I agree. Using the term "Computer Science" for what most degree programs teach is purely the result of the growth of the industry. 70 years ago you couldn't get a Computer Science degree. 50 years ago, you could get a Computer Science degree without ever having used an actual computer. 30 years ago, the only degree in computing you could get was Computer Science, and it encompassed the whole of the field. 20 years ago, Computer Science began to mean "software" instead of Electrical Engineering's "hardware". 10 years ago, the field was so broad, so diverse, and encompassed so many disparate technologies that required significant specialization that you could get a specialization certificate on your CS degree. Today, you can get a 4 year Bachelor's in any number of fields including Information Technology (sysadmin, netadmin), Information Systems (DBA, Systems Analysis), Information Management (management for IT), Software Engineering (web design, application programming). Computer Science is again a theoretical area of research and development on the theory of computers. All these other fields born from this CS research once again free it to be what it once was: mathematicians and logicians playing with number machines.

The school district I work at uses a messaging system which is capable of sending phone calls (pre-recorded or computer generated voice), email, SMS, and twitter. We also contact the local news agencies if the emergency requires it (school closures, etc.). We also use it for attendance calls for students with unexcused absences or tardies. Parents are signed up for phone calls (required at time of registration) and email (if given) by default, but they have to opt in for SMS.

We still have parents who don't know about school emergencies.

On the flip side, spending six weeks fixing an issue on a single server running a non-critical, non-time-sensitive service which occurs once or twice a year and is 100% worked around by a reboot probably isn't an efficient use of your time.

Programmers are human. They'll make a ton of mistakes.

Doctors are human. We hold them accountable for their mistakes. Engineers are human. We hold them accountable for their mistakes. Indeed, we hold just about everybody accountable for their on-the-job mistakes and the consequences of their mistakes result in everything from terminations to criminal proceedings.

So, when should programmers be held accountable for their mistakes, and how should be respond as a society?

Not exactly. Oxygen is a prerequisite for the process known as combustion, since combustion is an oxidization reaction. "A rapid, exothermic oxidation of a substance, called the fuel," is a reasonable definition of combustion. Usually we say the fuel is combustible.

The language you copied, fucked with, and then claimed to have the definitive version of.

Isn't that how English came about in the first place?

God forbid someone make them think about their data structures and how the end user might need to query them with their own reports.

It's a little hard to call it 'valuable intellectual property' with a strait face when they refuse to derive any value from it.

No it isn't. It's a revised and ongoing work. They own the old version 5.1 (Win XP) and the new version 6.3 (Win 8.1). They both have much of the same code in them. So by selling the new version, they're still deriving value from the old version. If you want to buy Windows, MS will sell you a recent version containing much of the same code that was available in Windows XP.

I'm not going back to GW-BASIC, thanks,

Yes, but those are proven to decrease ticket revenue. Why do you think red light cameras are so much more popular?

Personally, I'd love to see this system running in my town. Traffic control here involves trying to impede drivers and preventing them from reaching the speed limit by forcing all lights to be red by the time you get to them as much as possible. Your choice on a clear road is either to speed, or drive 10 under. It's so pervasive in this city that nobody outside of town or in the surrounding cities likes to drive in this town.

C/C++ don't claim to follow relational data rules like MySQL does. Not only is SQL supposed to error if it can't do *exactly* as the user describes, it's supposed to change nothing if any of the affected rows error. It's not supposed to be allowed to guess if the user tells it to do something ambiguous or nonsensical. It's supposed to be required to throw an error in that case. Indeed, many RDBMSs error on some tasks simply because the result would be non-deterministic.

An RDBMS is not just a fancy key-value store. It's not a series of JSON or XML strings. It's a data entity rule set. Used correctly, it will not allow you to store obviously invalid data, even if the underlying datatypes allow the data as valid types.

Determinism is the real issue here. Imagine a compiler that produced different programs from the same source code. That's not particularly useful, is it? Well, a lot of the behavior that MySQL has let slide indicates that they don't particularly care about being deterministic. It's sloppy, and the one thing DBAs hate is sloppy, unpredictable results.

MySQL is the IE 6 of the database world. It encourages poor developer practice. It allows and even encourages lazy or downright risky developer behavior, when the RDBMS should be the element requiring the developer to think about how he stores his data and consider the ramifications of getting useful data from his system that go beyond his own needs. It has more oddball syntax than any other RDBMS, and is less likely to complain about data integrity and more likely to perform silent truncation or silent modification than even SQLite.

Should diluting a helpful ingredient be considered harmful then?

"Helpful" is not necessarily true. It's possible to have a life-threatening allergy to penicillin.

Additionally, all antibiotics intended for human medical use are legally available only with a prescription in the US.

Quite a powerful capability; but one of those powerful capabilities best handled carefully, kept away from direct sunlight, protected from shocks, and otherwise treated as though it is just waiting to ruin your day.

That sounds like an apt description of a computer in general. Or dynamite. Or banks. Or the government. Or beer.

Personally, I like to point out that the government as tried -- repeatedly -- to count the number of federal laws that exist. It has never succeeded.

One begins to question why ignorance of the law isn't a legitimate defense when the laws cannot even be enumerated.

I'm not a golfer

Yes, obviously. There are no rocks on greens, but there are likely no titanium heads, either. That's where you use the putter. Putters need to have some weight to them since you don't swing them very hard.

You might swing hard with a titanium head club on the tee or on the fairway, but you're unlikely to encounter rocks there, either. You're also unlikely to encounter dry grass.

The problem is when golfers hit into deep rough, which can be far off from the fairway that you're intended to play from. Rough can be largely unmaintained. There can be fallen trees, tall grass, and rocks. It isn't irrigated, so it's likely to be as dry as wild grass. And, no, you may not see sparks on a bright summer day. Daylight in an open field on a clear is quite glaring. Even if you did see the sparks, you may not see any flame. The fire could smolder for hours as a tiny ember before finally flaring to life. That's why you're always told to cover a fire pit with sand before you leave it to ensure it's extinguished, remember?