This has certainly been my experience. I don't know how they graduate, but they do, just, every time. I never heard of someone who didn't graduate because they couldn't code. Somehow they fumble their way through every project and still pass. I'd say maybe 30% of graduates of the degree I'm thinking of could not write a small program correctly in their language of their choice in any reasonable time. That said, employers aren't hiring people who just pass fresh out of uni, so it's not really a problem for the job market. There are also plenty of good, even excellent, programmers who come out of the degree. I'd much prefer to tighten things up though, so the degree itself was worth more.

Learning a new language is easy if you commonly take the time to learn a new language and challenge the assumption that your current pet language is best for business. If you have only used two or three languages in 30 years, people might rightly question why you haven't explored your own field more.

That's actually what a computer science degree teaches you. Experience would instead help you to see to the core of a new problem, and find that one or two insights which turn a complex problem into a simpler one. It would also help you to manage client expectations, so that even with similar output everyone would be happier.

I'm all for reducing the problem to the numbers we can project. Perhaps what I really object to is reducing those numbers further (i.e. human lives lost, suffering increased) to just a single dollar amount. There's a pretty significant value judgement there which is not "objective" economic modelling. Come up with a new measure, call it person-years of poverty, and let's talk about how that measure changes between the two scenarios, (potentially) independently of the other measurable projections.

I don't doubt that humans will survive no matter the climate change which occurs. When you talk about comparing cost, we should be clear that there's no monetary value we can put on the possible outcomes. On the one hand, if changing climate patterns mean that species become extinct, arable land is lost, millions don't escape poverty, suffering increases, many die. If we halt climate change, but in doing so slightly increase suffering in first-world countries, reduce resources in third-world countries, millions don't escape poverty, suffering still increases, many die. Let's compare. The third world, hard to say which is better. The first world would probably be better off doing nothing, in terms of limiting suffering and keeping people's standard of living. As for species dying? What price do we assign? It's a question of ideology, of philosophy, the price we put on such things, and thus which is the better course. Let's not pretend otherwise.

Naturally, and there is a deep philosophic tradition which focuses on these questions. I'm deeply suspicious about the "solutions" to these problems chosen by traditional religions. Whilst I agree that in most cases they evolved through argument and popularity over long time periods, they carry far too much arbitrary baggage. Modern philosophy seems better at getting to the core of the idea and discarding the somewhat arbitrary baggage along for the ride.

Your post is about belief, agnosticism and atheism, but you completely mischaracterise all three.

Belief does not require faith, but can be based in reason. I can believe that the sun will rise tomorrow based on the evidence encountered so far in my life. If the evidence changes, I can change my belief. Both agnostics and atheists typically seat their beliefs in reason, rather than requiring faith.

Agnostics take the position that the factual existence or non-existence of a deity (for example the one you believe in) can not be proven either way. This leaves an agnostic free to actually believe whatever they like regarding a deity, knowing that they will never be proven wrong.

Many people who are agnostics do take a "don't know, don't care" attitude as you describe. However, if they base their beliefs on reason and evidence, they are further restricted to positions which seem likely given the evidence, and given principles for interpreting that evidence, in particular Occam's razor, which states that the simplest explanation for evidence is likely to be the correct one.

You argue that atheists are the irrational ones, since they'll never be able to prove their position. However, they don't need to. Just as they have no need to disprove the existence of Russell's teapot, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or any number of potential phenomena. There's infinitely many such phenomena we could think up, each equally likely and equally provable to the deity you profess belief in. The burden is on you my friend to justify your belief, if only to yourself, for without justification your belief is simply irrational.

Atheists are increasingly evangelical (myself included) because religions and the blind faith they feed off can be incredible damaging.

You call it stealing, I call it investment. Even people who come from "nothing" and labor to achieve large "fruits" are not really doing it on their own. They make use of common goods, such as roads, at an least minimally educated labour pool, a relatively stable society, a mostly predictable legal system, and many others.

We have governments take a proportionate share of this investment and redistribute it to us because it's more efficient and because, more than any other arrangement worked out so far, the government can be trusted to take a only a predictable and fair share. Now, we're constantly debating with each other what constitutes this fair share, but our governments are basically doing what we've agreed on so far, and what works.

I get really tired of reading sloppy sound bites about the evil and tyrrany of social democratic systems. How about making actual arguments instead?

This is one area where OS X lags behind. Sure you can zoom, but if you use a 27" or 30" display, the menu is just as small as on a 13" macbook. As much as I love other aspects of Mac usability, I'm still hoping that tomorrow they'll have the same scalability for large displays that windows and linux have today. My parents are getting old now, and they're both finding this particular aspect of computing a problem. After quite a while, I estimate that about 80% of computer issues my mother has are related to her difficulty reading what's on her screen.

Mod parent up. I'd use an editor like TextMate which is highly customisable, and then create some snippets and shortcuts which allow you to type the primitives you need for LaTeX quickly. Another alternative is of course to just type in plain text, and worry about rendering it nicely later. You can then use any symbols you like, and if your prof uses some new notation you can just invent your equivalent quickly on the spot, instead of worrying about how you could type it in LaTeX. Make it pretty later, as a form of revision.

Even if you choose to look at A afterwards, and you originally asked for A to be counted, you still don't know that the machine didn't count your dummy vote B instead as the real one. I don't think that this circumvents the problem. Malicious software could simply flip people's "real vote" from A to B or vice versa, depending on the options involved, and you'd never know.

The citizens who are doing the providing also get substantial benefits from not living in a society ridden by poverty and other social issues, and also from knowing that the safety net they are paying for is also available to them in the worst case. Let's not pretend it's a one way street.

This sounds like a nice theoretical distinction, but people in many countries consider health care, education and other basic "impositions on others" to be the rights of all individuals. I know where I'd prefer to live.

You misunderstand vaccination's main benefit as protecting the vaccinated individual, when it is instead protecting those who would otherwise have been made sick by the now vaccinated individual. If most people get the appropriate vaccinations, all of society is better off, since even if non-vaccinated individuals get sick the illness will have a more difficult time propagating. In other words, vaccination as a society-wide strategy is only effective if a high-enough proportion of people get vaccinated. That's why, if we're vaccinating at all, it's fair enough to force it on everybody who would reasonably find it effective. If you want to be the exception, then you're putting not just yourself but also other people at risk.

This could be very interesting for computer vision researchers, who are already trying to automatically detect "suspicious behaviour". If they added a few more rewards, they could have many eyes, many competing algorithms, all automatically trying to detect crimes. Very interesting times...

Damn those Americans and their freedom! Let's get them. Seriously though, freedom is too abstract an idea to hate. I find this type of language somewhat confusing. If instead of "freedom" you used "western culture", "scientific enquiry", "christianity", "atheism" or "colonialism" I would understand. If instead of "hate", you said "envy", "feel threatened by", "can't understand", then I would get it. Maybe it's just me, but when you say someone hates freedom, I can't help but think that you're radically oversimplifying them.