, or you're coming to a more congested area that requires human take-over.

But then there are semis. Allowing truck drivers to sleep while their semi drives a steady route is going to save serious man hours and real hours (and likely many lives). This will likely come before the minivan does, because there are all sorts of extra pressures put on the trucking industry that are miniscule for consumer driving. You don't want to test this kind of thing with a giant truck, though, which is why it's a car. Test with the car, apply to the truck, prove the usefulness and reliability on the truck, apply to the car.

As with most things consumer, we're going to see heavy use by businesses before they're common amongst people. City street auto-driving will likely be taken by FedEx or UPS first, moving on to driverless, inner-city taxis, and so forth.

And Wii-U fans have a strange obsession that they have some kind of monopoly on fun.

Not fun in general, but Nintendo fun via Nintendo properties. These will never be multi-platform, so if you want to play Zelda, Star Fox, Mario, or Pokemon you're going to have to buy a Nintendo console. The reason the Wii U's main reason wasn't "brand" like Xbone is because most Nintendo fans (so far as I can tell) are tepid about decisions Nintendo made with the console. Despite this, they still get one because they want access to those games.[1]

Not that you can't get light-hearted affairs and platformers on other systems, but they usually take a far back seat to games rated T/M.

[1]At the very least, that's why I'm planning to get one this year, when a number of large names come out or will come out early 2016.

The focus on resolution seems ridiculously overblown.

I think developers brought this upon themselves. Near the end of last gen, poly-count got with extremely diminishing returns and particle effects hit a roof, so they made up for the lack of graphical improvements by touting 1080p whenever they possibly could. Thus console gamers came to expect it of higher-end titles, especially when the console manufacturers moderately pushed the ability.

This gen can do more in terms of particle generation/poly count (with the Wii U far behind), so the focus has shifted back to those and away from 1080p.

In programmer parlance:
if(bill.Name.ToLower().Contains("freedom")) {
        boolean passed = congress.vote(bill);
        if(passed)
                panic();
}

This. When they first introduced ads, you could go into settings and opt out. I did so, then turned off auto-updating. I'm happy with the version of the client I have (2.something)

Why does the FTC even bother? How is that supposed to deter anybody?

My guess is that the abilities of the FTC to punish are severely hampered so that they can't be used on otherwise-legit businesses when they do a bad thing.

That reminds me of waiting in a very long line (maybe it was Christmas?) to send packages through the USPS, and someone at one of the counters spent their entire time ranting to the postal worker about how USPS service was horrible and they hoped the service would become a private one, and that private industry was better.

If I'd had my wits about me then, I would have said "Hey, if you like private industry so much, why are you here instead of FedEx or UPS?"

Their ranting probably delayed the rest of us getting to the counter by a minute.

I often wonder why we've not heard a peep about Half Life (2: Episode) 3. I understand the concept of Valve Time, but even taking that into consideration we're closing in a decade since Episode 2 (and the whole episodic started with the claim that they could put out an Episode every six months). To have nothing, not even a single screenshot or even an official "yeah, we're making Pikm- er, Episode 3", in 8 years, seems really bizarre. At best we had a blurb about "Ricochet 2" as a thinly-veiled explanation of the HL3 lack of information in 2012. I understand that they want to get it right, but at this point they risk "Duke Nukem Forever" syndrome, where the vacuum created by the lack of information is filled by user hype and it will become impossible to meet gamer's expectations. (I don't expect the eventual HLF3 to be as poor as DNF was, though.)

My assumption as this point is that a small group is quietly tooling away at HL3 using the Source 2 engine (perhaps co-developing). Once both HL3 is more-or-less done, they'll sit on it and just keep the graphics updated. Right now Valve has so many things its trying (like SteamOS) and is still getting a ton of attention/money from Steam trading cards and marketplace, TF2 hats, and DOTA 2 that the company itself doesn't need HL3. Thus it will maintain and use HL3 as its "Final Fantasy" if it feels the company could be in financial trouble within two years. They could release it on the N-Gage and it will still sell millions of copies, so it's like one funds where you put something in and can't touch it for 20 years.