Yeah, this old fart knows Cobol, Assembly, C, C++, Java, a little C# and several other languages. I enjoy when you younger guys come to me for help because you can't read a log file, resolve a memory leak, write a test plan up, or optimize your SQL. :)

Mainframes aren't so "specialized". Maybe you are confusing Mainframes with Supercomputers which tend to be much more specialized and focused towards scientific and research usage.

I worked on IBM big iron back in the day and a "mainframe" can run Linux Partitions as well as other mainframe OS's. Unix boxes aren't so generic either. A unix box running Linux is different than a Unix box running HP-UX or Solaris and requires some different sys-admin skills. There are other issues with shared library linking being different, different compiler's, different shells, etc.

MVS is now z/OS and it supports multiple programming languages - its not just your grandfather's COBOL anymore:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/OS

The Crab people will rise up and take over the Earth. Time to buy a Prius. Oh, wait, the lithium ion batteries create more carbon from manufacturing them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV5wmDhzgY8

Doh!!

I'm not so sure about the reciprocity. In India, the Indian nationals were being treated as badly as I was. I mean, my god, why does a passport have to be checked 5 or 6 times when exiting India by every other armed guard? I have stood in immigration lines coming into the US and it was nothing like the process I saw in India. It seemed almost as difficult to get out of India as to get in.

Likewise, in the Philippines guys from the UK, Europe and other countries that I knew had to go through the same BS as us Americans.

Talent has nothing to do with it - until a company is burned and a bunch of unmaintainable code with variable names like "foo" and Class names like public UtilityClassThatDoesEverything, which is full of memory leaks is crashing the servers every day or 2.

Then they call in the people with real talent and pay decent salaries. Or they hire consultants and contractors to fix the mess.

Talent does matter. It just takes some companies a little time to learn that doing things correctly with talented people often is a lot better strategyin the long run than hiring based on the lowest prevailing wage.

@Kumiorava,
I went to the UK a few times as part of my job employed by a US company. I usually arrived via Gatwick. I had a US passport, but no Visa since I was working for a US company temporarily at their offices. I was "grilled" at the airport in Customs by a british custom/immigration agent for around 10 minutes. I even told her I had a house in the US and I wasn't going to be there more than 2 weeks. But I still had to answer all these questions and I was treated like I was trying to "sneak" in to the UK.

I also went to the Philippines several times and went through some of the same mess and I had to get multiple Visa's to stay beyond 2 weeks each time, even though I was working for a US company based in the Philippines and had no intention of staying or taking jobs from local residents. I was in fact there to train staff.

I went to India one week to conduct training working for a US based company. I had to get a letter of introduction from someone that worked as my office, a visa that cost a couple hundred dollars from the Indian Consulate, fill out a bunch of papers with my personal information, and then I got treated like crap and ordered around by security in the Bangalore airport a few times by security officers brandishing assault rifles. I was there to train consultants from India. If anything, I was helping to train the local staff, not taking any jobs from anyone, but I still had to jump through all these hoops for 1 week. Only 1 week.

In my experience, I think the US is probably not as much as a hassle compared to other countries. I dispute what you are saying.

"An anonymous reader writes" - What? I've been on Slashdot for a while and enough is enough. "An anonymous reader" shouldn't be able to submit articles. "Anonymous" cowards are already trolling Slashdot to dead. If you don't have the guts to post under your username, then why should you have the right to post anything?

Just my opinion.

Agreed. Pointless post. Code.org is probably irrelevant anyway as people who want to code will learn how anyway, and most other people probably don't care.

Besides coding is only the tip of the iceberg. There is a huge difference between teaching a kid how to code in school and actually writing quality code, understanding relational databases, coding for real-time transaction processing, understanding source control, having the patience to sit in front of a monitor for 8-10 hours a day, etc, etc.

Most of the people I took coding classes ( Basic on Apple II's ) with in high-school aren't even coding or in IT at all now. In fact, some of the people I went to college with have even left the field.

Firstly, "Nerds" haven't "pushed technology that cost people jobs". Corporations, business owners, and even the government push the technology to save money and increase efficiency. "nerds" are usually either the ones discovering the technology, implementing it, or debugging it, and many of us rarely get the credit or the financial rewards.

Secondly, would you rather hold back technology so everyone continue to work in factories and sustain long term medical problems from doing repetitive tasks? Or have everyone exposed harm by doing dangerous jobs like welding on car frames in factories, when a robot can do the job without putting a person in danger?

I think most people's lives are much easier today than they were 100 years ago due to technology, even if they have to retrain or educate themselves to get a job because they lost a job doing a redundant task because of technology.

Gradiente (the company making the phone) wants to paint themselves as the good guys, who simply got lucky of registering the name before Apple (they even have a video, in Portuguese, saying that their phone is "cheaper and have less features" while praising Steve Jobs in the process for making the "other" iPhone).

My guess is that they are doing everything that is legal around here just to hike up the price. They probably know that being assholes would burn their brand (which is almost dead for around a decade) and just make Apple put more lawyers in the process.

The guy posting the question could code a simple game. My first 3 apps I wrote in Basic on a TRS-80 and then a commodore 64 when I was 15 were:

1. A character generator for D&D that would roll the stats and let you pick the attributes to generate a D&D character.
2. A text based Blackjack 21 game.
3. A simple shooter that had one sprite for a space ship you could move around and control with a joystick and some simple sound and graphics.

I probably learned more coding these types of app's then I learned in college. For example, to code the simple shooter I learned about sprites, peeks and pokes, using plot verse directly addressing screen memory to control graphics,writing loops, handling input real-time events from the keyboard and then a joystick, generating random numbers, data types, etc. It also started me looking into assembly language for games because Basic was so slow.

Of course, a lot has changed since then, but a simple game app would be a challenge and it would be something this guy could show off to his friends when he was done.

Actually, the hourly rate and what a contractor makes depends on a lot of factors. I've contracted a lot ( almost 10 gigs in my career ) as an LCC, Sub Chapter-S corp and as a W-2 Employee ) and basically:

1. You can setup a sub-chapter S corp and work for a company as another corporation.
2. You can just do 1099 self-employeed as sole-propritor, LLC or partnership if you have others involved.
3. You can work through a contracting company as their "employee" where they pull out the FICA, Social Security, etc and provide benefits at a cost to you and you get billed at X dollars an hour and get paid X - Y dollars an hour ( Y being the contracting companies cut ).

There are probably other options I don't know about.

So when someone says 100 bucks an hour, it doesn't mean much until you look at HOW they are earning 100 bucks an hour: W-2 or Independent as S-Corp, self-employed, etc , how they are filing their taxes, what expenses and other deductions they are taking, etc. In fact, I would say that at least in my experience I actually earned more of the rate as a sub-chapter S then any other way. Its just some extra work to keep track of all the expenses, run your own payroll, pay estimated taxes, file taxes and make sure you take all the deductions for the right expenses, etc.

Also rates depend very much on skills and demand. 100 dollars an hour is not that unrealistic. SAP and other ERP software packages and specialists can easily go over 100 an hour even being paid as a W-2 employee no matter where you are.

On the other hand, if a programming language or skill is "saturated" with a lot of programmers and the supply of talent exceeds the demand, rates drop like bricks. This seemed to happen with Java a few years back. I had some people calling me offering 30-40 bucks an hour for Java. I either ignored or laughed at most of them. Thankfully Java rates seem to be going up again, although I'm not doing much Java these days so I can't comment on what the going rates are for Java right now.

But the previous post was right. You have to "live" it. Even when I take time off between jobs, I spend some time reading technical books, checking out new languages, and writing code to keep my skills current. An hour a day probably isn't enough to learn a new language.

By the way, there is a link to the privacy policy on the first page of the app.

Like I said in my original post most if not all of the people using this app have already provided a lot of personal information to Delta. Seriously, you need a sky miles ID to log in and do most things, so most users of this app are just tying back to a Sky miles account with information that has already been provided. So they aren't really "collecting" any data that they don't already have.

They never required a picture from me to board a plane or nor have I ever had to use this app if I didn't want to. And I have flown delta more than 100 times in the last 10 years. The app isn't a requirement to board a flight or purchase a ticket. Much ado about nothing.