For something requiring high levels of security, probably not, but that doesn't mean it's not reasonably to use for unlocking a phone or authenticating a small purchase, especially if the alternative is no authentication at all because it's too cumbersome.
This is a case of why certain types of data should be stored in raw, unencrypted formats. Something like this should be stored as the result of applying some type of one-way function on a fingerprint to store a representation of it. That way you can authenticate with a sample, but not steal a person's credentials simply because they used some service with poor security measures.
A password or a physical object are just as useless as credentials if some idiot is storing them unencrypted or in plain-text and the information about them can be stolen and duplicated.
There's a difference between a substance being bad (which has been empirically demonstrated) and it being dangerous at the concentrations being suggested. There's research that shows drinking too much water is bad for you, but we're not going to start making laws about water consumption for obvious reasons.
What if we made the current emission standards two orders of magnitude more strict? Obviously that would be even better for the environment and human health, but if the current regulations are already to a point where the amounts being released have a negligible impact on health, pollution, etc. then making them more strict does not amount to much real good, but adds potentially significant costs.
The point raised is an interesting one as at one point in time it would have been unethical to not return an escaped slave. While it's obvious that there's a gulf of distance between the ethics of vehicle emissions and that of slavery, it cuts to the point lgw was trying to make in that if the standards themselves are meaningless (an open question that neither of you have presented actual evidence in support or contradiction of) then the only reason to stay within their confines is because it is the law, which says nothing about its usefulness in and of itself.
The crux of the matter is how good the law actually is. If it's a regulation that requires $10 of cost to prevent $1 of harm, it's a poor law and is wasting resources so that someone can satisfy their own sense of morality. If it's a case of $10 of cost preventing $100 of harm, then it's a good law that prevents damage to society or shared resources. If we have a bad law, then it should be broken through acts of civil disobedience because a bad law is more harmful to society than the behavior it seeks to prevent.
We'd be better served putting aside notions of whether the behavior is ethical, feelings about corporatism, and stances on government environmentalism so that we can objectively examine whether the emission laws that exist are reasonable because they do reduce harm or whether they're simply the result of someone deciding that they get to choose what's best for everyone else. Only then is it fair to answer whether the behavior is ethical, else we're just arguing assumptions or semantics.
And there's the rub. The average person will generally tend to be about as lazy as they can get away with and there are a lot of other problems on top of this. There are some people working multiple jobs and don't have the time to spend a lot of their day preparing their own meals in lieu of something else and the quick microwave dinner makes it easy for them to spend what time they do have on other pursuits. Then there are the people that live in the so-called food desserts where you can't easily acquire anything healthy, never mind those who couldn't afford the higher quality food over the processed meal in a box.
Nutrition is one of many problems we have in this country, and fixing it would in turn lead to easier fixes for other problems, but it's by no means at the root and in some cases other factors prevent us from making improvements in this regard. I think working to eliminate or minimize poverty would go a long way to fixing most of the other problems that we face as a society.
Why would anyone game on a ultra-light budget-oriented laptop that has no way to provide adequate cooling or power to game?
Gaming laptops are neither ultra-light or budget-oriented. Some of them weigh over 10 lbs. because they need to be thick enough to cram the high-end GPUs and other components inside as well as the cooling system to keep it from burning a hole through a desk. They also typically cost several thousand dollars because they're using the premium components that can cost more than another person's entire system.
I don't know why people buy something like this as it's clearly not for me. I'd rather make a mid-range desktop rig that gets 90% of the performance for under 50% of the cost, but I imagine that some people like these because they're more portable. If you go to a lot of LAN parties, dragging a 10 lb. notebook around is easier than having to lug a PC case around.
Since this is something that seems like it would be difficult to defuse or even work on, what would be the best way to handle the situation where it's found in a location like this? The linked article indicates that attempts to diffuse the bomb failed and it left a five-story crater in the building where it was located, which is probably less than ideal.
The only thing I can really think of would to try to build some kind of reinforced blast cage around it in order to minimize the amount of damage it can do or perhaps try to direct the explosion to minimize hard, much like a gun directs the force of a blast out of the barrel.
Also, would scanning it even be safe as what's to stop someone from building some kind of trigger that would respond to x-ray exposure? Even if there weren't such a trigger, could anyone even call that bluff?
There's probably some religious whack-job group in the U.S. that's similar, but I don't think they have much more of an effect than writing angry letters and indoctrinating their own children.
They probably do have some regression tests, but who would have written a unit test for an address with 16 characters in it? Some bugs are just so weird that no one even thinks to test for them.
It doesn't make sense for Intel to kill Broadwell-C when they can just charge more for the performance premium. It's not as though Intel is under any obligation to sell the chip for less money because it's not the newest technology.
Then funny part is that even the people hating on it count as a download, which means Apple can claim that a huge number of people downloaded it within the first x days, which gives an impression that there was an even larger migration from Android to Apple.
They should change their name to the Fighting Sues. They can use an old lady with hair curlers in a bathrobe holding a rolling pin menacingly as their mascot. Something kind of like this maybe.
Does it matter if you pay the $.02 tax on the small pack of gum you buy at the gas station if the government spends thousands of dollars on you? I think it's a good idea that everyone should pay some form of tax (even the most meager of incomes should still incur some non-zero tax) simply because it makes everyone have a little skin in the game and therefor more likely to participate in government, but there are people who pay far less into the system than they receive. But before you think this is some type of attack on the poor, some of the people in that category are rich and get more benefit from the government through various forms, programs, etc. than they pay in, even if they have to pay taxes that amount to more than some people earn.
I think the end goal of any sane government should be getting to a point where everyone can contribute more to the system than the take from it. That's how you enrich society.
He'd probably love it if he would only get results that showed women who he would both consider attractive and are also interested in machine learning. There are plenty of people who don't care how another person is if they have nothing in common or no interest beyond sexual attraction and a one-night stand. Maybe that's what people use Tinder for anyhow, but I suspect that some people are looking for something more long term, so any computer system that could give your a list of people who would be interested in you would be a good thing.
A better algorithm would be one that can spot which images of men or women are either fake or taken in such a way as to mislead as to the appearance of a person. It doesn't really matter if the computer can pick with 100% accuracy the people you're attracted to if none of them actually look like their pictures.
I'd suggest building a dating site where there are no pictures and people only describe their interests or personality, but people would just lie about that too.
I think a fun project to get a young kid interested in technology would be to build an arcade cabinet yourself. There's a lot of how-to guides out there even if you're not the most technical person yourself and it's the kind of project that combines both software and hardware (even more so if you build that cabinet frame from scratch as well) aspects that can get kids interested in all kinds of different stuff.
Eight-year-old me thought arcades were really cool and would have been stoked to built an arcade machine for at home.
I think there's something much lower than that, and the internet and the ability to communicate to such a large group of people has shown us that there are a lot of people who care nothing about tragedy, but will create a fine display of sympathy to feed their own narcissistic desire for attention.
Several weeks ago I saw a news story about some high school kid that was accused of encouraging a classmate to commit suicide so that they could make social media posts about how their friend died and try to raise suicide awareness. The one kid did commit suicide and the other only got caught because the one that died didn't clear out all of the phone's text messages. We saw the same thing with the whole Kony 2012 social media craze where so many people were rushing to show as much empathy as they could, but no one really did a damned thing about it that had an real world consequences.
I would say that pretending to care when you really don't is far worse than doing nothing at all. That's the kind of attitude that breeds busy-body moralists that you tend to find in a lot of churches that just want someone to condemn and look down their nose at rather than doing anything helpful or actually putting their beliefs to practice.
I wouldn't say that "placebo techno-radicalism" is a good descriptor of what you're describing. It's just meaningless filler. If he would phrased what he said similarly to how you have done it, he would have been far more effective at conveying his point, however I think he's attempting to dress his language up to cover for the fact that he has no real evidence to support his opinion.
Also, you take a far too narrow view of the world of technology. Look at all of the advancements that have come about in the last fifteen years and tell me that people aren't trying to make the world a better place with a straight face. It's a bit like only looking at the National Enquirer and proclaiming that journalism is bunk. We live in a market economy and if people would rather pay for entertainment with their dollars, you can't fault those who look to provide it. Would you also condemn Shakespeare and Mozart for keeping people briefly entertained instead of producing anything that made the world better?
The current techno junk food as you describe it might not last, much like any number of other things have come and gone, but the product category is going to stay around as long as humanity does. It's existed throughout history, but it changes with the times. You probably just dislike the taste of the new generations junk food and prefer you own, which you don't even consider junk food.
Secondary sources tend to be write ups by people who don't necessarily understand what they're writing about and may misrepresent or distort the data, which then goes full circle and gets reported as established fact by other authors who think researching the Wikipedia article is sufficient to verify some information. This XKCD comic demonstrates the process by which this can occur.
What we really should be doing is getting Congress to change the copyright terms for scientific research. Outside of a few seminal works that frequently cited, I would imagine that most access to a publication wavers after a decade simply because new works have built on top of it and are more relevant. Change the laws so that the copyrights for those works expire after ~ten years so that they become available to the public. Someone could probably experimentally determine a better term based on citation and access history, but ten is a good starting point.
All TED talks are not created equally, and there's a stark difference between a TED talk and a TEDx talk. The latter are pretty much open to anyone and aren't well screened either for quality of information or quality of presentation.
The talk you've linked to is one of those TEDx talks and it's given by a professor of visual arts. He's simply just passing off his opinion and little more than that. The speaker describes his work as dealing with "deep techno-cultural shifts, from the post-humanism to the post-anthropocene." I still can't get the Bullshit klaxon to turn off after hearing that part. Some of those words have individual meaning to me, but I don't even think the speaker could given me a concise definition of what that phrase actually means. Post-anthropocene is especially egregious. We get other meaningless jargon phrases like "placebo techno-radicalism" which is defined as "toying with risk, so as to reaffirm the comfortable." After that point I quit, as it was probably just another ~6 minutes of pseudo-intellectual peroration where we get to hear a lot of words that don't actually mean anything, and are only there to make the speaker sound intelligent so you might agree with whatever point they were trying to make if that was even clear.
Funnier yet, the example he gives of a terrible talk that accomplished nothing is another TEDx talk. Stay as far away from those as you possibly can. Even though there are a few bad TED talks, at least they're curated enough to keep the worst of the worst out.
We don't value it because there's no return on investment for those services.
At that point in their life, they should live in a care center where it's easier to attend for their needs. Society shouldn't have to bear additional cost because someone wants to keep living at home well after they're able to. If they have saved up enough and want to pay for such care with their own money, I'll not tell them how they should spend it, but If they can't afford private home care, then it's time to relocate to a care center or go without.
It might sound heartless, but it's a hard truth. They're not going to get better and it's really just a matter of how comfortable they are before dying. Sending a care giver to travel to a location where they focus care on one or two individuals is an utter waste when their time could be spend assisting multiple people in a centralized location.
Professors in CS, engineering, and similar fields actually make reasonably good pay, such that it's not necessarily a matter of money. I suspect that any pay bump was only a small part of the reason why they went to work for Uber. I'm willing to bet Uber was offering boatloads of funding for whatever they wanted to work on without the hassle of having to deal with the usual university politics or bureaucracy to do the kind of research that they want.
And there's really no downside for them either as if they get tired of Uber they'll likely have no problem getting a new university position as they'll be bringing a lot of experience to the table, never mind potential connections to industry that can be beneficial to a university.
Why not just find out what the female programmers want and hire some male cheerleaders for them as well?
On average, sex is probably a bigger motivator for males than it is for females, but that doesn't mean it can't also work for women or that there isn't some analog that is equally effective.
I wonder if part of this is due to China starting to feel the impact of their sex ratio starting to shift due to many families aborting female fetuses so that they can have a male child. Unavailability of potential mates makes younger males depressive and some have theorized that the reason we see a lot of suicide bombers and the like form the Middle East is due to a culture that permits men to have up to four wives which makes it impossible for many people to find a mate and a lot more willing to end their own life to attain some form of purpose.
Long hours and the average computer type skewing towards being introverted or social awkward probably don't help either, but if the sex balance of the local population is disproportionately male, it likely exacerbates the problem even more.
What I keep running into, though, are programmers who can't program their way out of a paper bag, who would stare at me blankly if I quoted Brian Kernighan when he said "Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming."
That sounds like the quality control at the college level is going down hill and there're a bunch of kids being run through a degree mill. While good programmers don't spring fully formed form the head of Zeus and there's probably loads of things that colleges should be teaching, but aren't, there are really only people who can learn to understand what is meant by that quote and people who just won't get it. The former can adapt to whatever problem you throw at them, but the latter are only good for what they're good for, but sometimes that's okay if that provides value.
Programming is a bit like math. You can probably teach everyone the basics and enough to get by or be dangerous, but the more advanced stuff requires a mind that can handle a lot of abstraction and the patience to digest the information and wrap one's mind around it. That's a limited number of people. I'm not sure if someone being a gifted writer or being able to paint aesthetically pleasing pictures would translate at all into good program design.
What I would hire those people for is requirement reviews. The type of people that tend to be really good at programming don't always think about the world the same way as a lot of other people. I'd want some fresh perspectives to go through the project's requirements, because odds are that they think differently about the world and will see the kinds of problems that programmers overlook. There's even some research (Sadly can't find a full text version not behind a paywall) to back this idea up.
I know people don't like Microsoft around here, but this is a story about Intel. You'd think a person would at least get company right before going of on a screed, but apparently not.
Slashdot Mirror
For something requiring high levels of security, probably not, but that doesn't mean it's not reasonably to use for unlocking a phone or authenticating a small purchase, especially if the alternative is no authentication at all because it's too cumbersome.
This is a case of why certain types of data should be stored in raw, unencrypted formats. Something like this should be stored as the result of applying some type of one-way function on a fingerprint to store a representation of it. That way you can authenticate with a sample, but not steal a person's credentials simply because they used some service with poor security measures.
A password or a physical object are just as useless as credentials if some idiot is storing them unencrypted or in plain-text and the information about them can be stolen and duplicated.
There's a difference between a substance being bad (which has been empirically demonstrated) and it being dangerous at the concentrations being suggested. There's research that shows drinking too much water is bad for you, but we're not going to start making laws about water consumption for obvious reasons.
What if we made the current emission standards two orders of magnitude more strict? Obviously that would be even better for the environment and human health, but if the current regulations are already to a point where the amounts being released have a negligible impact on health, pollution, etc. then making them more strict does not amount to much real good, but adds potentially significant costs.
The point raised is an interesting one as at one point in time it would have been unethical to not return an escaped slave. While it's obvious that there's a gulf of distance between the ethics of vehicle emissions and that of slavery, it cuts to the point lgw was trying to make in that if the standards themselves are meaningless (an open question that neither of you have presented actual evidence in support or contradiction of) then the only reason to stay within their confines is because it is the law, which says nothing about its usefulness in and of itself.
The crux of the matter is how good the law actually is. If it's a regulation that requires $10 of cost to prevent $1 of harm, it's a poor law and is wasting resources so that someone can satisfy their own sense of morality. If it's a case of $10 of cost preventing $100 of harm, then it's a good law that prevents damage to society or shared resources. If we have a bad law, then it should be broken through acts of civil disobedience because a bad law is more harmful to society than the behavior it seeks to prevent.
We'd be better served putting aside notions of whether the behavior is ethical, feelings about corporatism, and stances on government environmentalism so that we can objectively examine whether the emission laws that exist are reasonable because they do reduce harm or whether they're simply the result of someone deciding that they get to choose what's best for everyone else. Only then is it fair to answer whether the behavior is ethical, else we're just arguing assumptions or semantics.
So WE need to change.
And there's the rub. The average person will generally tend to be about as lazy as they can get away with and there are a lot of other problems on top of this. There are some people working multiple jobs and don't have the time to spend a lot of their day preparing their own meals in lieu of something else and the quick microwave dinner makes it easy for them to spend what time they do have on other pursuits. Then there are the people that live in the so-called food desserts where you can't easily acquire anything healthy, never mind those who couldn't afford the higher quality food over the processed meal in a box.
Nutrition is one of many problems we have in this country, and fixing it would in turn lead to easier fixes for other problems, but it's by no means at the root and in some cases other factors prevent us from making improvements in this regard. I think working to eliminate or minimize poverty would go a long way to fixing most of the other problems that we face as a society.
Why would anyone game on a ultra-light budget-oriented laptop that has no way to provide adequate cooling or power to game?
Gaming laptops are neither ultra-light or budget-oriented. Some of them weigh over 10 lbs. because they need to be thick enough to cram the high-end GPUs and other components inside as well as the cooling system to keep it from burning a hole through a desk. They also typically cost several thousand dollars because they're using the premium components that can cost more than another person's entire system.
I don't know why people buy something like this as it's clearly not for me. I'd rather make a mid-range desktop rig that gets 90% of the performance for under 50% of the cost, but I imagine that some people like these because they're more portable. If you go to a lot of LAN parties, dragging a 10 lb. notebook around is easier than having to lug a PC case around.
Since this is something that seems like it would be difficult to defuse or even work on, what would be the best way to handle the situation where it's found in a location like this? The linked article indicates that attempts to diffuse the bomb failed and it left a five-story crater in the building where it was located, which is probably less than ideal.
The only thing I can really think of would to try to build some kind of reinforced blast cage around it in order to minimize the amount of damage it can do or perhaps try to direct the explosion to minimize hard, much like a gun directs the force of a blast out of the barrel.
Also, would scanning it even be safe as what's to stop someone from building some kind of trigger that would respond to x-ray exposure? Even if there weren't such a trigger, could anyone even call that bluff?
Here's one such example.
There's probably some religious whack-job group in the U.S. that's similar, but I don't think they have much more of an effect than writing angry letters and indoctrinating their own children.
They probably do have some regression tests, but who would have written a unit test for an address with 16 characters in it? Some bugs are just so weird that no one even thinks to test for them.
It doesn't make sense for Intel to kill Broadwell-C when they can just charge more for the performance premium. It's not as though Intel is under any obligation to sell the chip for less money because it's not the newest technology.
Then funny part is that even the people hating on it count as a download, which means Apple can claim that a huge number of people downloaded it within the first x days, which gives an impression that there was an even larger migration from Android to Apple.
They should change their name to the Fighting Sues. They can use an old lady with hair curlers in a bathrobe holding a rolling pin menacingly as their mascot. Something kind of like this maybe.
Does it matter if you pay the $.02 tax on the small pack of gum you buy at the gas station if the government spends thousands of dollars on you? I think it's a good idea that everyone should pay some form of tax (even the most meager of incomes should still incur some non-zero tax) simply because it makes everyone have a little skin in the game and therefor more likely to participate in government, but there are people who pay far less into the system than they receive. But before you think this is some type of attack on the poor, some of the people in that category are rich and get more benefit from the government through various forms, programs, etc. than they pay in, even if they have to pay taxes that amount to more than some people earn.
I think the end goal of any sane government should be getting to a point where everyone can contribute more to the system than the take from it. That's how you enrich society.
He'd probably love it if he would only get results that showed women who he would both consider attractive and are also interested in machine learning. There are plenty of people who don't care how another person is if they have nothing in common or no interest beyond sexual attraction and a one-night stand. Maybe that's what people use Tinder for anyhow, but I suspect that some people are looking for something more long term, so any computer system that could give your a list of people who would be interested in you would be a good thing.
A better algorithm would be one that can spot which images of men or women are either fake or taken in such a way as to mislead as to the appearance of a person. It doesn't really matter if the computer can pick with 100% accuracy the people you're attracted to if none of them actually look like their pictures.
I'd suggest building a dating site where there are no pictures and people only describe their interests or personality, but people would just lie about that too.
I think a fun project to get a young kid interested in technology would be to build an arcade cabinet yourself. There's a lot of how-to guides out there even if you're not the most technical person yourself and it's the kind of project that combines both software and hardware (even more so if you build that cabinet frame from scratch as well) aspects that can get kids interested in all kinds of different stuff.
Eight-year-old me thought arcades were really cool and would have been stoked to built an arcade machine for at home.
I think there's something much lower than that, and the internet and the ability to communicate to such a large group of people has shown us that there are a lot of people who care nothing about tragedy, but will create a fine display of sympathy to feed their own narcissistic desire for attention.
Several weeks ago I saw a news story about some high school kid that was accused of encouraging a classmate to commit suicide so that they could make social media posts about how their friend died and try to raise suicide awareness. The one kid did commit suicide and the other only got caught because the one that died didn't clear out all of the phone's text messages. We saw the same thing with the whole Kony 2012 social media craze where so many people were rushing to show as much empathy as they could, but no one really did a damned thing about it that had an real world consequences.
I would say that pretending to care when you really don't is far worse than doing nothing at all. That's the kind of attitude that breeds busy-body moralists that you tend to find in a lot of churches that just want someone to condemn and look down their nose at rather than doing anything helpful or actually putting their beliefs to practice.
I wouldn't say that "placebo techno-radicalism" is a good descriptor of what you're describing. It's just meaningless filler. If he would phrased what he said similarly to how you have done it, he would have been far more effective at conveying his point, however I think he's attempting to dress his language up to cover for the fact that he has no real evidence to support his opinion.
Also, you take a far too narrow view of the world of technology. Look at all of the advancements that have come about in the last fifteen years and tell me that people aren't trying to make the world a better place with a straight face. It's a bit like only looking at the National Enquirer and proclaiming that journalism is bunk. We live in a market economy and if people would rather pay for entertainment with their dollars, you can't fault those who look to provide it. Would you also condemn Shakespeare and Mozart for keeping people briefly entertained instead of producing anything that made the world better?
The current techno junk food as you describe it might not last, much like any number of other things have come and gone, but the product category is going to stay around as long as humanity does. It's existed throughout history, but it changes with the times. You probably just dislike the taste of the new generations junk food and prefer you own, which you don't even consider junk food.
Secondary sources tend to be write ups by people who don't necessarily understand what they're writing about and may misrepresent or distort the data, which then goes full circle and gets reported as established fact by other authors who think researching the Wikipedia article is sufficient to verify some information. This XKCD comic demonstrates the process by which this can occur.
What we really should be doing is getting Congress to change the copyright terms for scientific research. Outside of a few seminal works that frequently cited, I would imagine that most access to a publication wavers after a decade simply because new works have built on top of it and are more relevant. Change the laws so that the copyrights for those works expire after ~ten years so that they become available to the public. Someone could probably experimentally determine a better term based on citation and access history, but ten is a good starting point.
All TED talks are not created equally, and there's a stark difference between a TED talk and a TEDx talk. The latter are pretty much open to anyone and aren't well screened either for quality of information or quality of presentation.
The talk you've linked to is one of those TEDx talks and it's given by a professor of visual arts. He's simply just passing off his opinion and little more than that. The speaker describes his work as dealing with "deep techno-cultural shifts, from the post-humanism to the post-anthropocene." I still can't get the Bullshit klaxon to turn off after hearing that part. Some of those words have individual meaning to me, but I don't even think the speaker could given me a concise definition of what that phrase actually means. Post-anthropocene is especially egregious. We get other meaningless jargon phrases like "placebo techno-radicalism" which is defined as "toying with risk, so as to reaffirm the comfortable." After that point I quit, as it was probably just another ~6 minutes of pseudo-intellectual peroration where we get to hear a lot of words that don't actually mean anything, and are only there to make the speaker sound intelligent so you might agree with whatever point they were trying to make if that was even clear.
Funnier yet, the example he gives of a terrible talk that accomplished nothing is another TEDx talk. Stay as far away from those as you possibly can. Even though there are a few bad TED talks, at least they're curated enough to keep the worst of the worst out.
We don't value it because there's no return on investment for those services.
At that point in their life, they should live in a care center where it's easier to attend for their needs. Society shouldn't have to bear additional cost because someone wants to keep living at home well after they're able to. If they have saved up enough and want to pay for such care with their own money, I'll not tell them how they should spend it, but If they can't afford private home care, then it's time to relocate to a care center or go without.
It might sound heartless, but it's a hard truth. They're not going to get better and it's really just a matter of how comfortable they are before dying. Sending a care giver to travel to a location where they focus care on one or two individuals is an utter waste when their time could be spend assisting multiple people in a centralized location.
Professors in CS, engineering, and similar fields actually make reasonably good pay, such that it's not necessarily a matter of money. I suspect that any pay bump was only a small part of the reason why they went to work for Uber. I'm willing to bet Uber was offering boatloads of funding for whatever they wanted to work on without the hassle of having to deal with the usual university politics or bureaucracy to do the kind of research that they want.
And there's really no downside for them either as if they get tired of Uber they'll likely have no problem getting a new university position as they'll be bringing a lot of experience to the table, never mind potential connections to industry that can be beneficial to a university.
Why not just find out what the female programmers want and hire some male cheerleaders for them as well?
On average, sex is probably a bigger motivator for males than it is for females, but that doesn't mean it can't also work for women or that there isn't some analog that is equally effective.
I wonder if part of this is due to China starting to feel the impact of their sex ratio starting to shift due to many families aborting female fetuses so that they can have a male child. Unavailability of potential mates makes younger males depressive and some have theorized that the reason we see a lot of suicide bombers and the like form the Middle East is due to a culture that permits men to have up to four wives which makes it impossible for many people to find a mate and a lot more willing to end their own life to attain some form of purpose.
Long hours and the average computer type skewing towards being introverted or social awkward probably don't help either, but if the sex balance of the local population is disproportionately male, it likely exacerbates the problem even more.
What I keep running into, though, are programmers who can't program their way out of a paper bag, who would stare at me blankly if I quoted Brian Kernighan when he said "Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming."
That sounds like the quality control at the college level is going down hill and there're a bunch of kids being run through a degree mill. While good programmers don't spring fully formed form the head of Zeus and there's probably loads of things that colleges should be teaching, but aren't, there are really only people who can learn to understand what is meant by that quote and people who just won't get it. The former can adapt to whatever problem you throw at them, but the latter are only good for what they're good for, but sometimes that's okay if that provides value.
Programming is a bit like math. You can probably teach everyone the basics and enough to get by or be dangerous, but the more advanced stuff requires a mind that can handle a lot of abstraction and the patience to digest the information and wrap one's mind around it. That's a limited number of people. I'm not sure if someone being a gifted writer or being able to paint aesthetically pleasing pictures would translate at all into good program design.
What I would hire those people for is requirement reviews. The type of people that tend to be really good at programming don't always think about the world the same way as a lot of other people. I'd want some fresh perspectives to go through the project's requirements, because odds are that they think differently about the world and will see the kinds of problems that programmers overlook. There's even some research (Sadly can't find a full text version not behind a paywall) to back this idea up.
I know people don't like Microsoft around here, but this is a story about Intel. You'd think a person would at least get company right before going of on a screed, but apparently not.
At that amount they can't use their typical bollocks figures or they end up with a number that is quickly approaching the yearly GDP of the country.