... where I thank god that I live in Germany. An abundance of colleges to choose from, all for free (except some trivial Semester fee that's well below 200 Euros that gets you rebated admittance to public events, a free public transport ticket and some other niceys along with it).

Fucking dig this: You actually *save* money if you are a student over here - even as a part-time student!! I'd pay less healthcare as a freelancer with cheap student rates (look up "healthcare" on wikipedia if you're from the US. ... SCNR) and my PT ticket is cheaper!

This is also one of the reasons I'm gonna get off my lazy ass and start a college CS track this year - it would be an insane freakin' waste not to. Just finished mit GED A-Levels with prime scores btw. for exactly that reason.

Tip from across the pond: You guys should help Lessig get through with his Superpac initiative and then redo some core parameters of your system - it's broken at to many places.

My 2 eurocents.

JS alone will get you nowhere. JS is part of todays web ecosystem. And developing for the web today is so hard, people doing it are either inexperienced and naive or - like me - sort-of specialized/focused in some vertical toolstack like LAMP + Wordpress + Bootstrap or something and never really happy with their results.

The problem is, that you have to know HTML5, CSS3, DOM perhaps some jQuery UI or HTML canvas stuff + UX + responsice webdesign + Typography & Layout + a workable set of backend tools (LAMP or such) to do anything usefull with JS. Which makes the whole thing basically impossible for an "entry level" developer to learn.

I suggest you find a team that has a working development pipeline, uses versioning (far to many webshops don't) and puts out good results and learn by doing.

As for JS in general - there's a lot of academic ragging on JS here, but most of it misses the point about JS entirely:
JS alone is like a mix of Python and Ruby made to look like Java (yeah, I know) and doesn't look very modern. However, what makes JS interesting is the fact that as a platform it is available basically anywhere. JS is todays PC of platforms. A toy, not taken seriously by anyone, but available for cheap/free everywhere. Which is why it is going to win in the long run, just like the toy-technology x86 did, eventually squishing every other architecture like a bug on it's way to total world dominance. In the early eighties, people would've laughed you out of the room for predicting that.

I personally wouldn't be suprised if JS eventually replaces PHP, Java and Co. on the serverside and takes over everything but system development on the clientside within the next decade or two. Be it natively or with languages that cross-compile to JS ... We already have a ton of those. Google is heading for bringing the second half of humanity online, and as far as I can tell, they're succeeding. Which in itself does put JS in a future-safe position.

JS, Browsers and the clientside webstack are a mess, but they are truely cross-platform, open and not controlled by a single entity. Very much like x86.

So no matter what you're doing, getting into JS at a professional level one way or the other isn't the worst thing to do.

My 2 cents.

If I catch a robot handling my book like shown in the video I'm gonna wreck it and sell it for scrap.
Or mod it into my personal coffee machine.

That doing something for the money is the wrong reason and that doing something that combines your passion and an income is the better option, even if you initially earn less. I did a career switch from teaching performing arts to spoiled brats who often couldn't appreciate and went into FOSS-centric web-development at the turn of the millenium. I came on board just in time for the crash, but I never regretted it. Staying in my "real" profession with the only realistic occupation would've killed me. Or brought me into a mental health asylum.

I would go back to performing arts on the spot. As a performer and/or choreograph with the right crew and the right amount of funding. But not as a so-so paid overworked excuse for a nanny for spoiled kids of the wealthy who have no idea what life is like in the real world and are too spoiled to appreciate good art. The best students I had were those who came in from middle to low income families - they felt like they had stepped into paradise. Which the school basically was. And the appreciated it and behaved accordingly. Those I still remember with warm thoughts. The others I sometimes sort of hate, hoping they ran into some serious lesson somewhere on the way into adulthood.

It was roughly three years into teaching that I noticed I never wanted to become a teacher in that field, that I wanted to perform and that there was no money in performing. I left that field, went into IT and never turned back. Being your Type A 80ies computer kid and RPG nerd did help with that.

I'm getting by as an experienced part time webdev, consultant and software architect and fiddle with FOSS technologies on the side when I'm not out dancing. Feels great.

Any newcomer should consider switching job and hobby if things turn out to be a drag - it's what I did and it worked great for me.

My 2 cents.

Imagine your garments being woven and sewn entirely by machines! Imagine if all the farmers would be replaced by machines that sow and harvest everything - there would be rampage, murder, rage, and death! Humanity would end! OMG, we're all doomed! ... Errrmh, ...
Ok, scratch that. Never mind.

Machines taking over the dirty work. Awesome.
More time for me to dance tango, do yoga and live to become 120 years old.

Sorry, folks, but I'm welcoming the new robot army with open arms. No excuse me while I continue my job as a webdev, clicking together Wordpress apps and doing the type of work that would've needed a team of seven 10 years ago.

Rather spending that type of money on the bazillions pointless DOD contract where it doens't trickle down but simply trickles away, it goes to a guy and his various crews that actually get shit done. And manufactures mostly domestically. I don't see a problem here.

Earth can support 30+ billion people easyly. Three times the earths population would fit into the US, with room to spare and more than enough room for agriculture to feed them all. The problem - as usual - is management of society, of natural resources and wealth disparity. We are at a point where it is more feasible for all of us to hand out solar panels, food, transport and shelter to the poor for free rather than have them chop down the remainder of trees in order to burn them to cook and heat.

Imagine earth being managed / gouverned by a team of smart people, such as the exec teams of Google or Apple - that would be a totally different thing and we'd probably all be way better of than now.

As for the procreation: We'd have to start thinking outside of heritage and percieve all children as children of everyone. At the same time first world people are losing interest in having children. We need to spread wealth and education in such a way that the birth rate goes down. Combine that with the management mentioned above plus perhaps some unfied space travel efforts and we have a bright new utopia ahead of us. If we then manage to reach 50 billion and the place is getting crowded, we can than think about who gets to take the suicide pill.

Sadly, somehow I think this is not going to happen too soon. :-(

Shit like this are the artefacts from the steam age of computing.
As a web guy I deal with this every day. If I ever get around to building an OS and/plattform (Harhar) I'll force one text format and one only for all glyphs in existance (UTF seems like a good candidate).
Controll characters will be completely seperate.

Women want to have babies.
Men want to have sex.

If all things go right, women get a man who not only does the 5-minute job but also is a provider.
If all goes well for the man, he gets good sex regularly.

That's a broad simplification, but that's what it boils down to on an evolutionary scale.
It is this that determines our behaviour on a broad range, at least with the majority which are heterosexuals.

I see it every weekend when I go out Tango dancing - saw again and everywhere just this pentecost weekend on a Tango retreat in fact. Career power women who earn thrice my paygrade dressing up all girly-like and melting away in those awesome dance-teachers arms (meh!) or in mine (huzaaa!) when the best where taken. Me, an insecure geek/nerd with social issues going all manly and cool and feeling like a god, embracing women so beautyful you wouldn't believe it. It's a formalised environment where I can't go too wrong if I follow the rules.

Don't get me wrong, a huge part of the way things are is a grown culture that could use some fixing, but the essence is pretty much evolutionary biology at work. I wouldn't say it's all that bad and I wouldn't say it's a disaster if my daughter doesn't go into tech.

I would love to see it, but I won't force her.

The IDE that works, is free/FOSS and runs cross-plattform is the best for me. That would be Netbeans for me, since I mostly do PHP. QtCreator looks neat aswell. And after Anjuta, CodeBlocks and whatnot crashing on Ubuntu for me or not being supported for OS X it seems like a good candidate for C/C++.

In fact, I'd go as far and say that not having a good IDE that runs on Mac, Linux and perhaps Windows is actually a dealbreaker for a new programming language for me.

Example:
Yesterday I came across Dart again and clicked through a few websites on it. I still have it in the back of my head and haven't dismissed it yet because - Tadaa! - Google offers a chrome based IDE for it. ... Couldn't say though that I'm all ready for this cross-compiled for JavaScript fad that's going on right now, so I'm not gonna hold my breath.

That's my take on IDEs.

We need more of this around the world. It can't be that people work 3 jobs and barely get by why others buy a new car every year or a new cellphone or whatnot and do no more important stuff than the cleaning lady or the cook. ... And no, shoving around papers or hacking up the next bazillionth Twitter or IRC clone or setting up the next Wordpress installation that's going to be totally abandoned 15 months in is not more imporant than cleaning. Emphasis mine!

If it's not worth paying 15$ it's probably not worth being done by a human in the first place and should be left or automated. And if you're not ready to spend 15$ but insist you have cleaning personell you're an asocial *sshole and ought to clean up your own dirt.

My 3 cents.

Newsflash!
Closing of ThePirateBay top level domains forces millions of users to search two minutes for an alternative bittorrent infosite.

Next up: Bag of rice falls over in China! Situation unclear!

That is a *very* long story. I could tell a similar one about my father. ... Doesn't matter.

Just briefly: There are hardly any things I can discuss with my father - who is a type-a evangelical christian faith man, a charlatan and a fraud who took the easy way out of his responsiblities and who had the nerve to try and borrow money from me on my 37th birthday, after having left me and my mother to our fate when I was twelve. And countless other things of the same bizar proportions too strange to actually be believable. ("I'm praying for you ..." ... Yeah, great. Thanks a bunch, asshole.)

Also there are also things I can simply not discuss with my mother. There are things she never will appreciate and there are acknowlegements I will never get from her, no matter what I do. To deeply engrained is her feminist hate of men because of those who wronged her ... or she thinks who wronged her. I love her and she did her best. She says she tried as hard as she could and I believe her. There is actually literally nothing more you can ask from a parent. In that regard I got very lucky.

The thing im getting to is this:
It's most certainly an evolutionary and biological constant that some people have good parents, some people have so-so parents and some people have parents who are way in over their head with the parenting business. Think of how many children would simply die out of neglect just a few centuries ago. It's just a few decades ago when 12-year olds where expected to work 14 hours a day for a plate of food. It still is in some places of the world.

What I'm saying is this: If your burden happens to be having parents who you simply can't look up to anymore in this day and age, as a grown adult, it is time to move on. It's hard and I catch myself falling into relapse every once in a while, but move on I should. I try to associate with people I admire and I try to cope with the fact that quite a few things I learned from my parents are flat out wrong or at least based on a bias.

I try every day to move on, and so should you.

Little Tip: I've taken on the habit of calling my mother and my father by their first name about 15 years ago. It helps.

I also try to be the best Pop in the world to my daughter, that's a good thing to focus on aswell. I think I'm doing fine. Not perfect, but fine.

My 2 cents.

... take a look at mens rights groups.

In your teens and early 20's you're partying hard with friends, getting laid, and making lots of good memories.

You got *laid* in your teens? Dude, WTF? What are you? Some bizar creature from outer space? ... You're definitely wrong here.