They make this claim in the first paragraph and then spend the next four pages pointing out that they didn't check lifestyle, didn't distinguish caffeinated and decaff and that half a dozen other studies have shown health benefits of drinking coffee, and conclude by saying that health experts are not putting coffee on any lists for lack of hard evidence.

Exactly. (For younger readers, Ellison was all over the media 20 years ago announcing that Network Computers would be the nemesis of Microsoft in the very near future. I don't think waiting for the Chromebook was part of the game plan at the time.)

Does anyone else think this whole sage would be much simpler if the media consistently referred to people:dell or company:dell?

I'd be interested to see the answers broken down by age. It may well be that most of the people who love paper books will be dead in 20 years.

I suspect there's also a "fake good" effect, in that people feel they ought to be supporting their local bookshop and therefore say that they do, even if, in fact, they buy a book a year in an airport and every other book on Amazon.

Personally, I really like paper, even for technical books, but all my colleagues look at me like I'm wearing sabre-toothed tiger skins and wielding a club.

If we take this to its logical conclusion, ex-pats should lose the ability to speak the local language whenever they look at their spouse. And Chinese staff in a Chinese restaurant outside of China wouldn't have a hope. This has not been my experience. I suspect that the experiment is not demonstrating what the experimenters think it is demonstrating.

Maybe to avoid Titanic Syndrome ("A boat even God couldn't sink"). Not that I think God goes around sinking boats and blowing down data centres to win arguments. But if your data centre does get damaged in a storm, and you haven't claimed that it's indestructible, you don't end up being used as a moral cautionary tale about the perils of pride for the next 100 years.

I think that everyone should learn to code. Not because it will make them a programmer. Not because it will enable them to estimate how long something will take, not least because experienced programmers are legendarily bad at doing that anyway. Everyone should learn to program because programming makes the modern world go round, and it's good for everyone to have at least an inkling of what that involves.

We teach a lot of kids chemistry, without any expectation that they will invent a new compound that will change the world. We teach a lot of kids physics, without any expectation that they'll make a significant contribution to subatomic particle research. We teach most kids to do creative writing and poetry, without expecting the vast majority of them to produce fiction or poetry of publishable quality. I don't see why we wouldn't teach programming alongside all those other topics that most students never master and never "need".

One argument for teaching a lot of academic subjects widely is that the skills you learn along the way have wider application than the topic itself. And it seems to me that this argument holds at least as well for programming as for, say, pure math. As programmers keep saying, programming is about analysis, structure, models... is there really no application whatsoever for those skills outside of hardcore programming? Does no-one ever wish that their managers had a better grasp of "system"? Yes, of course, you can acquire these skills in other places. But the thing about programming, pretty much from the outset, is that your pious beliefs about system will stop your code from performing correctly unless those beliefs are reasonably accurate. I sometimes tell people that I do executable philisophy - it's all about logic, but, unlike the philosopher, my logic has to work.

No, a bit of Python won't enable people to produce estimates for projects. But it may enable managers to understand why writing code once to do something that needs doing often is often a good plan (and, also, why it sometimes isn't). It may enable managers to understand why "Can we just change this one assumption" at the end of a project may involve restarting the entire project.

Yes, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. But the little knowledge is out there already on the TV station of your choice. I don't even like Python that much, but I'd still much rather deal with erroneous assumptions based on a bit of Python experience than deal with erroneous assumptions based on watching Mission Impossible and NCIS.

"It's probably now at the point where new projects are better off starting with Python 3, to ease the pain of upgrading later, unless there's a library they really need. Starting with a mature (but depreciated) platform is not a great idea."

Unless you want to use Python on Google App Engine, where Python 2.7 is what you get. And given that Guido himself works for Google on this project, that's not exactly encouraging.

Or unless you want a Python app to work out of the box on, well, just about anything, but OSX is the example that bit me.

I remember discussing Python 3 on /. when it came out. The decision not to even try to ensure backwards compatibility struck me as disastrous. The response was "No, because Python will never have a cruft problem because we are not Perl coders", or something like that. Many years on, I still think it was disastrous. Python now has a bigger legacy code problem than Perl - seen much Perl 4 recently? - precisely because the upgrade path is such a pain.

Killing Python 2 is going to be like killing IE6 and Windows XP - a noble goal that turns out to take decades. And it's a totally self-inflicted wound by the Python community.

For households that heat electrically, incandescent lighting in winter has to be an excellent idea. You get the light, and in the end all the electricity turns into heat, which is distributed really efficiently across the room. Replacing the light bulbs just means the electric heating is going to work that much harder.

I was reading "The mythical man-month" only this weekend, which starts with the observation that "everyone knows" that two kids in a garage can do more than a corporate development team, and then points out that, if this was actually true without caveats, corporations would hire two kids in a garage every time. There's a difference between producing a standalone program and developing/maintaining a product system.

If you want to organise your address book with a joystick or find the nearest restaurant to your television, not at all. But if we're talking about games, I don't think there are "millions" of great games for Android. ISPs who already resell TV channels may have one or two ideas about how to licence games. For example, you don't need to read French to spot the logos and brands on this ISP's website

In France, where almost all domestic broadband is "triple play" (phone, TV and Internet), at least two of the major ISPs offers gaming as part of the functionality of their latest glorified router package. You can't get much easier to install than "It's already there", and the ISPs already have a distribution model that they use to sell view-on-demand video.

The assumption in TFA seems to be that PHP does something that couldn't be done otherwise now, or does it more easily, or something. But I don't think that's true. There are alternative languages and alternative ecosystems now. IMO, most PHP coders don't use PHP because they have looked at the alternatives and decided PHP is the best choice, or the least bad choice, or any other choice. People use PHP because either

1: It was forced upon them for some reason or

2: It was the first thing they found and it was good enough

If that's the case, it's irrelevant how fantastic the alternatives are.

Also, while PHP code can be truly terrible, people who are determined to write terrible code will do so whatever the tool. You can use almost anything as a hammer if you try hard enough. The myth that The One Right Language somehow makes bad programmers good is still alive, especially within the Python community, but it's stll a myth.

When good programmers have no choice but to use PHP, they'll find a way to build something that is workmanlike even if it isn't beautiful. When bad programmers program, the result is going to be bad regardless of the language.

That is a truly terrible article.

To summarise the logic of TFA, America doesn't do well at standardised international tests, but the average level of scientific education is clearly dazzling because of Silicon Valley in general and the iPad in particular. Except that, last time I looked, the iPad was using a processor core designed in Cambridge, UK. I believe there are one or two other foreign contributions to Silicon Valley.

And, even if that were not the case, what percentage of people resident in the US work in Silicon Valley?!

My impression of US education is that, like many other aspects of America, the bell curve is very wide. The best of US education is possibly the best in the world. The worst is very bad. So, if "American education" means "the best of American education", there's nothing to worry about. If it means "what 90% of Americans have understood about science", or even "median American comprehension of science", the answer might be different. Or not. But the quality of science is not about whether or not a huge multinational with most of its labour outsourced can ship a commercial product.

(FWIW, I'm writing this in France, and I don't get the impression that science teaching here is great either.)

Both unsecured connections I can see here in France are from ISP-provided routers - one of them is mine. This is how French ISPs provide roaming wifi for their clients - leach a bit of bandwidth of domestic connections and make it available via a locked-down open wifi connection.