It's also hard to explain how the increasing challenge of getting enough oil and gas is a result of a "false" scarcity

Here's the trick, the people who say there is plenty of stuff are throwing coal, shale, tar and anything else they can think of into the mix and pretend it's the same as easy to extract liquid oil. Another common trick is to pretend that all that unsurveyed land in Iran, the arctic, wherever has huge oil basins when we do not know one way or another. There's plenty of fossil fuels. Oil we can get out of the ground - not so much. The only reason I have the job I have is that the more computing power you have the easier it is to find the stuff from survey data.

Humidity is very low in the air in that place now. With a bit of outside air circulating under a dome it should stay relatively low.

Sorry you feel that way. But if you look at my account I've been active since 2009, rather dedicated for an astroturfing account

That's about when PR companies decided to put money into "social media" and this place started to get astroturfed, but it does appear that your comment was wrongly labelled by Exitar.
Let's consider what is now a very old example of this sort of contraversy. The F111 also had a variety of early problems, as mentioned by others here, yet despite all those problems decades ago they were useful enough in some roles that there were retained in service long enough that I saw one flying the year before last. There are none flying now but nearly 40 years of service is enough for a jet fighter isn't it?

For instance Australia's new and inexperienced government is shelling out billions for these F35s in the middle of an austerity budget - presumably because someone in the US leaned on them and they don't know how to do anything other than completely cave in yet.

This problem should solve itself as downloading and cloud-based games take over and game stores disappear. GameStop is closing 120 more locations. Game retailers are going the way of record stores and video rental outlets.

There's nothing mysterious about this. The problem is that if someone gets control of circuit breakers for large rotating equipment, they may be able to disconnect it, let it get out of sync, and reconnect it. This causes huge stresses on motor and generator windings and may damage larger equipment. This is a classic problem in AC electrical systems. A more technical analysis of the Aurora vulnerability is here.

The attack involves taking over control of a power breaker in the transmission system, one that isn't protected by a device that checks for an in-phase condition. Breakers that are intended to be used during synchronization (such as the ones nearest generators) have such protections, but not all breakers do.

Protective relaying in power systems is complicated, because big transient events occur now and then. A lightning strike is a normal event in transmission systems. The system can tolerate many disruptive events, and you don't want to shut everything down and go to full blackout because the fault detection is overly sensitive. A big inductive load joining the grid looks much like an Aurora attack for the first few cycle or two.

There's a problem with someone reprogramming the setpoints on protective relays. This is the classic "let's make it remotely updatable" problem. It's so much easier today to make things remotely updatable than to send someone to adjust a setting. The Aurora attack requires some of this. There's a lot to be said for hard-wired limits that can't be updated remotely, such as "reclosing beyond 20 degrees of phase error is not allowed, no matter what parameters are downloaded."

Ignoring the racist whining, he has a point. Web programming really sucks. Even web design sucks.

HTML started as a straightforward declarative layout language. Remember Dreamweaver? Macromedia's WYSIWYG editor for web pages. It was like using a word processor. You laid out a page, and it generated the page in HTML. It understood HTML, and you could read the page back in and edit it. Very straightforward. You didn't even have to look at the HTML. Back then, Netscape Navigator came with an HTML editor, too.

Then came CSS. DIV with float and clear as a primary formatting tool (a 1D concept and a huge step backwards from 2D tables), Javascript to patch the formatting problems of CSS, absolute positioning, Javascript to manage absolute positioning... The reaction to this mess was to layer "content management systems" on top of HTML, introducing another level of complexity and security holes. (Wordpress template attacks...)

It's as bad, if not worse, on the back end. No need to go into the details.

All this is being dumped on programmers, with the demand for "full-stack developers" who understand all the layers. Cheap full-stack developers. Usually for rather banal web sites.

Not only is this stuff unreasonably hard, it's boring. It's a turn-off for anyone with a life.

Due to being in a different place and quite a few years older than most here it appears I misunderstood "SAT scores" to be equivalent to an accurate measure of high school achievement averaged over at least two years. Other places do not do a single test.
So I'd better update my statement to make things more clear.

Raising your score in a single type of test is easy - just do a lot of that sort of test as practice. Raising your actual intelligence is a lot harder.

Real IQ tests aren't like most of the stupid things you find on the internet

The sort of things used by lazy fad driven HR idiots are until you tell them to either do their job or get out of the way.

I'm no pychologist, but I'm been told by some that at least in the field of education IQ tests are pointless and can vary widely with the same child over several years. It was described to me in the 1980s as being nothing but a measure of how good people are at doing that sort of test and translating poorly to other situations. It's still an artifact of that time that only remains due to management fads.

His fund has an impressive trading record. He had the big advantage of starting early, in 1982, when almost nobody was doing automated trading or using advanced statistical methods. Their best years were 1982-1999. Now everybody grinds on vast amounts of data, and it's much tougher to find an edge. Performance for the last few years has been very poor, below the S&P 500. That's before fees.

The fees on his funds are insane. 5% of capital each year, and 45% of profits. Most hedge funds charge 2% and 20%, and even that's starting to slip due to competitive pressure.

Simons retired in 2009. You have to know when to quit.

If he had this "decency" you speak of, he would have only alerted his own people and not the foreign governments

He notified a couple of newspapers. If you want to hassle people about letting foreign governments know then your problem is with them and not with Snowden.

I run into too many technical people who hate learning new things even though they are in a field where learning new things is mandatory

That sounds like people who followed the money - the same problem that turned a "woman's profession" of sitting inside and typing into what's close to a boy's only club and an industry with a high turnover and short attention span. I got away from that problem by working with scientists instead of a bunch of "programmers" that were scared of 64bit, multithreading, and anything that wasn't fucking Visual Basic.

University forces you to push through the boring shit that you need to know before you can even begin to grasp the meaning of the interesting stuff. If you learn by keyword search you can end up with a list of facts about the thing but not enough understanding to make use of it properly.
A good example on this site was a programmer asserting that "single bit operations are faster" presumably due to him bypassing all the boring stuff about hardware and clock cycles that many others here learnt in high school.

To get down to it, while it is possible few people when leaving high school have the self-discipline to learn a lot of difficult subjects just by going through textbooks or other resources. If nobody is talking to us about it we don't know where to get started - so University or similar provides that start.

And college may be heavy on the theory behind computer science concepts it does not put much effort into teaching the intricacies and pros and cons of the various frameworks floating around today.

Which is just as well because who uses Modula-2 today? How about the godawful VB of 15 years ago? Both apparently looked like winners instead of the weird Java thing and that antiquated C.

If you want somebody to follow standard operating procedures, sure, put them in a cube, give them a job and forget about them. If you want someone capable of writing new procedures you need to either train or apprentice them yourself or get someone else, like a university, to do it for you.
It's the technician versus engineer argument. You only actually need an engineer (or a very experienced technician with a wide range) when you want to change things, such as solve a problem or do something new. So in the short term sticking a kid in a cube with a clipboard of "how we do things here" makes sense for the company and the kid.
In the long term they could both do better.

Where I am the current vocational approach to programming means there's no "real" programmers in the place, since too tight a focus means we have no chance explaining the mathematics to them in under a couple of years. So we have scientists who "spent 4 years doing calculus", and even if their code is crap they at least can estimate and work out when their code is spitting out noise instead of answers. Following the list on the clipboard is not for everyone. You need at least a few people capable of thinking up that list.

and he has to use the proxy of SAT scores

Which, though still flawed, are a vastly better way of measuring ability to reason than IQ tests and more difficult to game.
Raising your IQ is easy - just do a lot of IQ tests as practice. Raising your actual intelligence is a lot harder.

Abelson and Sussman is a delightful book for programming theorists. Scheme is a big improvement over Common LISP. Learning Scheme from Abelson and Sussman is straightforward for people who can get into MIT.

This is not most of the programming population. As someone else pointed out, programming today is mostly the creation of glue code to tie together a number of (usually buggy) components. Neither the webcrap crowd nor the appcrap crowd needs Scheme. In fact, if you have that strong a theoretical background, you tend to overdesign simple programs.