If they had just said "Hey we're raising prices" rather than hiding the price increase by removing features and making you pay extra for them, they'd probably have come out ok- a bit of a hit from the higher prices, but not too much. The dishonesty of this is what's killing them.

Which has very significant changes to how external storage, SMS, and several other features are handled that break a significant number of applications. 4.4 was not a minor release.

ANd when I said C++ would lead to a nicer syntax- I mean C++ 01 without std::thread and autos. Mainly because you could make it a template function instead of special casing for the type of using void pointers.

Because in C and older versions of C++ launching a thread takes significant typing and ugly code,

Bullshit. It takes 1 function call- because if you had a need to do all that repeatedly, you would write the damn call once, turn it into a function, and let it be done. People didn't do it because the tasks weren't parallelizable- they had massive resource contentions on memory object. Contentions that would be non-trivial to solve, and would cause using threads to be a minimal gain or even a loss in efficiency.

Libraries like std::thread don't do anything that people weren't already doing- they just prevent people from going out and writing their own implementations. But any problems that would benefit from them were already being solved with roll your own solutions.

Except in this case you totally would. You'd be signing up to be a hacker. There is no reason to deploy hackers outside of the US- you'd have lower access to infrastructure, making your goal more difficult. Whereas a member of the traditional army makes sense to deploy around the world.

As for undersea cables being cut- if the cables are cut and you can't reach the country you're attacking, the "cyberwar" is over.

And that makes sense for people who will be in a live fire zone and shot at- having no training makes them a liability to those who will have to protect them. It makes no sense for people who will never leave the US and will work by typing on a computer. These people aren't soldiers. They're programmers and IT workers. By adding these restrictions onto them you reduce the pool of talent you can reach by eliminating people for useless reasons.

A better question though is why to put these people in the army at all. They have almost no overlap with the work of the army. It would make better sense to either keep them civilian or create a new division.

You, for owning and running it. You may then have a claim against Google if you can find fault or negligence. And yes, you'll have to have insurance just like you do now. If you lend your car to your friend to drive, you're still on the hook to insure the car for damage it can do to others, you just might have a legal claim to recoup from the friend.

It doesn't even need to be a phone. If all you need is data inside the clean room, a PC or laptop will do as well.

True, a degree doesn't mean they have those traits. But this is where conditional probability comes into play. More people with the degree will fall into this category than those without, because the degree gives them the knowledge to wield those traits effectively. That means that when looking at a resume, you're more likely to get a good hire from one with a degree than without. And several of those traits are positively associated with a degree. Additionally, the floor is higher- while even those with a degree can be a bad hire, a mistake is more likely to be a mediocre worker than a bad one. So you minimize your risks and maximize your potential gains by just dropping the other pile, looking for diamonds in the rough isn't worth the time and money. Especially since the type of person you're discussing won't be easily discernible from a resume, you're looking at phone or in person interviews at much higher cost/effort to have a chance.

One exception I would make is with a personal testimonial of the non-degreed dev's skill by a developer I trust. But you're looking at corner cases there.

No, it absolutely won't. First off- drop the idiotic lingo. All it does is make you look like a tool. Secondly- the "rockstar" tends to have a degree. That's part of why he's so good, he's studied the foundation of his craft and understand the costs and benefits of different approaches. Once again, someone with a degree is far more likely to be able to do that then one without.

Secondly, when looking for high impact workers- the things you want don't correlate to no degree. What you want is hard working, creative, a willingness to step up and take ownership, and high intelligence. Lacking a degree means he's not likely to be hard working, he wasn't willing to put in the work to go to college. It means he wasn't willing to take ownership of his own career path. And it means he was either too stupid to get into college, or too stupid to see the benefits of it. The only one you might get is creative because he "went a different way"- but he did so without thought or a good reason for doing so, which again isn't what you want.

So yeah, the non-degree holder loses again. THere's a few exceptions (although only 1 I've ever met and he had 3 years of college before quitting for health reasons and needing cash too much to return), but I'm happy to miss out on them- a given engineer is more likely to be high impact with a degree than without, so again I'm using it as a good first screen to weed out the 90%+ who are useless in that category.

Now I have found some good engineers with alternative STEM degrees and a passion for coding- physics, EE, comp eng, mech end, etc. But you have to carefully screen to see if they actually know what they should, I would expect their math to be on par (or better), but not necessarily their knowledge of CS concepts.

Because you have to prove merit. A degree proves that you've studied the field for 4 years. A lack of degree show absolutely nothing. Thus to have equivalent background you have to show much more.

Now we have a pile of resumes. 50% of them have a college degree, thus 4 years studying the field. 50% do not (and don't have at least 4 years in the field professionally). I'm throwing out the 50% without a degree because the signal to noise ratio is too low. Will I throw out a few good hires? Maybe. But I'll throw out a lot of bad ones, and that's more important.

THat doesn't even get into the fact that school teaches different things. School teaches theory. The vast majority of self-taught programmers without a degree that I've seen are very weak on theory. They can maybe throw some libraries together, but they don't understand how to actually solve hard CS problems and couldn't explain basic concepts, causing their designs to have massive flaws. Many of them even take pride in this, their entire attitude being that they didn't need that "academic BS". These kinds of programmers tend to cost time and effort in the long run. So yeah, I'd rather have the degree and someone taught the theories behind everything than someone who thinks reading documentation on weekends will make him a good programmer. SO yeah, no degree means you better have a LOT of experience to even things out. I'm not going to hire you as anything but a web monkey if you have less than a decade.

You should check out the unemployment and college debt numbers for law school grads. Unless you're going to a top of the line law school and are an extremely competitive person, odds are very good you'll never recoup that investment. Many law school grads never find a job practicing law.

That's all relatively recent developments. Until the 1800s, you were whatever religion the lord of your land was, down to the sect of Christianity. If you didn't like it, too bad- shut up or be jailed or killed.

You were a jew? You can't own land, must live in a ghetto, must be locked in at night, must be one of about half a dozen professions, and would regularly be killed in mob attacks by christians. It was literally better for them in Islamic territory where they only had to pay an extra tax.

You want wars? Well, there were the crusades. And a whole fleet of wars across Europe, especially in Germany, over which particular sect of Christians everyone needed to be.

Even one of the more enlightened countries, England, basically kicked out anyone who wasn't mainstream enough to the colonies. Where they still didn't have religious freedom, you just had areas ruled by smaller sects.

And even today in America, a very tolerant society, you have 1 political party that kisses the nutjobs asses and is moving to make abortion and birth control illegal.

Yeah, I don't see a whole lot of difference between the two.

JDB is a text based java debugger. Most IDEs are graphical shells for it, similar to ddd and gbd in C land.