You are correct that the use of the Internet, in and of itself will not create qualifications.

But having access to it and properly directed they will be be far better in the IT industry than their peers that didn't have the access.

You can't argue with results.

I'd be all for that if you could discharge educational debt via bankruptcy as you can with other forms of debt. Once you do that, I suspect lenders will start doing much better risk assessments on individual candidates. It might end up meaning fewer people go on to higher education, but it should also mean fewer people end up in minimum wage (or no) jobs with crushing amounts of student debt.

To be fair though, my nephew is going through a CS program at a university and has asked me about some of his assignments. They're similarly trivial and the example code provided by the professors is atrocious. I like to think they're doing that intentionally, but I know they're not. I was disillusioned with the business programming course I enrolled in right out of high school back in the '80's and ended up finding a small state school with instructors who had real world experience for the rest of my formal education. Even with that, I've learned far more on my own and through work experience than I was ever going to pick up in a university. If a person isn't motivated to learn on his own, he's never going to be a particularly good programmer. Perhaps the for-profit schools just attract a higher concentration of people who are only trying to get into CS for the money and don't have the love of the art that you need to get to that level.

When I'm in charge of hiring, a degree doesn't really factor into my decision. I can tell if you're the sort of person who enjoys programming. I'd take a high school dropout over someone with a Master's, if the high school dropout had a substantial portfolio of open source code he could show me. Assuming the guy with the Master's didn't, naturally. If they both did, I'd want to hire them both, and I'd make a damn good argument to management about it.

Don't be so sure.

All my younger kids cannot wait until they are old enough to get a facebook account, and my oldest three that do have one are on it constantly.

Chances are very high that lack of facebook consumption by kids is limited by very paranoid parents that are crippling their future in any tech field by not allowing regular access to the Internet.

" Kids, upon the whole, do not use Facebook. "

Citation required.

It seems likely that it ran out of fuel and crashed somewhere. A really surreal option I thought about was that all the passengers could have been in on it and wanted to go somewhere else for some reason. That seems very unlikely, but hey, if it turns out that's what happened, I called it!

We'd be better off if I just rewrote this entire application.

How many times have we witnessed this? We know how it goes down. That shitty application has two decades worth of bug fixes and business process embedded in it. Some of the business process might look like bugs or random side effects. An effort will be launched to rewrite it, and it will fail miserably, well over budget and several years late.

If the team is unfortunate enough to actually manage to create a working executable, they will find that it doesn't offer half the functionality of the old application and does not deliver the correct results half the time. So the team will start hurriedly patching code, accumulating rushed bug fix after bug fix until the entire thing is an unmaintainable quiltwork of patches and side effects. At which point the company will decide that the new application is awful and attempt to rewrite it. It's just the circle of life...

Bwahaha! A few years back, they had a contest to rename The Gimp. I can't help but notice that it's still called The Gimp. I spent a couple of days trying to figure out how to shoehorn an acronym for "GOATFUCKER," but petered out at 4 or 5 letters. You know if I'd managed to pull it off, that's what they would have renamed it to...

Indeed! My 70's-era assembly language book speculates that in the future we may have 32 bit processors but 64 bit processors will most likely be too expensive to ever enjoy widespread availability!

Well once we get good at this we COULD just grow the tusk part, in 3' by 3' cubes. Then you could glue a bunch of them together to make a minecraft-style ivory castle.

The C++ mentality is that you should catch as many errors as you can at compile time. When you're launching a satellite, you want to be sure your code's as bulletproof as possible before it leaves the ground. Every time I've seen reflection used, it was by some terrible programmer who'd just learned about reflection and was looking for an excuse to use it. And every single time, they were using it as a crutch so they wouldn't have to think about the system they were building. You can almost hear them thinking "Cool! I don't really know what this bit here is supposed to do, so I'll just use reflection and once I've collected my paycheck and left, some other programmer can drop random objects in there later!" I've never seen its use actually improve a design. I've never even seen it make more loosely-coupled or reusable code, now that I think about it. Somehow they ended up with introspective systems that were so tightly coupled that you couldn't just break one object out to run a unit test on it. If they'd written unit tests. Which they didn't, because they were bad programmers.

Yep, and not only will the inevitable still happen (hence the term) it will happen to a much larger set of people. We can screw a billion people now or 4 billion later but on our current trajectory somebody is eventually getting screwed.

Should change randomly every year to drive IT spending.

Hey everyone! Welcome to our Privacy tour! Let's meet everyone in the room! Hi, what's your name? Eric? I think we have a picture of Eric's dong... yes, here it is! We got this while you were Yahoo web chatting. Who else is here? Dave? Do we... yes we have a picture of Dave's dong. This one wasn't too hard to get, since he uses Chat Roulette. Who else do we have here? Sam? Sam was quite a difficult one, but we finally got a picture of his dong after our agents set up a gay men playing with olive oil site... hey... where's everyone going?

And I expect all employers to do this as a matter of course. That means that if you read your personal E-Mail at work or do online banking there, your employer probably also knows your passwords and the contents of your mail. Keep that in mind before conducting your personal business (or job search) at work.

I also expect them to be very aware of who you call from the phone at your desk.