I'm no fan of Java-based curricula, for the same reason I'd be no fan of Fortran-based curricula. Computing isn't about one language. Each language and system shows you one hyperplane of a vast multidimensional space. The best programmers know lots of languages, and choose wisely among them — or even create new ones when appropriate.

In the production world, there are times where some C++ or Java code is appropriate ... and there are times when what you want is a couple of lines of shellscript and some pipes ... and there are times when the most sensible algorithm for something can't be neatly expressed in a language like C++ or Java, and really requires something like Common Lisp or Haskell. If you need to exploit multiple processors without getting bogged down in locking bullshit and race conditions, you're much better off using Go than Java.

(Just last night, at a meetup, I was talking with two bright young physicists who reported that their universities don't do a good enough job of teaching Fortran, which is the language they actually need to do their job. Scientific computing still relies heavily on Fortran, Matlab, and other languages well removed from what's trendy in the CS department — no matter if that CS department is in the Java, Haskell, or Python camp. But if you want to learn to write good Fortran, you basically need a mentor in the physics department with time to teach you.)

And there are times when the right thing to do is to create a new language, whether a domain-specific language or a new approach on general-purpose computing. There's a good reason Rob Pike came up with Sawzall, a logs-analysis DSL that compiles to arbitrarily parallel mapreduces; and then Go, a C-like systems language with a rocket engine of concurrency built in.

(And there's a good reason a lot of people adopting Go have been coming not from the C++/Java camps that the Go developers expected, but from Python and Ruby: because Go gives you the raw speed of a concurrent and native-compiled language, plus libraries designed by actual engineers, without a lot of the verbose bullshit of C++ or Java. Would I recommend Go as a first language? I'm not so sure about that ....)

What would an optimal computing curriculum look like? I have no freakin' clue. It would have to cover particular basics — variable binding, iteration, recursion, sequencing, data structures, libraries and APIs, concurrency — no matter what the language. But it can't leave its students thinking that one language is Intuitive and the other ones are Just Gratuitously Weird ... and that's too much of what I see from young programmers in industry today.

I can't believe that you can graduate with a CS degree today without having at least one assembly language class which should show you about bit-twiddling and memory management just a bit. Not to mention an OS class that would expose you to exercises to modify a Linux kernel - written in C.

What do they actually teach in a CS degree these days? Don't tell me... Gamification, HTML, CSS, and Javascript, right? Do they actually make you take a database or an algorithms class any more?

As opposed to individual contaminated ground water wells? Or a million homes' pipes somehow stuck out into the lake? WTF?

Or are you just bad at coming up with analogies? Because those are the water installations analogous to the situation described.

Nah, without the foul words, it wouldn't be accurate. Most are motherfuckers (i.e., their mothers are the only person that would find them lovable enough to fuck).

I've been in the industry for over a decade, and have used the calculus and statistics required for my CS degree precisely never.

Well, I've been in the industry for over 30 years and I've found one good use for statistics during that time - it's great to sniff out BS. Like the crap spread by the VP of Quality who touts a 2% decline in customer calls YOY when the variance in this yearly data is around 5% and you didn't put out a major product release this year. Not that you're politically well-connected enough to call him on it, of course, but it's good to know that it's crap nonetheless, because next year, when you do get the next major version out, and the customer calls go up, you'll be ready to defend politically.

Yeah, sounds like EMACS except for not having an OS thrown in... but maybe they just forgot to mention that.

Worked in Star Trek every time! It's the only way to defeat a computer (well, that or pull its plug). It comes of being binary, you know. Poor things...

If you don't play the game, the mutual funds won't like your stock and your stock, potentially affecting the share price negatively. Then the board gets all pissy and you don't get as big of bonus. So you play the game. You didn't understand that?

Situations start when there are multiple players in the market and one can obtain acute, short-term benefit by causing more diffuse, long-term harm - unless all players participate in the harmful action, they will suffer more with neither short- nor long-term gains. The efficiency that using economics as a model in this case brings merely ensures that this harm accumulates as quickly as possible.

That kind of rule used to be fairly rampant in some of the more stodgy firms back in the day, started becoming more rare in the '80s, was almost gone in the 90's, and most folks younger than 40 or so, have probably not seen one. Us older folk, though...

These days, it's been supplanted by a looser interpretation saying that you can't be "related to" someone you're supervising (or vice versa) and there are strong cultural norms to not be involved with someone within your chain of command.

Remember that this "deluge" of comments are spread across the entire nation. You have... what? ~1M comments? That's only about 2200 per legislative district (which now averages a little less than 1M people/district) - this counts astroturf and anti-openness advocates, too. Even being generous here, you probably work out to less than 0.2% of people caring enough to complain. People willing to switch votes over that issue? Less than that. People in safe districts voting for "the other side"? Ha!

Given the numbers here, I don't think they give a rat's ass one way or another what that "huge" number of people commenting is going to do with respect to elections.

What would you say that the automated systems that allowed the process refinements did to those kind of jobs then? Frankly, automation replacing those people sounds like a pretty good description, especially since the process refinement allowing those people to be terminated could have only come about using automation.

Law sucks any more according to all the lawyers I know. Big glut. Civil service? Haven't you heard - everyone wants to cut government. Any other ideas?

A president who decides to ignore some laws and pretend thats executive discretion is on incredibly shakey ground; it undermines the whole foundation of the legislative branch's power.

Show me a single president in the last 200 years of our country that had the resources to actively enforce ALL Federal laws. And then it would only be fair if they enforced them equally against all individuals. You want a police state? There's one for the grabbing.

I'd accuse you of holding this particular President to a higher standard than any other, but since I don't attribute to malice that which can be easily explained by stupidity, I'll make an exception in your case.

The White House should respond by providing links to state and federal representatives if they want the law changed.

Why? Can an organization like Tesla not find people smart enough to look them up? Are we not smart enough to know where to look? Or so disengaged we don't know which ones to write? For those like that, here's a start. Tesla should be happy that the administration didn't actively try to work against them.

This is a rich boy whining that he's being oppressed by the system. The only thing that irks me is the fanboys here that seem to want to change this because of "bright, shiny" and "change is good". Note that the jobs Tesla would provide if they got the ability to sell their cars direct probably number many less than the ones provided by current dealerships (and the counterparts needed in the auto companies to deal with said dealers) and that unemployment is still a problem here. Again, Elon should feel lucky that the WH staff didn't send a response about how things are fine as they are and tell him to STFU. That's what you would have gotten if you wanted something. Ask marijuana growers (a much bigger market than electric cars) in Washington or Colorado about that.