But when I first heard about Scrum with its "pigs" and "chickens" I immediately thought of Animal Farm. :)

I remember over two decades ago there was talk of making data objects, that is data that new how to present an object interface to get at its information. Data self contain its own reader in some ubiquitous language. But wait, we never got a ubiquitous language. Perhaps javascript today? But if you want to solve this problem then this is how to solve it. Or perhaps you could just package a converter to convert format XYZ to BSON as being good enough or at least better than today's breakage.

One thing that really burns me is having my information that I created / entered / caused to be locked up in some proprietary opaque format, especially if owned by one and only one app.

Well, if you speak this way about your own intelligence and don't even have a handle on whether you are smart or relatively smart or not then I guess in your case the test was in fact wrong. :)

Are there differences in people? Obviously. Are there differences in the level of material people can learn and use fluently? Obviously again. Are people that can fluently use some types of material generally more capable in a group of areas we usually think of as requiring more intelligence, yes again. So pretending there is nothing at all to intelligence differences generally is clearly not in keeping with known data.

It is an undeniably obvious fact that some people are smarter than other people. So any study that says intelligence differences between people are a myth is obviously flawed and contrary to obvious everyday data.

I have been in software for 32 years professionally. Whether there is age discrimination or not it is certainly not evenly distributed across all employers. It is not easy to find employees and co-workers who are adept at software. Even merely adequate software engineers can be elusive to find. So many companies realize that discrimination on any basis is not something they can afford. I am 58 now and still going strong. There is no way I experienced any age discrimination in my 40s. And there are several people at my current small company (80 people or so) who are older than I.

A) Sandy has average winds less that 80 mph so the major danger is heavy rainfall (or perhaps snow) only.
B) "Nuclear meltdown" is largely a media myth. Real nuclear plants do not melt down in the way the popular mythology claims.
C) Real nuclear plant are designed to push in the control rods if anything like a power drop happens.

So stop with the 70s anti-nuclear FUD.

We already put more into public education per student than any country in the world. And yet the results are lousy. Clearly it is not a matter of money. Government does not belong in education. Retraining? How do you retrain adults who don't even have basic math skills in many cases to do high tech work? How many adults would do the work to get such education even if you could somehow pay for it in the already 100% GDP in debt country? Smaller classes and more teachers are not doing it. Web based education I think will help a lot. The government is not the head of the family and is not suppose to be. The assumption that it is responsible for us or has the right to run things is what got us here.

First US workers do not own jobs or have some special rights to onshore jobs just because they are US citizens. If they cannot do the work or do it as well then they will not get the job. US education levels and particularly tech education are overall dismal. China alone graduates 100x as many engineers and scientist as the US at Masters and PhD levels. In an increasingly tech heavy market there is increasing demand for these skills. You can't solve it locally or in US much of the time as I know from experience. Your company needs the workers to survive and grow. Why do you have very limited rights to hire workers that can provide what you need just because of some asinine visa restrictions. I have personally lost really good co-workers because the visa process kept them out for so long I could no longer afford to wait. Or a snafu sent them home. I have one co-worker and friend who has worked and lived in US for 13 years and only a year ago got his green card. He is not eligible to become citizen for years after this. PhD level professional and obvious asset as professional and hopefully citizen and he has to jump through such hoops? Clearly illogical.

The author is simply trying to making political hay with people that have no idea what they are talking about and think that merely being an American entitles them to all kinds of things including jobs they don't have the skills to do.

Google did the right thing. There is no legitimate ethical or legal ground for restricting free speech in such a case. I would have been quite disturbed if they had taken the opposite stance.

It is no more the state's duty to educate everyone than to provide shoes for everyone. The private sector is much more capable of providing much better quality education for everyone and at lower costs. Nor does the money of a corporation belong to the state it happens to do business in. The idea that besides the value it offers in its products and besides all the benefits that derive from it being in existence in the the state, that somehow it also owes more to the state is utterly absurd, it is hideously parasitical. What on earth makes you believe a corporation or anyone else owes you a damn thing?

First of all, the WTO has no means to order any country to sell anything at what it determines is a "fair price". Second, China does not have a monopoly on rare earths. They exist is many many countries. Those countries may not be actively pursuing them and exporting them to the same degree but that is not China's fault.

I have no Windows boxes. Only rarely will I find something that causes me to run it in a VM. I just don't like it at any level. Never have. Oh, I have tried to have a Windows machine many times. But after the first or second time I have to nearly rebuild the damn thing due to registry screw-ups, malware or just bit rot they tend to get scrapped completely and replaced with Linux.

I am mega-creeped by this trend that the OS and/or hardware vendor somehow gets to tell me what I am allowed to run on my own machines and gets paid usurious rates to do so. This is not remotely in keeping with the Computer Power to the People meme that set myself and so many on fire back in the 70s and 80s. It is as if the government via the corporations are herding the sheeple into the slaughter chute. Especially combined with such near open declarations of war as SOPA.

You can't retrain most construction and manufacturing line workers to do something like programming. It is more than a matter of IQ although that is not an inconsiderable part of it. I don't know any decent programmers that are less than 1 sigma from the mean and the majority are 2 sigma or more how the IQ curve. But even with the raw intelligence there are plenty of people that just can't program. It is a bit of a mystery as to what that something is that is required.

It is not the job of a company to "spread the wealth". It is the job of a company to create value, things that are valued much more than the value consumed to produce them. That is all. It is not there job to employ people just for the sake of employing them. If the people cannot add to producing more value in the sole judgment of the company then they will not and should not be hired. Until we learn that we will see more companies move more of their operations offshore.

It is not the government's job to be involved in this or to "care" either way. They are not your nanny and protector. If you don't think the loans are reasonable then don't take them. Why is this hard? But you are right that the government, by being involved at all, creates the same kind of moral hazard if not guarantee of very bad outcomes as occurred in housing.

Government has absolutely no right to determine what is taught or who takes it. If the people of the US forget this then the America is dead.