"whatever we do, I want the kids to obtain marketable skills."

Really? By the time those kids are out of college, programming will be obsolete.

My main requirement for programs today is that they don't make me wait too much.

Yes, you are right - there are technical solutions (I wrote a book on this), but the intractable problem seems to be that developers and managers are not interested in security. As you say, we might "need to sack 95% of programmers and 95% of their bosses". Or - those people could undertake to learn about security. But I am not optimistic about that.

Things are completely broken. The future of computing is in doubt - unless the security problem is solved.

It could be. My disk is only half full (out of 319Gb avail). When I installed Yosemite, I initially selected to turn on FileValt, but later I turned it off, so it had to decrypt the volume. I wonder if things got fragmented.

I just tried it and it took ~30 seconds. But then I closed it and opened it again, and the second time it took 15 seconds. I have other programs running, but not a huge number. After installing Yosemite performance did not change right away, but lately I have noticed the system performing very slowly. Still, these programs do essentially what they did ten (twenty!) years ago - and computers are so much faster and have so much more memory. These kinds of programs should load in an instant - there should be no perceptible wait at all.

Yes, agree. It is just that corporations try to use science for their own ends. Sometimes that aligns with what is good for the public, and sometimes it doesn't. If the drug companies could have their way, we all would be permanently addicted to expensive drug treatments - they are pretty close to achieving that already, and that is why they invest so little money in finding cures - they don't want cures: they want us to be dependent on them. The agribusiness industry wants the same thing. But of course, the science itself is not evil. And government misuses science as well - all groups that have power try to, when it is in their interest.

All those devices requiring updates, acting flaky (bugs), and hackable. Nice - yeah, that's the future that I want. NOT.

I use a dual core Macbook Pro, with 8Gb of ram.

I don't have any add-ons - at least, I have not installed any. I use these programs vanilla, via my Office 360 subscription. I am running them on a Macbook Pro.

Can they please make the programs load more quickly? Why does it take 30 seconds (at least) for Powerpoint to start? Almost as long for Word? These programs took that long to load on my Mac in 1990. Today, they should load in the blink of an eye. What the heck is wrong?

True. It is a difference of philosophy: those who trust science and corporations and those who don't.

It did? http://www.europeanboost.com/c...

I agree. To me, the ideal car is absolutely quiet. There is already way too much noise in our lives nowadays. Besides, people might as well get used to the fact that the whole concept of a car and driver is destined to become obsolete in not too long: cars will evolve to be living rooms on wheels, driver not required (or even allowed, in urban areas).

And now they can sell farmers the missing ingredient!