Have things changed much in the industry since then? Perhaps more innovation and more standard code base tools and sharing?

Haha

Have you looked at the amazing CS50 online courses on Harvard?

I hadn't, no. It looks like a great way to get a quick update on undergraduate CS.

It doesn't meet my requirement of having a real master's degree from an accredited university without the "extension" or "electronic" qualifier, though.

I'm doing the Algorithms specialisation from Stanford on Coursera right now, just to make sure I'm ready to get started on a master's in the fall.

It depends on whether you have social constructs in place which take priority over human behaviour.

Remove all of this.. what happens.. humans will eventually go back to primal instincts

And one primal instinct is social bonding.

Which is also the primal instinct that allows for tribalism, which is really important when the other tribe is competing for a scarce resource.

Humans are social creatures, but not social with the entire world.

Tribalism is generally closed, but not automatically antagonistic with other tribes. In contexts where there is no forced competition, tribes rarely fight.

The modern view is that most likely hunter-gatherer societies, which didn't have fixed lands and had no general reason to be territorial, had little warfare. It is only with agricultural societies, where competition for land becomes a factor, that we start finding evidence of warfare, as far as I understand.

Hunter gatherer societies fought all the time for control of hunting grounds.

What's interesting it's that researchers that lived with the Yanomami and other Amazonian peoples noted that most inter tribal conflicts weren't about competition for food sources-that was rather plenty- but instead for women. In polygamous societies, high status males acquired many wives and young males frequently kidnapped neighboring tribe's women which sparked constant retaliatory raids.

Not social with the entire world yet. Give us time.

Hey. Don’t knock it. I had to use that

This is really funny - think of all you are missing by not being a coder for a faceless corporation.

Jonathan Coulton rocks. Check out his other stuff and buy his music at http://www.jonathancoulton.com/