As a game developer, I use a lot of C++, and performance is important. That's really a big part of the draw of C++ for game development. So when interviewing new grads I often ask them a bit about cache behaviour. Most really don't have a clue, but those who do show an understanding get high marks because it shows they've dug a little deeper than the rest:
Questions like:
- "Tell me what cache memory is and why it's important."
- "Let's say I have a list of objects with various bits of data like position, color, velocity, etc.. I can organize the list as an array of structures or a structure of arrays. Why might I choose one over the other and?" The best answer: "It depends on your usage patterns." and then they explain why.
Not understanding cache behaviour is the first step to making even the prettiest code run slowly.

I'm not a Javascript developer, but working in the game industry, I've been involved in the development of mission scripting technology for a number of different games. In some ways the problem is the same: The people you need to write the code aren't necessarily comp-sci grads. It needs to be simple, yet powerful. I've seen multiple variations of both visual and textual languages used to represent mission flow, and the big problem I've seen with visual programming is that once a particular scripting problem becomes even mildly complicated in terms of requirements, the resulting visual script becomes a spaghetti mess which is far harder to understand than the lines of equivalent textual code. There's certainly a place for visual programming, but it's generally limited to fairly simple problems.
Basically, visual programming doesn't scale well with the complexity of the problem it's trying to solve.

One of the financial disadvantages to US citizenship, compared to other citizenships around the world, is that you have to pay taxes to the US, regardless of where you live in the world. Often you don't end up paying anything due to credits for foreign income tax, but regardless, you have to at least declare it, which can be a pain. Most other citizenships don't have this requirement.

I don't think there's any law out there that says you must not index a site if they ask you not to. It's more of a request then a requirement. If information is public, and legally available to Microsoft, it would, I believe also be legally available to Google (unless the indexing was licenced in some way, but I don't think there's been any precedent for that). So all Google has to do is ignore the 1000 sites and just index them anyways. Problem solved.