Sounds good! I am all for more of Microsoft's cash being transferred to the shareholders of Salesforce.

America has one of the highest corporate tax rate in the world. That is the main reason that corporations have been leaving.

The 90% tax bracket was an personal rate, that did not apply to corporations. The corporate rate has never been much above 50%, and even that was generally in wartime.

Corporate tax rate by year

That video is about talking to the police if you are a suspect in a crime. It is not about talking to the police if you are a witness.

Which companies voluntarily turn over customer location data to the police? Please name names.

Is it? How come I never see job ads for COBOL programmers? I know no one who uses it. I have often heard that it is used in "banks" or for "business" programming. But I know several people that work as programmers at banks, and none of them use COBOL or are aware of it being used at all. They are all Java shops. Same for programmers writing business logic. So I think that all these myths about demand for COBOL programmers is a load of hogwash.

Ada was oversold in the 1980s, and quickly developed a reputation for poor performance, and heavy resource requirements. Few systems were written in it, and even mission critical military systems (which Ada was designed for) could commonly get an exemption to use something more sensible.

Except that you CAN measure it. Just give each person a few programming tasks that should take ten minutes or so. I do that all the time. It is called a "job interview". My experience is that most applicants are incapable of programming even trivial solutions, or even getting the syntax right ... and these are people applying for programming jobs. A fair number can come up with reasonable solutions. Only a few come up with elegant out-of-the-box solutions that I was not expecting.

The distribution is not "U" shaped, and it is not normal (bell shaped). It is high on the left, and slopes downward to the right.

Morse code would be one solution, and isn't that hard to learn. Voice input would be another. A small camera that can read sign language might work, but ASL requires two hands and would be hard to read from the wrist of one of the hands. Another solution would be to project a keyboard onto a surface, and then use a camera to read the taps. The watch could detect the wrist movement, and the tension in the tendons, to detect keys as the user typed on an "air" keyboard. But perhaps the best solution would be a cranial probe that could detect the letters or words as the user was thinking them.

The groundwater contamination is a serious issue, that needs to be resolved, probably through more frequent inspections and higher fines. The earthquakes are a trivial problem. They are small, and transitory. Once the frackers move on, the earthquakes will stop. Fracking has generated over a million jobs, adds hundreds of billions of domestic production to the US economy every year, and, by replacing coal with gas, has done more to reduce CO2 emissions than all other efforts combined. If the price of that is a few rattled windows in rural Oklahoma, then so be it.

I thought we were talking about IBM?

If that meeting with Bill Gates never happened, IBM would still have found someone to provide an OS for their PC. Apple would have still produced the Lisa, ushering in the GUI era. Only an idiot would minimize MS's influence on computing, but let's not pretend that we would all be using carbon paper and typewriters... the PC market was very active when the IBM clone steadily gained prominence, with several vendors of mouse-driven GUIs.

They are not needed to break the rocks, but to dissolve the hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons are not normally soluble in water, so you need detergents or other chemicals to form an emulsion that can be pumped to the surface. After the hydrocarbons are separated, the "funky chemicals" are mostly recycled and pumped back down the hole. But they are temporarily stored in holding ponds, which can leak if not properly sealed. Some of the chemicals also leak because of bad seals on the pumps and pipe joints. It is unlikely that there is leakage directly from the shale, so the groundwater contamination is not an inherent problem with fracking, but rather with sloppy practices and corner cutting.

This is not "inexplicable". It is obvious to anyone who has taught programming to beginners, or any type of introductory abstract math. About a third of the population is simply incapable of abstract reasoning. If you think otherwise, I invite you to come to my house, and I will give you a free dinner while you explain "vectors" to my 15 year old daughter. Good luck with that.

I am a west coaster, and have never heard of the "U" shape myth, and what you say makes no sense. What the "U" shape means is that there are many bad programmers, many great programmers, and almost no average programmers. Believing that greatness is common is the opposite of a "superiority complex".

I doubt that the "U" myth existed before the author of TFA made it up.

Done what, exactly? Created a command-line personal computer? There was a healthy marketplace full of those - some affordable, some expensive. Within a year or two of release of the Lisa, there were a bunch of windowing environments - some quite competitive like the Amiga, some terrible like Windows. I don't mean to dismiss the level of prestige that IBM brought to the table as far as businesses were concerned, but it's not as if businesses would not have eventually adopted PCs. Visicalc was already making PCs common in the business environment.

While Carly was CEO, HP lost 65% of its market value. But she walked away with more than $100 Million. So how is that going to self correct?