It all depends on what they learnt and how they apply it. But I will take any of my former co-students as a programmer, over any self-taught programmer, when I can't judge their work in advance.

The difference between someone who understands invariants and pre/post conditions for formal correctness verification, even without using it, and someone who has never even heard of the concepts involved, is huge. There are order of magnitude differences in algorithms for certain tasks, and if you don't even know that you can determine that sort of thing (and how) you're a lost case. Datamodelling is another area. Everytime I see programmers abusing the logical model, I cringe. Code first is a bad idea and with formal training you can avoid things like that.

And I mean, the halting problem. Turing machines. If you don't know Turing machines, you won't understand the implication that at a fundamental level, all computer languages are the same. If you don't know lambda calculus, understanding what Linq does, is much harder.

Etc. etc.

Ofcourse, you can have brilliant self-taught people in the field, as in any field. It's just so very rare to encounter competent ones.

Guilds aren't unions. I won't enter into the details of the whole discussion between the IWW and the AFL-CIO around the turn of the century, but suffice it to say that you can organize around owning a pet as well. And it's probably worthwile, for some. But unions are about organizing the interests of the workers as they work. Guilds are about protecting your own interests *against* other workers.

A guild would complain about H1B visa because they are "taking American jobs from American workers". A union would protest against H1B visa because employers are paying them horrible wages under bad conditions, that will eventually become the standard for ALL workers in the industry.

Sounds like a list of ingredients for perfume. Rosetta perfume, anyone?

Not yet. But once we are, the Midichlorian Heresy will be purged...

Ah. I see you wanted to share the very definition of "prejudice" with us by providing a clear example. Thank you.

I only start to get it after at least 4 exclamation marks.

Must be proven. That's the hard part.

Ofcourse there are risks. But my pictures are in a drawer. Too bad if a burglar gets them, but that's what it takes. The problem is that many people still consider the pictures to be some sort of physical asset, rather than virtual assets that will be stored in literally dozens of places. And that's where the problem comes in. Because snapping a polaroid and physically giving that to her boyfriend would have been the same thing, but much safer (unless you have a nasty break-up). So there is a difference there that is very hard for people to grasp, apparently.

Well, I'll bet *she* was stacked :)

Wow. That's certainly a surefire way to get very close personal attention from nearly all anti-money laundering departments in my country.

Don't worry - we're only looking at the bankers.

If I lived in Finland I'd probably want to get out too. You know how little daylight they have there? I'd rather be in prison in Spain at this time of year :)

You may laugh. But last week I got a serious request from an acquintance to verify whether 2000 Kg. of unsorted Euro coins were real or fake. Pretty weird. So I did some research.

In 2012 in Germany, some folks managed to trade in 29 tonnes of coins at the Central Bank of Germany. Must have been quite a counting machine :) But they got 6 million euro in return (in notes) so I guess the trunk full of unmarked quarters was a pretty good deal. However, they weren't legit.

In 2013 some entrepreneurs tried it again with a container full of "old metal" that turned into Euro coins after customs, which they tried to trade in at the Central Bank of Belgium. Having been forewarned by the Germans, they had the enterprising Chinese arrested.

So I declined the opportunity to trade in 2000 Kg. of coins :)

The free version has a promotions folder. It just doesn't really work well with an IMAP configuration.

Well, that's nice. Even the car thieves encourage you to "go green".