Egalitarianism is misguided and naive, and leads to this sort of bullying.

Fact: You can redistribute wealth, you can redistribute false self-esteem, but you can't redistribute smarts. The bell curve forever divides the intellectual haves and have nots. And those who haven't got brains are more likely to use their fists.

We need to rebuild a school system that rewards excellence, that challenges smart kids to be all they can be. The current system not only holds them back, but subjects them to bullying by their intellectual inferiors. But the current system is scared to death of even a hint of elitism. It's not elitism to reward achievement and develop gifted kids. It's just common sense. But this is utterly lost on the radical egalitarians.

I agree. I started my own company after I was 50, only I deliberately left corporate employment to do it. There are lots of small businesses out there that need IT support and custom coding. Build your system admin chops. But you also need to be prepared to build your business (and yes, You have to build it. No matter what President Obama might have said, nobody else is going to make it happen.

Plan on working without pay at first. No, you don't have to provide free services to customers. But you have to let the money that comes in go back to the business to build it. You can't plant a seed, then yank the first green shoot that comes out of the ground and eat it. You have to nurture it and grow it. Your business has to build and grow so you need to invest your time and re-invest the money that comes in. When I started my company, I committed to two years without pay. I had plenty of savings from 15 years of corporate employment as a systems engineer and a spouse who had a job with benefits, so I could afford to do so.

Read _The E-Myth Revisited_ by Michael Gerber. This will help to prepare you for the business side of business - if you already have excellent tech skills, your business will succeed or fail based on how well you run the business side of things.

You must build a marketing plan. No matter how good your tech chops are, no matter how excellent your services or products may be, if you don't have customers you have no business. Identify some vertical markets you can target. Perhaps there is a single vertical product you can sell - Medical office practice management systems, or Sheep herding management systems. I don't know what you do, but if you can find an industry vertical, identify consortia and trade organizations in that vertical, find member businesses, speak at organizational events, become a thought leader for that vertical. If you're a generalist, fine, but if you can identify some vertical markets it will be helpful, and market, market, market your services.

As a programmer you should be able to understand this: A program is a machine (a code machine, but still a machine) that is designed to automate a task or set of tasks. Your company ultimately is a machine designed to automate the earning of money. Design your business with the goal of ultimately running without you. Learn to outgrow the employee mentality you had in the corporate world, and be a business owner. Build your business, create jobs, then once it's up and running, you can keep your hand in the business but it will not require you 24X7. Your employees will run the business.

It will be much tougher than showing up for work in the corporate world. Your only employee review is your balance sheet. If you can make half the money you made in the corporate world (after taxes and expenses) congratulations - you have a running business. If you get it running on all cylinders and get it to replace your corporate income and then some, then BIG congratulations: you are an entrepreneur and job creator. And you have created a business that will provide for you and your family. Design it with an exit strategy in mind: build it to a level of recurring revenue and sell out to a larger competitor when your valuation is enough to provide for your retirement, or build the business enough to create the cashflow you need (personal cashflow after the business is taken care of) and keep an office as a place you can go putter as you keep an eye on things.

It will be the toughest thing you've ever done, even if you're an ex-Marine. But it can be done. Those who can cut it never look back. If you fail, at least you tried.

He has Type 1 diabetes.

Had to work without pay for a year, but now the business has grown and is paying for itself, me and employees. And with all due respect (emphasis on *due*) Mr. President, I built this business.

You might already be doing cutting edge development. If you are really good, a Ph.D. can help you move ahead. Be brutally honest with yourself. If you have the chops for it - you know it deep inside, and it's a living, burning passion that is going to manifest itself in real innovation which will put you at odds with some organizations, and drive you to the front of others. It will drive you to find an organization that values real innovation, and in that kind of organization, that kind of creativity and brilliance is always rewarded with concomitant challenges. A Ph.D. in such an organization would accompany - not drive - ascent to a position on the cutting edge, but the sheepskin wouldn't be needed. If you don't have those kinds of chops, you still might be a really decent programmer capable of producing solid code. But getting a Ph.D. may not be as helpful as working on some good projects. And if after all is said and done you're a mediocre coder - a Ph.D. will look good on your wall with your other meaningless certificates and accolades, but will only produce eyerolls and cynicism from your colleagues and supervisors.

Since you're already considering NAS it means you're not running client-server apps or databases on the server side. Why not go the full monty and put your data into the cloud using Dropbox, Google Drive? If you have less than 100G you can spend about $100 per year. You will want to publish some process guidelines in your ops manual, but this could work for you very economically. Although I am not completely familiar with it (and not affiliated in any way) Clio practice management http://www.goclio.com/ is another way you can put the management of your practice into the cloud with matter, document and contract management.

When it comes down to it EVERYONE has their own business. When you are traditionally employed, your business has one customer, and if you lose that customer by quitting or getting fired, you're out of business. Start your own business and remember each customer is an income stream. Multiple income streams mean more money and more security, and also give you the ability to fire customers you don't want to do business with.

This doesn't mean it's easy or even possible for everyone. My business was much harder to start than I ever thought it would be, but the challenges have been worthwhile both in income and in getting out of corporate BS like the stacked ranking game.

Middle managers who have no skills beyond playing office politics and self-promotion are pretty much stuck in the corporate rat race, but people with real skills that translate to marketable goods or services can make it on their own if they can learn how to build business structures and processes to run their business and a marketing plan to get customers.

The Slashdotter who said the best way to win is not to play the game was right. This post suggests one way HOW get out of the game.

I'm surprised I don't see more recommendations for codeacademy.org or khanacademy.org. But I am with the majority of respondents in suggesting the Python is a good start and How to Think Like a Computer Scientist is a good book.

Of course the Asymco study looks at the profitability of devices and carrier fees taken together. It fails to consider that unlike Apple, Google is not primarily a hardware, software and media delivery company. Google's profitability is driven by advertising revenues. I wonder how Android's profitability numbers would look if the study took into account direct and indirect advertising revenues driven by the Android platform?

The authors of SOPA are not hypocrites. Hypocrisy connotes understanding of the issue and the representatives who allowed this piece of legislation to be crafted for them lack even the terminology to enter into meaningful conversation about issues such as DNS Security, Website Poisoning, and other salient factors affected by the law. To use Wolfgang Pauli's aphorism as a metaphor, this piece of legislation is so bad it's not only not right, it's "not even wrong".

What a great line! "Climate change will always be a heated debate."

You can get a decent generic barebone from Tigerdirect for less than $300 (have to watch for a deal) with a quad-core processor, 8GB of RAM and a TB hard drive. I have one with Xenserver free version because I like the tools and driver support. I have used VMWare 2 GSX and ESX, then ESX3, VMWare Server free version and ESXi, but have been using Xenserver free version in both test and production for the last three years, though I understand that VMWare's solutions are also very workable. A UPS is helpful as well.

My current test Xenserver has at time of this writing 4 VMs on it - two Linux boxes, a Windows server 2003 and an XP instance, all used for testing and development. I have a Windows 7 instance as well, but it happens to be turned off at the moment. I use an external USB storing snapshots of test VMs - get a clean config, store a snapshot of it, then you can test, muck it up, blow it away then start up a copy of the snapshot without having to re-install. Mine has been running continuously since early summer.

This setup can get you started with minimum cost and effort if you are doing development and functional testing that does not include anything too exotic like clustering or a database with a large transaction volume. You're not going to break any speed records but you can build VMs in all the OS types you want to test and limit the number currently running to 4 or 5, and you'll do just fine.

I have an Untangle gateway perimeter defense that blocks viruses, spyware and over-aggressive marketers. My Windows machines are protected by good Internet Security software, the Linux units have their own protection. My wife's company-owned Mac doesn't have any protection that I know of, but it's not my system to take care of, so it gets the protection of the Untangle gateway.

I'm not a big fan of Oracle's 20th century business model, which like a lot of other big name proprietary software companies and other types of companies as well is predicated on doing everything possible to obtain vendor lock-in, then charge through the nose for licensing and support, forcing upgrades, and basically squeezing customers at every opportunity. That's the downside of the model - in one way it sees customers as prey to be devoured.

The flipside of this is that proprietary companies like Oracle do make considerable investment to create solid, reliable product offerings, and they try to provide high quality support.

There are other proprietary companies out there who have Procrustean approaches; they don't spend time developing or innovating but rather continue to ride the gravy train of code that was written years and years ago. Customers have to alter their problems to fit the proprietary solutions. This is true in part of some of the niche applications aimed at specific vertical markets Oracle has acquired, but Oracle's acquisition has actually brought new life to languishing applications and brought Oracle's support processes to those same small app vendors.

Oracle targets customers who are willing to pay high prices for high quality software and willing to pay high prices for support. Is the cost justifiable? It depends - for some companies the risk exposure of getting 90% of the functionality of Oracle-type products for free or for very low cost is worthwhile, and the risk exposure of being without an enterprise-class support organization (or paying for support on a per-instance basis, sometimes through a consultant if no such support plan is offered for a given application) is justifiable. It's a decision each technology using company has to make for themselves.

Oracle's acquisition of the K Splice project is consistent with their business model.

Their business model is not amenable to me personally, but in some cases it might be a good fit for some of my customers. In those cases I can recommend Oracle's solutions, even though I am not fond of Oracle's business practices, which to some may seem avaricious, but to others may simply be a sign of an aggressively run profitable company that offers high end products and services and demands concomitant prices.

As to whether Oracle will contribute to the K Splice community or hold its own code contributions proprietary is their call. Past history indicates that they may not be enthusiastic contributors to the community but any prediction of how they will act in this case is pure conjecture. We'll have to wait and see.

I'm really glad to see that you are suggesting a Content Management System. While it's inarguable that knowledge of (X)HTML and CSS make better webmasters, much of the world has moved on and let CMS packages like Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal, to name a few of the most popular systems, take care of dynamic HTML presentation. Just keep in mind that in any CMS (the ones mentioned all use Apache, MySQL and PHP as the platform stack) you must use security best practices as defined by the community then add your own extra security in things like extended .htaccess entries to prevent most SQL injection keystroke combos. As always, caveat lector!