Because credentials matter to people that will hire you:
http://www.networkworld.com/ar...
Computer Science (CS)Rank: 8; Starting salary: $59,800; Mid-career salary: $102,000

Median salary for a non-degreed programmer is lower and chances for promotion are poorer and chances of getting hired in the first place as a programmer are lower if you don't have some kind of degree. With no degree, you'd likely have to work your way into that from some lower-ranked position.

Also because a CS degree really does expose you to different things that just programming does. You wind up knowing things that you're unlikely to discover on your own in a programming job, or likely to take much longer to discover.

I agree a CS degree may not be the best course. Software engineers start higher and have a higher median salary so that's probably a better use of a college education if you're able to take that path.

An associate's degree may also be a good compromise because it's a lot cheaper, quicker and has lots of formal training focused on core skills rather than the sprawling educational experience that is any four year degree.

Also an advantage of the associate's degree is that you can apply that as credit toward a BS if you later decide that you want or need more credentials to get the job you want.

But the idea that you are going to learn enough to be usefully employable in a couple of months is not realistic. With a background in a social science field, he's got some understanding of basic math and probably a good grounding in statistics and how to do research and maybe formal logic if he's lucky. He won't be able to become a competent-enough-to-hire programmer without years more study, whether or not it's self-study. He should think about leveraging what he knows. A MS in any science field has studied and (if he was a good student) knows a lot of different things that he can apply to jobs in many fields. But unless he has done quite a bit of programming, that's not one of them.

Which means the optimum size for a bus is smaller than most current buses. In the automated future, buses will be smaller and more of them will run the same route. Possibly, during off-peak hours some of them will function as taxis.

If you think a bus disrupts traffic more or less than 40 cars do, you haven't thought it through.

It would be determined by price. The price of an automated bus ride (which would go along a common route) would be significantly less than the price of an automated car ride that goes wherever you want. Busses ain't going away. Neither are taxis. Paid-for-hire drivers however, will be gone soon. Then over probably another couple of decades, most people will stop driving cars themselves as the prices of auto-drive cars get nearly as low as human-drive cars and automated taxis become cheaper and more common.

Of course, this might be slowed in some places by regulations to protect taxi drivers, and that would be mostly a bad thing. Instead, automated taxi services will hopefully be forced to buy out human drivers.

Citizenship is irrelevant to the question of whether he broke US laws. Like every other country, US laws apply to actions and jurisdiction, not to citizenship. The important question is whether he acted in a way that broke US criminal copyright laws. The FBI has convinced the NZ government that they have a substantial case so they executed arrest and search warrants against him and he has strangely been able to drag out extradition procedures against him for more than two years.

I think those kind of restrictions are common in conspiracy cases. This all sounds like standard procedure except for the "popular among nerds" and "rich guy" angles.

I'm whining about inaccurate summaries. We've always done that here.

Well played!

What's happening is Linux is catching up to where Microsoft was several years ago. Don't let the pretty skin and fast hardware running it fool you. It's still in a primitive state.

Which *could* be a bug in the kernel and that was highly believable a few years ago. More recently, not so much. BSOD are very rare except for hardware errors, driver errors and corrupt system files.

Then what the hell are all the other phones running? Every Android phone comes with a customized version of Android on it, NOTHING comes with stock Android -- not even Google-branded phones. Cyanogenmod is in many was less customized and more like stock Android than almost any version you might find on any Android phone.

There may be a hundred steps, but you named some that aren't necessary such as "development and approval of patents, approval of government agencies."

You want to make something out of (name any substance)? There are only a few special cases where any government approval is required, and patents are NEVER required.

Yes, you can teach yourself to program. You'll join the vast herd of semi-skilled programmers with spotty understanding and no knowledge of what has been done before and better by more skilled programmers. People who followed a more disciplined path will pass by you, because someone clued them in about the dead ends you'll be exploring.

but it's just not working.

If you can't trust them not to cheat the system, you shouldn't be letting them in the clean room at all.