A good technical college or university will be ABET accredited (abet.org) you can search for the school name here: http://main.abet.org/aps/Accreditedprogramsearch.aspx. HINT: search on full school names, not abbreviations. I know hiring managers that will not even look at a resume if it lists a non-accredited school, like ITT, or ECPI.

As forward thinking as the EU is with limiting the energy consumption of discrete components; I am surprised they haven't addressed a much larger issue, the cruelty of computer on software violence. Everyday, trillions of instructions are summarily executed with no trial and no right of appeal. This cannot continue!

It is both amusing and aggravating to me how many people fall for someone else's predigested spin on any topic you name from their favorite media source. It is also amusing an aggravating to me how you can't find unbiased reporting on anything. There seems to be so much hysteria in the news lately both about politics and mormons. It is also amusing an aggravating to me how much the people who preach tolerance and acceptance of all viewpoints almost immediately turn around and slam people they don't agree with, often using strong words to demonstrate their disgust and lack of tolerance and acceptance. Don't like Romney and think he's a moron? Whatever. He is richer and accomplished more as governor and as a businessman that most of the people that call him a moron. Want to call Obama a bozo. Whatever. He is rich and president of the united states, which is more than most of the people who call him a moron have accomplished. Want to call mormons a crazy religion with unbelievable stories and majic underwear and all that? Whatever. They must have something going for them if they have 15 million or so members across the world. I try to listen some to liberal media and some to conservative media and figure the truth is somewhere between each sides spin. If I want to know more about what Mormons really believe, I will read their Book of Mormon. If I want to know more about what Muslims really believe, I will read the Koran. I won't listen to the stupid rumors that seem to be prevalent in the media or comments.

next stop, location sensing popup ads in your googles glasses. Imagine driving past a store and then in your augmented reality glasses an ad pops up dead center while your trying to make a turn or change lanes...

I am not convinced that the current 'gloabal warming' trend is solely due to human activity. James Hansen may be NASA, but some of his conclusions seem dubious. And then the climategate scandal. There is so much pro and con and hysteria about global warming, it's hard to know who is a reliable source of information. To me, there seems to be natural warming and cooling cycles, wetter and dryer cycles. The drought this summer made me think we are in for another 'dustbowl' period like in the thirties. Sure we have better agricultural practices now, so we won't have huge dust storms, but we could be in for the same type of severe drought. I remember reading a story that in the 1920s, ships were able to sail over the ice-free north pole in the summer. My though here is this points to a cycle covering decades. There is another cycle covering centuries. There was a medieval warm period from around 800 or 900 CE to about 1300 CE where the climate warmed enough they were growing grapes in Britain. In this time the Vikings colonized Greenland and Iceland and reportedly landed in Nova Scotia. Some archeological evidence for Vikings has been found in NS. But the one thing that has puzzled archeologists is the mention of the Vikings finding wild grapes in NS-which doesn't make sense unless the climate was warmer at that time than now. In the early 1300s the climate changed to what is termed 'the little ice age'. It got cold enough that the Thames would freeze hard enough and the British has Frost Fairs on it. It was cold enough that the picture of George Washington's crossing with all the ice chunks in it was correct. Around the 1850s, the earth started warming up again. And there is a cycle of tens or hundreds of thousands of years where the earth is warm or the earth has a big ice age--yet the planet is still habitable. There are also news stories where some scientists have found evidence that the earth was warmer in the human past than now, or that not all the ice is going away. Here is a sample of some: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/02/1930s_greenland_glacier_retreat/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2012/09/19/antarctic-sea-ice-sets-another-record/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2011/07/27/new-nasa-data-blow-gaping-hold-in-global-warming-alarmism/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/10/global_warming_undermined_by_study_of_climate_change/

I have been considering myself incorporating or LLCing until I remembered and dug up these following slashdot posts: http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/02/21/1353223/our-low-tech-tax-code http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/02/25/1949223/independent-programmers-no-win-scenario I also read the linked articles inside these articles. The upshot I get is that independent contracting/consulting is no win scenario in taxes even if you incorporate or LLC yourself. But it seems that writing and selling your own code to an app store is workable. Don't think this tax targeting tech professionals starting and being sole employees of a business has been repealed has it? What am I missing? From your comments, most of you seem to have sole proprietership businesses and be doing fine.

IMHO full-time pair programming is a waste of a good developer or a shield for a bad developer. The only time I have seen it really work is for debugging or code review.

I three classes when I was studying for my BSCS that are an excellent example to me of how well or bad lecture versus online can be. In my linear algebra class, the professor would just come in and lecture the whiteboard as he worked the book examples. Beyond the third row in the classroom, he sounded a lot like the teachers in the Charlie Brown cartoons. There was no value add from listening to the lecture and the only way I passed the class was by reading the book In my calculus 3 class, the professor was so good at explaining the concepts that I almost never had to crack open a textbook. And I was able to do well on the math department produced exams. In my statistics class, we only met for the course introduction and to take tests. The rest of the material was either textbooks or online. The online lectures and textbooks were well written enough that I was able to get a good grade in the class. In my opinion, the linear algebra material and the statistics material were of equal difficulty. I got a C in linear algebra and an A in statistics. This shows to me that an online class can be done very well and a lecture class can absolutely suck. IMHO online learning is here to stay and is only going to grow. The teachers and professors need to accept that fact and adapt.

I have done pair programming and team programming, and in almost every case, half the pair or half the team was not fully productive. IMHO the only time the team or the pair is useful is for design, debug, or code review.

Let's see...save money by having one computer for every two devs. That saves a thousand or two dollars. about 2% of an average developers salary. and somehow the productivity of each developer goes up more than 2%, so it's win-win...

one of the better hard sci-fi writers.

I found stephen r donaldsons gap series more depressing than his thomas covenant series

How long before some court declares your data is in the public domain once it has left hardware that you own?? Then it will be datamined to death by advertisers, spammers, government agencies..... If you use cloud services even today, make sure you encrypt your own data and keep the keys, certificates, passphrases, or whatever you use to yourself. While I don't have anything to hide, I still don't want anyone digging through my stuff. Especially nameless, faceless ones at a remote location.

Should I tell you how to live your non-religion so I don't think you're a hypocrite? I always laugh when people not of my religion try to tell me how to practice my religion.

The nature of acceptable evidence is debatable: The world is what the world is regardless of scientific or religious spin. Facts are facts regardless of scientific or religious spin. The Truth is the Truth regardless of scientific or religious spin. Accepting only one kind of fact and not another based on a consensus of acceptable evidence rather than the nature of the fact seems less than useful...e.g.from a bag of multicolored marbles. many scientists would accept only marbles of one color as evidence of that marbles exist while many religious folk would accept only a different color marble as evidence that marbles exist. And both groups would throw the rest of the marbles away.