The best way to "know" petty much anything is to teach it to someone else. I never knew Calculus III (even thought I had an A in the class) until I taught it to someone else. Similarly working with my co-workers and explaining something that I think is cool, makes me "know it". So go teach Java to your younger brother, your mailman, or Schrodinger's cat.

There's a difference between cheating because of time constraints and cheating because you can't comprehend. I've worked with a developer who cheated durring school and his resume looked great - GPA, etc. When working with us, he didn't know much and would ask basic questions (Google-able questions). Eventually it was discovered that he was basically outsourcing his projects from work because he didn't know how to do them - no really, he had someone else write code for him outside the company. So when he was explaining the code, he crashed and burned. I personally "cheated" on projects in school because I didn't have enough time to get them done (work full time + school full time = not enough time). So when I "borrowed" code for something like a QuickSort (HeapSort, etc), I would at least go through it to understand it and generally after taking one stab at it by myself first. And I wouldn't do a direct copy/paste, I would at least make it "my" code. I digress; my point is that "cheating" isn't the end of the world if the "cheater" is competent. And I agree with this message's parent. In a corporate environment if I can find code to get the job done quicker instead of writing code for the sake of writing code, then do it - as long as you're not breaking a copyright. One more case in point. I spent 20 hours learning Service Broker (don't hate me for mentioning a MS product), I could have written my own queueing technology in 60 hours (that would have holes). It's the same but different.

Really? I don't get modded up for this? 4 post down just says use HTML and they score for 4 points!

I started programming at a very young age. Similar to you, I started with BASIC (Atari 800 for me) and moved to Turbo Basic, Turbo Pascal, C++, JAVA, C#... and somewhere along the way I picked up FORTRAN. For a young man around 12 years old, I would suggest an interpreted language that would quick show the cause and effect of what has happened.

I know how much Slashdot love MS, but there's this:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx

The Mono project is also very awesome:
http://www.mono-project.com/VisualBasic.NET_support

Last but not least, jump right into JAVA with NetBeans. The IDE (although bloated) holds your hand through a lot of things.

If there's a struggle with understanding, then good ol' HTML is a quick way to see results. After all, the 'Hello World' and making your name appear on the screen in different colors and blinking is very exciting when you're young!

Can't I get a little score for that to get me out of the dog house?

Imagine the uproar from the Russian! No vacuum cleaners in Poland, you can easily change them to offensive weapons!

my cell phone is more powerful. Buy a $150 closeout computer and install linux. You'll make your money back with the lower wattage power supply and you'll be less frustrated.

... the toilet paper is softer in Cupertino, CA vs Redmond, Washington. What an opinionated article. News for nerds STUFF THAT REALLY MATTERS - I argue not by contrapositive.

Data mining is to databases as taxonomy is to animals. Can you use taxonomy on plants? sure can. Can you data mine other sources of information besides databases? sure can.

It wasn't long ago that Hawking believed that NOTHING escaped from a black hole. He even had a bet as to this and lost!
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6193-hawking-concedes-black-hole-bet.html
It should be called Preskill radiation!