Actually, online advertisers know exactly how effective the directed advertising is. Unlike traditional advertising, where the old saw goes "I know 50% of my advertising budget is working, I just don't know which 50%", online ads can very often be linked precisely to specific sales. This is actually the biggest factor in Google's success as an advertiser; good targeting was important, too, but the real breakthrough was being able to help advertisers quantify very precisely what return they were getting on their advertising spend.

Your experience is completely at odds with mine. I'm 45 and have been a professional programmer since I was 18 (I started writing code at about 12). I work with many guys who are in their 50s and 60s... they're excellent engineers, and compensated very well for their experience and knowledge.

Granted that I work with the upper tier of professional programmers, but it is far from impossible to have a long, satisfying and financially rewarding career writing code. You have to love it, you have to be good at it (which is pretty closely correlated with loving it), and you have to have the talent, intellect and education (which needn't be formal, but formal CS education is generally best).

In the job market right now, if you're good it doesn't matter how old you are, or in many cases even what you smell like, the industry is absolutely desperate for talent.

It's a lot more than that. Coding is very different from the sort of process thinking you use to build processes executed by people, because computers are completely incapable of filling in any gaps or exercising any initiative. If you build company processes the way you write code, they'll be very ineffective, and if you write code the way you build company processes, your code will rarely work.

In addition, outside of code that defines business rules, coding involves huge numbers of details and abstractions of those details which are different from anything we encounter in the "real" world.

If that were true, then former programmers would make outstanding managers and executives. I do know some software engineers who are outstanding managers or executives, and I know plenty who were great coders but lousy at management and leadership. Further, in my experience the correlation between coding effectiveness and managerial effectiveness is negative, though close to zero.

I don't know why I'm even bothering to respond to someone who writes down such utter bollocks, but I'll bite.

The very first cancer patient was treated with cobalt-60 irradiation in late 1951, in London, Ontario--so I suppose that slips into your 1952 window (though the instruments used in those preliminary 1951 tests bear very little resemblance to those used today). The first use of a clinical linear accelerator for high-energy radiotherapy wasn't until 1956, at Stanford.

The first clinical x-ray CT scanner was used in 1971; it took five minutes to collect a slice of data, and more than two hours to process that data into a rather low-resolution image. PET scanning using FDG started around 1976. The first commercial MR imagers appeared around 1980, after a decade or so of futzing about with technical challenges.

The drug cisplatin wasn't approved by the FDA until 1978; it was the first discovered of a line of platinum-containing antineoplastic drugs. The drug taxol received FDA approval in late 1992. It was the first clinically-used taxane, a family of compounds which inhibit microtubule formation and thereby disrupt cell division. Rituximab was approved in 1997. It was the first anti-cancer monoclonal antibody therapy; there are now more than a dozen. Imatinib was the first small-molecule kinase inhibitor for cancer therapy, approved in 2001.

All of the above techniques and therapies are available to *you* and in routine use today - when they haven't been superseded by even newer developments. I hate to break it to you, but this ain't your grandma's oncology.

Well, start with the conservation status of the birds. Both species are rated as "Least Concern" -- which means no identifiable conservation issues.

In the 1950s there were only 412 nesting pairs of bald eagles in the US, due to hunting and DDT. By 1995 they were taken off the endangered lists, and five years ago they were taken off the "threatened" list. By now there are nearly ten thousand breeding pairs in the lower 48. Half of US states have at least 100 breeding pairs.

From an environmental viewpoint it's quite reasonable to stop treating an occasional accidental bald eagle death as some kind of serious event. For healthy population, an individual removed is room for another individual, just as with reasonable levels of deer hunting. Emitting more carbon in order to stop a handful of eagle accidents makes no sense at all.

Most alternative reactor designs have some major flaw. Sodium reactors have sodium fires. Pebble-bed reactors have pebble jams. (An experimental one in Germany is such a mess there's no way to fully decommission it.) Helium gas-cooled reactors leak helium. (Fort St. Vrain was converted from nuclear to natural gas because of that.) One of the painful lessons of long-life nuclear power plants is that what goes on inside the reactor vessel has to be really, really simple. Anything complex in there will break. It's being shot full of holes at the atomic level, after all. (See "hydrogen embrittlement"). Pressurized water reactors and boiling water reactors at least have only water to deal with. The fuel rods are solid rods. The thing is basically simple,

Came here to say this. Everything at a nuclear power plant is periodically taken apart to fix and clean on routine basis. Maintaining any of these exotic reactors always sounds like a nightmare.

4 years in and burned out
well on my way to RSI.

That's from all the -1's you give me

I can see Snowden from my house!

The *real* simplest solution is to put the stuff that lasts a Very Long Time, into a Very Deep and Stable Place.

THAT is the simplest solution. Not your fantasy of getting a few billion people to live the backwards lifestyle you won't even accede to yourself (oh wait, that was supposed to apply to you and not just the peasants?).

I got into programming because my friend talked me into taking an elective class in high-school. I was reluctant at first. But after I saw what it was all about, I realized how potentially powerful programming was: a wide variety of ideas that I could conceive I could turn into a "device" and shape it to my vision: the computer was a blank canvas and the programming language was a rack full of shiny new paints and brushes.......and it was fun and liberating, until the boss made me paint the corporate equivalent of velvet Elvises all day.

Maybe kids should just be forced to take a course until it clicks what programming is about. Some things just take getting over an initial hump of ignorance and confusion.

You forgot to include cannibals.

I saw the posters at my kids school and I am was unconvinced this is a good idea.

Programming / coding is a lot of things, and it's different to a lot of people. But the idea of teaching it by discussing game design really strikes me as a bad idea, for a lot of reasons:

1. Game design is inherently difficult. I mean, it's an art and science, and it is multi-discipline. After an hour, or ten hours, or whatever, you aren't going to have a lot to show for your efforts. Games designed and built by large teams of skilled programmers often fail to complete. Even a simple game requires substantial

2. Most programmers are not going to be doing game development. Or even game development. It's like trying to educate you on medicine by bringing in a surgeon to talk about remote micro-surgery. Sure, you could be the 1/100th of all doctors who are involved in that field. But chances are if you become a doctor it will be a GP.

3. The goal of getting more kids into programming, I would imagine, is to get kids to become programmers to do useful things. Games are a nice slice of entertainment, but in the big picture, except for the individuals, no one is really better off because of a new game being developed. If we as a country/specifies/whatever want more programmers, it should be to be more productive, to have a better economy, etc. We don't want/need more programmers for the next Candy Crush. That's a side benefit. Not a purpose.

Who cares about chemistry? Those jokers have been talking about turning lead into gold with applied phlogiston for longer than people have been promising flying cars, and no results less. I say check to see if chemists are heavier than a duck and be done with them.

I'm not sure, but I think a rabbit is involved.

The industry is cyclical. Good times now may not last. The future is difficult to predict.

Statistically, the odds are against one. Maybe you are the exception, I can't tell. Plus, how does one know whether they will be one of the lucky/special ones, or follow the historical (typical) route when choosing a career?

Civil Engineering looks like a better bet:

http://improvingsoftware.com/2009/05/19/programmers-before-you-turn-40-get-a-plan-b/