For CS, is there a simple programming problem that could help divide people into bad/not bad groups? If you can easily do this problem, then you are probably not an awful programmer. Off the top of my head, I would suggest writing a tic-tac-toe opponent that cannot lose, utilizing backtracking search. In addition, you must short-circuit the search if the board is in a position which you've already determined to be a bad path. This is a simple problem that demonstrates some (minor) programming skill.

I don't think I could solve this without exerting some serious effort. I may be ignorant but I am no longer blissful.

I hope there's more to this story than this:

During the afternoon, Neil came over to me and said that some of the other speakers (no names) had been incensed that I covered Java in my talk and said they had asked that I not participate in the evening Q & A.

If the list of speakers is what's advertised, I'm pretty disappointed in hearing this. These are all well respected and influential people in the .NET world and that they can't stand to even share a stage with a Java advocate reflects pretty poorly. The "Java Jam" cruise doesn't seem to feature any speaker with a .NET background, and given this story, ".NET Nirvana" meetups in the future don't hold much promise for a second chance.

I have noticed a problem with the .NET community, such as it is, is that there's something of a prevailing bias for pre-packaged solutions. Reading the NAnt mailing lists and some of the reactions to NAnt from various places, I see lots of people advocating commercial solutions over NAnt. Not that they have invalid reasons for favoring other solutions over NAnt, but I've detected in some cases an underlying resistance to contributing to a product, rather than just consuming it. Sometimes it seems like a developer's problems with NAnt could have been resolved by a patch or a new task, but that route doesn't get explored. While this is good for the various small ISVs that fill these niches, I don't believe Open Source can thrive in an environment where developers won't pick even the low hanging fruit.