Like in the past. Hit the "Windows" key, type "Control Panel", and it'll show up. I never had a problem with Windows 8 because in Windows 7 I always hit "Windows key" and started typing whatever I was looking for. Did you really have to Google that?

I liked this feature better when it was called "DOS."

Gee, Wally, I dunno. Because law-enforcement resources aren't endless, and need to be prioritized effectively?

Even though Bill and Steve were fierce competitors, they were sort of two halves of a whole. The "yin" and "yang", so to say.

Yeah, like Hitler and... Randall Flagg.

Nice. I see a lot of insults in the replies to this comment, but I don't see any substantial explanations for your observation, or even any real denials.

Adding programmers to a late development project makes it later.

Adding writers to a late screenwriting project makes it worse.

Those are the closest things to genuine axioms in either field of endeavor.

To play devil's advocate: ubiquitous surveillance as in the examples you bring up would not come with unlimited resources to follow up. The very existence of this capability will force the authorities to focus their efforts on people who actually might be a threat. You know, like people who are actually on terrorism watch lists.

That assembler I did in the 80s is no use to me at all now.

If you're not a different, stronger programmer for having written it, then you must have been wasting your time.

Selection bias renders your question unanswerable in the general case, but in the specific case of someone with 5 years+degree versus 10 years+no degree, I don't believe you will be able to back up your assertion.

Given the statistics, are you saying that most high tech companies have incorrect hiring practices?

You haven't given any statistics, so this question is unanswerable in context. Companies hire based on the candidates available. In certain fields, virtually all of those candidates will have degrees. That's all that can be stated with any certainty.

Do all the bean counters who measure productivity not have any influence in who gets hired? OR do employees with both education and experience outperform those with experience only?

These questions are also too general to be answerable. I would, however, note that some of the larger employers including Dell, Apple, and Microsoft have no moral authority to reject undegreed candidates blindly. Perhaps that's why they don't.

Once you start making longer term bets on people and caring about long term results, you might find that with 1 or 2 years of experience, those graduates outperform the un-educated.

Not really. Setting aside the fact that "unschooled" and "uneducated" are not synonyms, the thing about your experience is that its value will grow over time, or at least it should if you're doing things right. Meanwhile, the value of your college education will diminish as it recedes into the past.

Put another way: with each year that passes in your career, employers will care less about your college days and more about what you've been doing since then.

But we were told there would be no... aw, fuckit. Did you say you wanted 2% or whole milk in that triple latte?

And it's the least of that paragraph's problems.

There will always be work for those who can write well. Trouble is, someone with a Ph.D. in literature has spent his or her time learning to read well. Employment prospects in that field are a bit less certain.

They are not going to spend 5 grand to catch a $50 drug deal.

(Shrug) It's not their 5 grand. So why shouldn't they?

That's the whole idea behind the War on Some Drugs.

No, the terrorists didn't win. We both lost. We lost as you noted above. The terrorists wanted the US out of the Middle East and instead got us even more involved.

Not quite. Among other things, what bin Laden primarily demanded was that the US leave Saudi Arabia.

His demands were met, as the US hastily closed its Saudi bases after 9/11 and moved into Iraq.

Since Iraq was a secular state with no Muslim holy sites of any significance, Al Qaeda never gave a hoot about it. It was only in the aftermath of the US invasion, when it became apparent that the secular nature of the country was up for grabs, that Al Qaeda became involved.

An even shorter answer is to stop awarding people exclusive government-enforced monopolies on abstract ideas.

No. What will happen is that making an ass out of yourself will be the new "normal." It will be impossible to hold anyone's previous actions against them.

This is probably enough to explain the Fermi paradox, just by itself.