If by "people look down on it" you are suggesting veteran programmers look down on beginner courses because beginner courses have been around for ages, I would care to disagree. I am fairly sure many veteran programmers indeed began their careers with just such beginner courses, way back when, which corroborates your assertion that such courses have been around for ages but gives no insight into why anyone would look down on such courses...which leads me to guess that maybe you mean that it is the _hype_ that is being looked down on? In that case, sure, hype can look a bit laughable to a veteran who has perhaps seen the object in question being hyped several times before. On the other hand, perhaps for a few veteran coders it was some hype that once helped them to find their way to a beginner course that set them on their path to become veterans. So even the hype can have a purpose and should not be looked down on, in my opinion.

But perhaps you didn't at all mean "veteran programmers" by "people" ? On the other hand, I don't see how junior programmers would have enough experience to look down on the material they are still learning from, and the general public (assuming they know even less about programming than the junior programmer) would consequently have even less experience to draw on when looking down on the material.

So perhaps you meant "intermediary programmers"? In that case I must agree I have sometimes seen tendencies of some intermediary programmers who are overly eager to distinguish themselves from junior programmers to look down on material suited for the juniors, but it is an approach that rarely lasts for very long, and I would frankly advice against such advocacy as a way to establish one's experience as a coder as it is fairly transparent.

I'll even bet he's just the type to go around downloading and using free open source software without paying a penny for it!

So on this island no-body can ever have a week off from hunting pigs or their other duties?

What if the pig hunter produced some extra pigs along with saving up extra shells so that the other two could still buy pig during the week off?

And if the pig hunter can have a week off, does that imply the economy at large also isn't screwed?

"Just for starters, if you proclaimed that a Z80 with a stripe on it was the most awesome thing ever, anyone who actually knows what a Z80 and carse what it does is would laugh at you, and they'd be right."

But what about an all white casing where the user cannot change the battery? Slam dunk, right?

"A good technical foot soldier can extrapolate the reasons behind good high-level technical decisions"

You mean that someone did business while golfing?

If your premise is that you need less people I think statistics indicate that helping people in need would be your best bet (in addition to sounding, as you put it, less bad). As I understand the general mechanism, people tend to compensate for uncertainty regarding the survival of their offspring by having more children. With access to for example better medication, the argument goes, parents can afford to have fewer babies.

A rock is not evil. Does that imply it is good?

Ha! Everyone know the French use private islands to test their nukes!

I live in a rowing boat on a secret lake where I (almost) constantly row around in a criss-cross pattern determined by a quantum random generator.

You are certainly right. The reality is of course just that if they are very far away, they would have to travel either very fast or for a very long time to get here.

If they started 1 billion years ago they could have travelled at 0.1c and still reached us from a very faraway place (to the tune of 0.1 billion light years away).

Could some life have started and reached spacefaring capabilities somewhere in the general vicinity of us (less than 0.1 billion light years away) in the last billion years? Seems entirely possible to me.

The argument for intelligent design is based on the concept of irreducible complexity. A scientist and an intelligent designist could agree on some thing, say the general evolutionary history of the horse, but the distinction comes when the intelligent designist finds some thing to be irreducably complex such that the consitituent parts could not have evolved by themselves (that is, only God could have made it because Darwinism wouldn't suffice. Not a watertight conclusion of course but it is the one intelligent designer theory goes with). The scientist will then go on to investigate how come the complexity under question is not impossible to reduce after all and if the intelligent designist is also a scientist they will help out in this endavour, but if they think they have just found proof for their religious belief that some irreducible complexity _must_ exist somewhere they may be unwilling to test their faith as thoroughly.

If someone claims that anyone should be shot their idea should be shot down with very much greater priority than the idea that Santa Claus brings toys to children on Christmas Eve.

"Then there's [the well-known case of] Jupiter-sized outer planets"

mind = blown :)

Yes indeed. Is the most likely option that we are somewhere in the middle?

"It doesn't necessarily have to want to contact us, but we should be able to observe these magical spaceships and colonized Dyson Spheres and all the other mythology the Space Nutters believe in."

But we seem to be making headway towards cloaking before we stride towards FTL (well, we have the neutrino but we refuse to believe in it)