Actually, I am not stating anything about skin color. Ethnicity can mean "Irish" or "Italian", and it certainly used to be a problem back in the day. Of course, it doesn't help if you are both brown and foreign.

And I am not suggesting that we'll always have a "high" population in jail, however, there will be a tendency for it to be high-er. That's because the groups in power become fearful of a larger segment of the population. The "high" prison population in the US is that, but also the War on Drugs, which inflates the crap out of the statistics by locking up people in prison with hard time who wouldn't even be in jail in other countries.

Still, I want to be clear. Pointing at Finland, which is ethnically homogeneous and the size of a moderately sized US state, is a complete apples to oranges comparison and is not incredibly helpful. It's sort of like someone in a gated community around a golf course asking why those inner city youths can't manage to behave themselves.

Well for one thing, the population of Denmark is 89.6% Danish. Finland is effectively ethnically homogeneous as well.

Homogeneity breeds better understanding and better community outcomes. Less fear of the other, more ability to emphasize with your neighbor who happened to get in trouble.

In other words, nothing like the United States. Make no mistake, immigration and diversity have good effects, but it has some pretty breathtaking challenges as well.

In fact, as soon as civilization breaks down, ebola and highly fatal diseases like it would burn out before they killed everyone because transport systems would stop transferring infected over long distances faster than the incubation period.

Of course, then you'd have the loss of civilization which could kill everyone down to the carrying capacity of what was left, but humanity would still survive most likely.

Nevertheless, a big asteroid strike or nuclear winter, which would affect the whole planet for extended periods of time, might kill off humanity. In fact any catastrophe that globally ended the various species closest to us in the food chain would quickly end us as well because there wouldn't be enough energy production in the system to support us at the apex.

Programming in pseudo-C for a MUD did it for me, although I had been playing with computers for years starting with Apple II and C64 BASIC for awhile.

Obviously, software, even weapons software, does not deliver lead or steel to an opponent directly.

What I think everyone is having trouble with is the fact that software can often make less effective weapons much more effective, or even weaponize information itself.

It would be interesting to have a Second Amendment like set of rights for encryption and hacking. I don't know that I would oppose that, although I'd like someone to do some serious thinking about the consequences of such. Like the actual Second Amendment, it is what I would consider to be the acceptance of a certain risk enshrined in the Constitution for the purposes of preventing tyranny and allowing for individual or local self-defense. That risk should not be played down, but it can be accepted.

I don't think that's particularly odd.

Try operating a private military and see how long you get away with that.

Spying and hacking is basically the same: considered to be weaponized and therefore the state monopoly of force applies.

Note, I am not passing a judgement on whether the state monopoly on force is a good thing, only that it is generally accepted.

I LOLed.

I do have mod points, but I already commented in this thread. Alas.

He should make sure he considers learning Python or Ruby (if he's going to a chef shop). They're not that hard to figure out if he already mastered Perl, but he will have to learn more OO if he wants to work with those effectively.

If anything, it's probably a good thing he didn't try learning OO with perl. Perl OO is a terrible hack.

Actually, I have interviewed people with ten years of experience who are shit. It's nice to have, but usually the only thing it guarantees is that they want more money. Sometimes, that experience is worth the money. Sometimes, it isn't.

I recently interviewed a bunch of former government drones with years of experience. Except not so much. They were constrained by the roles that the government put them in, and they were spoiled by the rate that the government paid them to do as little as they did. They wanted a full-on senior salary, but they didn't want to do anything other than support their one interest area, with their few constrained toolsets. No thanks.

If this guy came to me and demonstrated that he had experience on real projects in the past and he was excited about using the newer stuff we were using AND came to the interview with enough of an aptitude to demonstrate that he's actually learned something using the whiteboard/laptop, I'd seriously consider hiring him, even if he had a relatively junior position.

Yes, if I got a senior person in for an interview who had both experience, skills, and versatility, this guy would lose out, but it's not always easy to find experienced people who want to join your team who have all that going for them.

Note: one major disadvantage. Where he would lose out is salary, at least initially. I won't pay someone like that a full-on senior salary if they are simply an older learner. However, I also wouldn't screw him either. I want people who feel they can stay with the group long term, I don't want to churn and burn team members. If only because I hate having to get reqs and interview people.

Hell, even if you *want* to manage, you should keep your skills up, or you'll end up as some shit line manager. You just need to understand how those skills are used in technical management, and they keep on helping you as a manager.

Agreed. Although I am a manager, I don't feel I need to be one. I could just as easily be a system administrator or coder, and I get pinged constantly for that sort of thing. And many people my age don't want to have anything to do with management, which I can completely understand.

Being a manager is not what happens to older technical people. Although I certainly appreciate fresh perspective, the older folks on my team get the jobs completed and are entirely reliable, which is golden when you have to be concerned with your team's ability to figure out if a requirement can be done in a promised time frame.

The secret is: if you, as a manager, don't insist on some sort of trendy implementation of an idea, you don't need to hire young coders to just be able to write the code. And the fact is, if you have a Java programmer, you have someone who can definitely pick up something like Node.js for instance, with minimum trouble.

I appreciate the energy of the younger people on the team, but there can be serious disadvantages with not keeping a diversity of experience.

Of course, an older coder can't live in the past. Perl is still used and useful, but much less so than in the past. And let's face it, it was never going to be a serious development language, even back in the day. It was a good stopgap at the time, and it got things done because you could be productive with it, but the tasks it was used for have now graduated into much more complicated projects. Perl made decent dynamic web pages server-side and was useful for sysadmin tasks, but now you have a lot of client side implementation. On the server-side Java and subsequent development took right off and beats the pants off of the performance of something written in Perl. Perl itself stalled with Perl6 development and has gone full HURD/Duke Nukem Forever. And like those, if they ever do finish it, it's probably going to be a mediocre disappointment released to a lot of people who can't quite remember using the old Perl (or who never have).

I agree with others that management would be a poor idea for this person. Management isn't being alpha-geek or Old Man. It's a different job entirely, albeit one where you do better when you understand what the team is doing and how they are doing it. You need to make business decisions based on your skills, instead of technical implementations based on your skills. And your skills are most frequently useful as bullshit detector or to provide another perspective to help your team. If you don't have a lot of team experience, you're at a serious disadvantage as a manager.

Still, I think he can jump start his career as a coder (if he really has skills). I'd do the following:

1. Learn something new. Node.js or some modern OO language. Java would be great, but he'd have to learn a lot about how to be productive with it in terms of IDEs and frameworks and such.

2. Simply put then new thing on his resume and look for jobs. Some places will interview him and he'll fail, but his goal is to learn what they are asking him to do in interviews. Then practice those things and learn those concepts.

2a. He might actually succeed at landing a job at that stage. In which case, he needs to learn the tools and languages rapidly and become productive. If he can, he's home free and has saved his career for the foreseeable future... assuming he doesn't fall into a rut again.

3. Get employed by someone who will attest to his skills, even a shit contractor job. Take a junior job, if he needs to, but try for mid-career jobs. Then he's back in the swing of things IF he applies himself to learning the new hotness, or at the very least, the popular lukewarm-ness.

4. A year or two later, if he needs to upgrade his salary, start looking for a new place and interview at his luxury and wait for a good opportunity.

You appear to be under the delusion that you do have any sort of absolute personal freedom of the kind you espouse. In minor matters, you do, as long as your actions affect no one else. In major matters, that is more difficult.

Personally, I feel that drug use is a minor matter, which is made into a major one by the War on Drugs.

However, there are certainly scenarios where that use can affect others. Lower prices or not, if you do happen to over-use to the point you have trouble maintaining a job, and your income is taxed by even the lower price of your particular legalized recreation, then someone is going to have to deal with the mess that is you. Whether it is welfare, or you becoming a shoplifter because you can't feed yourself and your habit at the same time.

Note, while I know the vast majority of people do not have such addictions, some definitely do, and those are the people who concern me and who we need to stand ready to help wean from their addiction.

You do have the right to make decisions where other people don't have to be concerned with you, usually by maintaining responsibility and consideration for other people's situation in regard to your own. I also feel that we shouldn't be looking for more and more ways to interfere in people's personal lives.

Nevertheless, until we are able to divorce ourselves from society and not incur social costs by our decisions, there are some scenarios where we should make sure that we're not causing problems beyond the tip of our own nose by the consequences of our decisions. If you want to call that permission, then so be it.

The thing is... he's right. Iraq did have WMDs of the chemical nature. And yes, the US Government sold them to Iraq. That's all 100% factual.

Whether they were still functional or whether any of them were actually there to be found 20 years later is a completely different story.

The real story of the war is why the war was fought over something that we knew that they had for decades. The fact that we didn't actually find much of anything is hilarious, but actually besides the point. We fought a war over something that we'd actually given them.

Well, that was the reasoning. The real reason we fought the war is because the administration believed we made a mistake leaving Saddam in power, and they wanted to correct that mistake. 9/11 got the ball rolling, and when it didn't seem like anyone was really taking the ALQ threat very seriously, they threw in the WMDs.

The funny part of all of this is that the US Government wasn't actually trying to pretend there were weapons there that there weren't, the hilarity was that the WMDs were supposed to be the "ringer" because Iraq really did have them. They were expecting Saddam to have maintained them and try to hide them in a semi operational capacity. Instead, he had let them all go to shit and had basically gotten rid of what was left.

To make myself clear, as you suspected, I don't think all people taking drugs need to go into rehab. I certainly don't need alcohol rehab for imbibing maybe a six pack a week or so.

However, there are a number of drugs where you quickly develop both tolerance to it and also a strong addiction. That's a combination that makes for someone who will start to quickly drain their available cash resources to maintain their habit. That's when drug use becomes pathological. Even if it doesn't kill you or melt your brain, it causes you serious problems with maintaining an everyday existence. That's when you get crime due to use of drugs even if the drugs themselves are legal. That's where rehab comes in.

If there were drugs out there that have no dangerous side effects and are non addictive in reasonable quantities, then by all means, go for it, if you can enjoy it responsibly. Just be aware that many drugs (or other substances) used to excess, or in place of dealing with problems that need to be solved, can cause problems far in excess of their actual physical effects. And with drugs legalized, we need to spend some of the money we take from locking people up, and instead use it to help people who need that help.

I am always struck by the fact that something in such widespread use as PuTTY is still downloaded from what looks like someone's public home directory.

On the other hand, it is such an anomaly that I instantly recognize the site when I see it as the correct download site.