My university years were good for a few things, but major career training was not one of those things.

My university degree, though, was essntial for opening doors.

Every useful thing I learned about writing software I learned on my own -- all the core, and much of the advanced, stuff I learned before I ever set foot in a classroom; all the rest after I started my first job. None of the time between those two points yielded much of anything useful, but all the desirable jobs required a 4-year degree from an accredited university.

So yes, universities are a huge scam; but most businesses are in collusion with the universities to make them, for all intents and purposes, a required rite of passage.

Fortunately, though, I had the good sense to live with my parents until well after I graduated, so I paid off my entire student debt in about six years.

There are several ways in which that statement is both true and, at least potentially, untrue at the same time.

True:
1) We have discovered no way to break what we understand to be the highest velocity at which a particle can travel: light speed.

2) No experiment we have ever conceived and/or tested has discredited (1) above.

3) There are several more, but I don't want to articulate them.

Untrue (or potentially untrue):
1) Our best understanding is that matter in the universe moved faster than light during a time following the Big Bang. This invalidates your assertion that FTL is never possible. Otherwise, matter could not have spread as far as it has in the given time since the Big Bang. This suggests that the speed of light may not be an absolute limit, but that we have no way to reproduce it. See (1) under the True heading. A sufficiently advanced civilization may, hypothetically speaking, possess such technology. This, if it exists, is so far beyond the state of our knowledge as to be indistinguishable from magic.

2) Reproducing the effects of FTL, without actually moving at FTL speeds, is an acceptable alternative. A sufficiently advanced civilization may, hypothetically speaking, possess such technology. This, if it exists, is so far beyond the state of our knowledge as to be indistinguishable from magic.

3) Again, there are several more, but I don't want to articulate them.

I wouldn't trust Mac, as it's closed source. But I don't blindly trust my Linux-based systems, either, as they run on closed hardware. Comey and the Three Letter Agencies have made open hardware all the more necessary.

That is called, "Slander of Title."

You're under the impression that sanitation equals pristine measures, which isn't the case. Sanitation means cleanliness. Most of the measures undertaken to eliminate Malaria in Sri Lanka involved cleanliness. That's not to say that this form of sanitation is without repercussions (perhaps the sprays cause cancer); but yes, most of the measures described in the article involve sanitation.

Nowhere in the article did it mention Primaquine. But even if the drug was involved, it doesn't detract from the sanitation effort one bit. The drug was one prong of a multifacted approach, and was used where the infection occurred before the sanitation efforts were undertaken. The drug will be largely, if not completely, unnecessary now.

Where I work, the Surface has exactly one benefit: our Java programs can be installed on it as if it were just another computer. But once Android has that ability, the Surface's one advantage will evaporate; leaving only downsides.

So once again, sanitation eliminates disease. Shocking how that works.

There is a HUGE difference between developing external technologies and altering internals that we don't understand. I would put human understanding of human biology somewhere between .05% and .07%. We can't even create relatively simple medicines that don't have side effects, or create replacements for relatively simple organs without risking death, or manufacture basic replacement parts that actually work, and you're all for altering our foundational existence?

That's insane. You've been watching way too much TV.

Autonomous weapon systems, while being an issue that needs consideration, are far less of a concern than autonomous job killers. Putting people out of work, without a means to quickly repurpose them at equal or better pay, is far more dangerous to a civilized society than the very primitive state of so-called "artificial intelligence".

The risks of families starving and being homeless are far greater than the risks of families being killed by military drones.

OpenOffice died the moment LibreOffice forked it. The ghost of OpenOffice.org just didn't know it was dead. When most of your major developers leave to carry on a competing project, the prior project dies.

Most IDE's (and some better text editors) have options to convert from spaces to tabs, and from tabs to spaces. Choose your preference, select "reformat" and get on with the job of writing software.

The debate was interesting back when all we had were dumb text editors, but it's entirely pointless now.

So Comey wants to eliminate one of our biggest protections against organized crime, pedophiles, Federal agencies acting illegally, and other forms of criminals. Who on Earth can promote such an agenda, while claiming to be protecting Americans, other that someone with an agenda similar to those he is claiming to fight?

His arguments are highly illogical at face value, but make perfect sense as a means to harm America from the inside. Prior to Snowden, when we buried our collective heads in the sands of denial about illegal Federal behavior, I could have assumed that Comey at least had our best interests at heart. But now I must assume that his agenda is to continue harming us.

You and I have completely different experiences. I've had to maintain people's C# code, and it's no better than Java, and is frequently so obtuse as to be a bad joke. It has a whole set of solutions solving problems that don't exist, except in the minds of bad programmers, but completely lacks the cross-platform benefits of Java.

Java's cross-platform powers far exceed the minor (and most are very minor, to the point of insignificance) problems the platform has. Of the dozens of languages/platforms I've learned and forgotten over the years, Java hits a sweet spot that nothing else has come close to touching. It's unfortunate, because Oracle is a decayed, green, rotten donkey dick; but the GPL compensates for that.

It's entirely possible that I'm misunderstanding Google's strategy here, but if the summary is correct (the summary contains the vast majority of the article, which, yes, I read), this is a profoundly idiotic move on Google's part. Not necessarily dropping the Nexus name, as that's very minor, but moving away from stock Android. One of the primary appeals of the Nexus was the complete and total lack of crapware.

I'm going to reserve final judgment until I see more of what Google is doing with its phone brand, as I have a hard time believing that Google's Android division is being run by morons.

There must be more to this than the story indicates.

This is pretty close to the core of a problem that can't be fixed with drag and drop tools. The core problem isn't writing code. That's the easy part that anyone can learn. The real problem is analysis, a skill that very few people (relative to the business population) have. All the code generators in the world won't solve that problem.

A good developer isn't a good developer because he can write code. He is a good developer because he can integrate the components of a system into a coherent whole. No programming automation system will magically teach someone how to do that.

As you've said before, we've seen this promise come and go more than once in the last 30 years. Like "cloud computing" and the dot bomb, this fad will peak and fall.