Aceticon

They "are" for those people who are too stupid to understand that individual consumers don't have the time, expertise, access to inside information on company processes and their own labs so that they don't need to rely on regulators to make sure they're not buying and consuming dangerous shit, and can do it all by themselves as individuals.

The "too stupid to understand regulators are there to do what individuals don't have the time, expertise and power to do as individuals" neatly brings us around exactly to the point the OP was making.

(Mind you, sadly it's not just Trumpettes who fall into the "too stupid to understand the need of regulators" category)

The way I'm reading is that they were holding a date related value in an unsigned integer field, so the start date (corresponding to 0) was a convention (whether internal or broader than that, I don't know) and they chose 0, the default initialization value for such fields as a flag for "no information". Back in the day there wasn't all that memory and storage to go around so I bet this was a 1 byte field holding a year value.

Those choices in a system to be used for Social Security for a whole nation make sense in software design terms if you're having to come up with your own solution for storing dates in as fewer bytes as possible in a language with no built-in date type, but present day teenagers would have never have been in such a situation because there are no currently fashionable programming languages without date types, space isn't as constrained anymore and they don't have experience in the kind of projects were one has to store records for hundreds of millions of people.

I taught myself coding at 14 on a ZX Spectrum 128 and was doing Assembly within 2 years.

By now I have over 3 decades professional software engineering experience, almost 4 decades in total if including the stuff I did non-professionally.

Looking back, I knew how to make programs (even made a Minesweeper for the Spectrum in Assembly) but that's not at all the same as knowing the good or industry standard practices in the languages I used.

Whilst it should be way easier now to find those things out (there was no Internet back when I started), in my experience one needs to actually have been coding in a spaghetti way long enough and in enough projects you can't just ditch if they get too messy to actually feel the need to learn those better ways and hence go search for it.

Also I bet that it's a lot harder to find advanced tutorials on COBOL on the net from people with actual experience doing it professionally for a couple of years than it is for, say, Python.

Yeah, you're right - you're saying that it's possible in a properly functioning Democracy to have an independent state funded media, not that the UK is a properly functioning Democracy.

I just reacted to you posting a link to the BBC's very own bullshit on their impartiality (a link which doesn't make sense in light of the rest).

I think it makes sense that people who don't have actual experience in making projects in a specific language won't be aware of details such as the value 0 being the default in a certain kind of field in a certain language which makes it a good flag for "data unknown".

This is not a problem specific of teenage programmers - it is natural for just about everybody to not really know the ins and outs of a language and best practices when programming with it, when they just learned it and haven't actually been using it in projects for a year or two at least.

What's specific to teenagers (and young coders in general) is that:

• They're very unlikely to have programmed with COBOL for a year or two, mainly because people when they start tend to gravitate towards "cool" stuff, which COBOL hasn't been for 4 decades.
• They haven't been doing software engineering for long enough to have realized the stuff I just explained above - in their near-peak Dunning-Krugger expertise in the software engineering field, they really do think that learning to program in a given language is the same as having figured out how to properly use it.

Code is not a physical thing that spoils with age.

All that backs that sentence of yours is your uninformed opinion.

Mate, from reading the comments of this no-brains, he or she doesn't even know how to program in a professional capacity, much less have even the slightest clue of the scope of such a project.

That one is literally a mindless Trump/Elon fan wading into waters way, WAY, WAY beyond his depth.

That's like claiming that North Korea is a Democracy by pointing out that they're the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

You want to see how "impartial" and "ethical" the BBC is, go check out their coverage of Jeremy Corbyn during the campaign to oust him as leader of the Labour Party some years ago (curiously done with the help of Israel-linked Jewish groups accusing him of anti-semitism, which is very much consistent with what they did here and their vastly different reporting of what's happening in Palestine depending on the source being Israeli or Palestinian), most notably the news program were they had as background a picture of him doctored to show him wearing a Soviet hat or how they spread the slander that a Jewish Holocaust Survivor was an anti-semite for comparing the actions of Israel with those of the Nazis (specifically, they claimed Corbyn was an anti-semite for sitting in a panel in a conference when somebody compared some actions of Israel with those of the Nazis, said somebody being a Jewish Holocaust Survivor).

And don't get me started on how they use framing of everything as having only two-sides to silence non-mainstream voices.

The BBC is a Propaganda outfit same as, say, Fox News, they're just a posher version of it, all about "opinion making", controlling information and uneven presentation (just go check at how they present things differently in the Gaza genocide depending on the source), rather than in-your-face bullshitting.

You might want to re-read my posts a couple of time and think about it a bit harder, if the conclusion you derived from what I wrote is that I want to gatekeep the posters.

It makes her an expert in advocacy and politics, not science or engineering.

Obviously advocacy expertise is no less worth than engineering expertise or science expertise, just like arts expertise is no less worth than any of that and ditto for plenty of other kinds of expertise in complex areas.

However, the "salesmanship" kinds of expertise are already the some of most widely celebrated and rewarded by present day society, hence my point.

Extreme Racism is a chronic mental problem, not a mental health crisis.

Don't take this the wrong way but from the list of achievements she sounds very much a Politician/PR-person/Lobbyist specialized in the area of Space Exploration, not an Engineer or a Scientist.

Still beats Beer-belly Brad by a long distance (probably not hard), but is such a person really worth celebrating in Science Memes?