The conclusion that more experienced developers develop their own style is an important one. It shows that good programming is not about adopting convention.
> Everyone on obfuscating their persona with Tor and bitcoins, still had to enter their postal addresses on the website, to receive the goodies.
Not exactly, these sites allow you to encrypt your address with the seller's public key. Of course it's possible that the site performs a man in the middle attack, but you could test for this. The big problem is that many users do not take advantage of the encryption features and send their address in clear text.
Regardless, there is inherent risk. Even with perfect encryption, as a buyer, you still have to trust a drug dealer with your mailing address. And there's no way to tell for sure that the seller isn't LE.
The whole Arduino thing has always baffled me a bit. I've been programming 8-bit AVR chips since 2000. There have always been many different development board options. Even long before Wiring and Arduino. Sure many were more expensive but neither Wiring nor Arduino added much technically to the hardware itself.
The real innovation of Arduino has always been the Wiring programming system. Personally I prefer the low-level interface the AVR chips provide and document very well in their datasheets. I find it frustrating to have another layer, like wiring, between me and the hardware. As an embedded systems programmer my perspective is different.
To me Arduino has always been little more than a really good marketing campaign.
I don't know about other schools but my CS degree took a little more than showing up. Granted many of my classmates, even some of those who managed to graduate, never quite "got it." It's easy to say you don't need something you don't have. The lack of CS knowledge in our field is shameful and is a large contributor to all the crap code being pumped out at huge expense. That said, if you really love what you do you will probably learn how to do it well, eventually. A CS degree is a huge advantage, regardless.
“Perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away.” --Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
This principal should be applied more to programming languages.