If there's one thing the "free" economy system has shown time and time again - it's that capitalism creates monopolies. The industries that are not dominated by monopolies or monopolistic competition are very, very few, far in-between, and generally without advancement.

It's all stuff you could get elsewhere or should already have in the machine. Wake me up when it's an actual, full computer.

I really, seriously appreciate this comment!

I'm pretty interested in how something like that is implemented.

What ever happened to them? The last time I remember them making headlines they declared war on ISIS.

How does the "law of conservation of momentum" square with the the momentum imparted by photons? (iirc it's the light pressure from fusion that keeps stars from collapsing on themselves)

What would your advice be to people looking for work as a programmer? Either straight out of college with a CS degree, not a CS degree (but a degree), or someone transitioning to it from something else.

Yeah seriously. At some point you always need someone that can get into the weeds and gritty details.

It's called attrition rate. For any profession there's a relatively small amount that stay within that profession for 10, 20, 30 years. The counterexamples to this rule are the professions that tend to be taken by people that wanted to be in that profession for all of their lives. i.e. an MD or a lawyer. I'm sure coding academies will attract a high amount of novices. But from that influx there will still be some percent - perhaps even 0.001% - that just springboard after it.

Is it enough to call it not snakeoil? Probably not. In my totally unscientific and personal experience, programming languages and frameworks usually have sufficient information for me to figure them out and know how to use them. That includes the very basic stuff of learning java, for example. If you name a programming language there's a way to teach yourself it for free. So the coding academies are vying for a portion of a market with a "free" and viable enough alternative. I'd call THAT snakeoil.

The thing is, their hardware is going to have better performance capabilities than an iPad.

I genuinely fear for the US and the world when the Chinese currency finally corrects.

This may just be me, but audio seems far from the best interface

That's my question - in full time/regular employment what's the minimal time expected to hold a position in IT?

tangential question - in IT is it a year that is considered the minimal amount of time before you can reasonably move on to the next thing?

Not going to lie, that is a scary and all too real interpretation.

But there really are many programming projects & problems...so maybe it's not entirely true. Maybe there's a huge labor shortage in programming & bringing people on board will push production forward without costing jobs. ... Maybe.