I don't think you need math even to be a great programmer. I do think a lot of great programmers are people who think in mathematical terms and thus benefit from mathematics. But I also believe you can be a great programmer and not be the sort of person who thinks in those terms. I expect the latter is harder, but then I'm a mathematician so I'm more than read to accept that I have some bias in this topic.

Math is a language. Just because you can frame things in that language doesn't mean that that language is necessary. Recipes are often in English. English is sequencing (words are a serial stream after all). That doesn't mean English is necessary for programming (there seem to many competent non-english speaking programmers as far as I can tell).

Disclaimer: I am a professional research mathematician; I do understand math just fine.

Of course there was a time when college education was supposed to be education and not just vocational training.

The other part of the problem is that math is so diverse. There's calculus and engineering math with all kinds of techniques for solving this or that PDE; there's set theoretic foundations; there's graph theory and design theory and combinatorics and a slew of other discrete math topics; there's topology and metric spaces and various abstractions for continuity; there's linear algebra and all the finer points of matrices and matrix decompositions and tensors and on into Hilbert spaces and other infinite dimensional things; there's category theory and stacks and topos theory and other esoterica of abstraction. On and on, and all very different and I can't even pretend to have anything but cursory knowledge of most of them ... and I have a Ph.D. in math and work for a research institute trying to stay abreast of a decent range of topics. The people who actually study these topics in depth are all called "mathematicians", but if you're an algebraic geometer then sure, you're probably familiar with category theory and homological algebra; if you do design theory and graph theory then those seem like the most useful subject available.

Calculus is perhaps not the best measure however. Depending on where you go in the programming field calculus is likely less useful than some decent depth of knowledge in graph theory, abstract algebra, category theory, or combinatorics and optimization. I imagine a number of people would chime in with statistics, but to do statistics right you need calculus (which is an example of one of the directions where calculus can be useful for programming).

Of course the reality is that you don't need any of those subjects. Those subjects can, however, be very useful to you as a programmer. So yes you can certainly be a programmer, and even a very successful and productive one without any knowledge of calculus, or graph theory say. On the other hand, there may well be times when graph theory, or calculus, or statistics could prove very useful. what it comes down to is whether you are inclined to think that way -- and if so it can be a benefit; if not it won't be the way you think about the problem anyway.

There was at least one American on board.

Because some relatively small number of events may have a conspiratorial aspect does not mean all events do. In this case, it does appear that a bunch of separatists in Ukraine got their hands on some pretty sophisticated hardware and, obviously by accident, blew a civilian airliner out of the sky. Now, that's not as sexy an explanation as secret US operatives standing in the bushes near the separatists, or secret Russian operatives bringing the plane down in an even more elaborate scheme to make the West look bad by making themselves look bad so they can say "Those rotten Americans are trying to make us look bad."

Something like this was bound to happen when relatively poorly trained and disciplined weekend warriors get their hands on serious military hardware. The Russians have been quite keen to back the separatists with weapons, intelligence and some of their own personnel. It would be nice that if they are going to allow these separatists to use advanced AA equipment that maybe they have someone nearby who actually knows how to use such equipment, or at very least to put a bullet in the head of some daft nimrod who thinks he knows how to use the equipment.

"bascially, tt looks like what needs to be done is the PHP runtime needs to be tightned up."

Boy, you could put that on the PHP developers headstones.

Winston Churchill confessed, guiltily, in his History of WWII, to being happy at the news that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, because he knew at that moment, the Germans had lost the war.

You know, I'm beginning to think conspiratorial thinking is just another form of apathy. "Oh well, it's probably made up, so I'll sit in my cocoon, spout my paranoia on the Internet on occasion, and play PS3 the rest of the time."

Yes. The US tried very hard to push the EU to put much stronger sanctions into place, but key EU players; in particular Germany (which does a lot of business with Russia), was unwilling to sign on for anything more than the lukewarm sanctions.

I have a feeling he's going to get a bullet to the head fairly soon.

I thought it was the US's fault. Isn't every single bad that has happened in the last 75 years the fault of America?

They're not the same. Raping a coworker will get you thrown in jail. Sexually harassing a coworker will get you fired, possibly have you end up with a large legal bill, and find yourself all but unemployable in the sector in which you work.

The policy manual where I work spells out all kinds of things; like not doing illegal things on company computers, not stealing, not sexually harassing or bullying people. What the hell is your problem with that? The whole point of policies, whether they cover unwanted illegal activities or unwanted and yet legal activities, is to make clear the organization's priorities and desires for the workplace.