DawkinsGawd

Subsidized housing, day care, etc? Food stamps aren't a great example because you can sell them. You can't sell the $800 you save in subsidized housing. You can't sell a service.

You completely side stepped the question. I find it absolutely amazing how naive BI supporters are. I grew up poor in a ghetto in New York. Studied, went to university, became an engineer and am no longer in that socioeconomic bracket. However it is very apparent that the people in my current bracket (the one's that support BI), have no idea about the issues of the poor. Poor people are mostly poor because of the decisions they make. At least that is my experience. Drug addiction, gambling, alcoholism, poor budgeting, mental illness, etc, etc, etc. Thinking back I do not know anyone in my neighborhood who was genuinely a hard working person with no vices. Hard working people with not vices don't live in the slums and generally can support their basic needs. Yes there are those occasions were an acute emergency happens and support is need but that is an atypical story. Giving $1200 check to someone without food and shelter most definitely isn't going to provide them food and shelter. It will more likely go to a stamp bag, scratch off, 40 ounce, etc.

Yes, we need to help these people. Mental health, substance abuse, etc do not make people "bad". But giving someone a months worth of rent/food/utilities/clothing in cash is going to be disastrous

I think it would be accurate to assert that mathematics helps create a logical thought processes which is the only way to think about programming. Additionally, some areas of mathematics are nearly identical to their programming counterparts (set theory, Boolean logic, graph theory, etc). When I am doing SQL joins it helps me to think about set theory/ven diagrams to envision the output. Additionally, I think the strictly defined terms in mathematics helps me articulate concepts relate to software both more accurately and precisely. For example, I can define an integer in most languages as the set of natural numbers union the set of additive inverses union the set containing only zero

I always thought that correctness (in computer science) only asserted that an algorithm acted as specified. For example, say the specification was: The input accepts an element in the set of real numbers, and the corresponding output is that number added to the next element in the set of natural numbers.

If this algorithm is used to dispense some type of medication, and I enter 3.1 and it murders you with 10 grams of alprazolam... well.... the algorithm is still correct.

Life is not reliable.

I haven't gotten a chance to read the entire paper however the reference to the Therac-25 in the beginning was slightly tilted. Yes - it was a programmatic error that dispersed a deadly amount of radiation. But, if I remember correctly, the Therac-25 is often used in Software/Computer Engineering ethics classes as an instance in which a hardware safety mechanism would be appropriate. So while the article is right that a software malfunction did disperse a deadly amount of radiation, the fix for this isn't necessarily a software solution

I know entire organizations that run off excel spreadsheets

AI-hard - nice. thanks for teaching me a new word.

P.S. The articles is beyond stupid. I use to love technology because it was apolitical and was never muddled with things like "race" and "micro aggression". It seems like every tech article I read now has something to say about minorities or under represented youth or woman. Give it a rest already. Anyone can start coding. All you need is notepad.

I do appreciate how the article makes a distinction between computer science and programming. We already have a computer science education in school. Its called math.

I am very much torn between this on multiple levels. On the most superficial level, I do not want development to become "blue collar" because I am a developer and don't want to think of myself as blue collar. With my personal bias out of the way:

Do you think it's possible for development to be the new manufacturing? I have been saying that it is for years now - but I don't know if I truly believe it or not. There is a large academic distinction between coding and manufacturing. Solid middle class manufacturing jobs were mostly mindless monkey work. Screw this on, put that in the hole it fits in, etc. The more I work on this internal Java ERP/CRM sites the more I think it is monkey work too, but when I take a step back I realize that I have been programming since I was 10 (16 years), I have a bachelors degree in computer science, I have several years of working experience and after work I go home and code. The work generally seems like turn key work to me, but I'm not sure if that is true. Basically I'm saying that I don't necessarily believe the masses are smart enough to be developers even for shitty intranet applications

Disappointed. I thought the article was going to focus on why a computer isn't even necessary for a computer science degree. In other words - how a computer science degree is mostly just a degree in mathematics, and a lot of the coding that you do (algorithm work, obviously not a software engineering or programming intensive course) should be done with pencil.

I have been seeing a lot of articles claiming that a barrier to CS curriculum in high school is that they don't have the technological capabilities to support such curriculum. Nonsense. If I ran an AP computer science class we would never touch a computer. Pencil and paper only.

You realize that offensive web application pen testing is only a tiny corner of the whole information security industry, and that most information security professionals don't find bugs. A good portion of InfoSec professionals are not technologists at all. They are behavioral experts, legal experts, policy makers, etc.

Judging by his own description of his skill set I would say he doesn't do offensive security at all but rather remediation, policy, and/or maybe forensics.