I bought a Toy Story Lego train set for $50. Two of them actually, when Walmart had them steeply discounted. My daughter has one she can play with. One is still in the box. They're now selling for $83 on Amazon at minimum. I tried selling it once, got to UPS who wanted $30 to ship it, and promptly cancelled the sale. Amazon charged the customer only a few dollars for shipping.

Sure the price has gone up (or rather, stayed steady since the original price was around $80) but shipping costs make it so that the only one making any money on it is the shipping company.

Not much of an investment when the "gain" will go to shipping it to the buyer.

You don't need a CS degree which is more likely to require lab/classroom time. I tried to the CS program and couldn't stand it. I finally ended up with a degree in Math and that's perfectly suitable for a career in programming. I was working full time and taking classes to finish that up. I imagine it's a lot easier to find on-line math classes.

You know, there's a huge market for cheap plastic crap. All those lazy kids that just sit around playing video games might be able to make a living having their makerbot(s) print out a bunch of crap to sell while they continue to sit around playing video games.

We think the US shouldn't enforce it's laws on companies operating outside the US (see pirate sites) but believe that the Germans have a right to dictate the policies of a US company.

Good on Facebook. It sets a horrible precedent. If Germans don't want to use their real names on Facebook, they are free to not use Facebook.

"The world isn't going to end because the Mayan Calendar says so."

Science cannot predict world ending/mass extinction asteroid strikes much in advance.

Science cannot predict catastrophic earthquakes or volcanic eruptions.

The world is going to end when the world is going to end. We simply don't have technology to predict when really bad things are going to happen.

"As of the end of 2004, astronomers had discovered more than two thirds of the larger Near Earth Asteroids (diameter greater than 1 km). None of the known asteroids is a threat, but we have no way of predicting the next impact from an unknown object. "

http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/intro_faq.cfm

NASA isn't debunking anything. The world is as likely to end on the 21st as any other day.

His mom bought the guns legally. He stole them from her. He tried to buy a gun and was turned down because he wouldn't go through a background check or wait as the law required.

Turns out, psychopaths don't follow the law and find ways around it.

More like, Store A is charging $20 for a loaf of bread, I'll go to store B where I can get it for $5.

Google isn't stealing money. The government is.

The irony is in the politicians these companies choose to support knowing those politicians want to jack up taxes on them. They like the populism of that thought, but not so much the consequences.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/greenland-used-to-be-green.htm

Lots of things cause climate change.

When the cost of war does not include lives on your side, there's zero motivation to end the war with peaceful, equitable treaty. And when there's no cost to you, there's little incentive to avoid going to war to begin with.

No wonder we're trapped in endless wars. The government just prints money so there's no limiting factor there and as long as our guys don't die, the public doesn't care.

Fantastic world we live in.

We need to get a Republican elected to president so we can start caring again.

He's not writing operating systems.

When someone is paying you, it's "their" work. They are paying you to build something they own.

You no longer own it as soon as you cash the check for the work you did.

If you want to get paid to write software then you're writing it for a company. If you want to write software to give away then stop expecting people to pay you for it. They want something for them. Not something for the world to use. By expecting to just give away their code you're telling them you're not focused on their product for their company. And why would they pay you to write software that a competitor can just use for free? If no competitor would use it, then why are you making it open source?

If you want to contribute to open source then do it on your own time with your own money.

It seems to me the bigger problem is that you're not a programmer, you simply find existing things that kind of do what the customer wants and piece them together.

If you can't write custom code for a client without using GPL code then you're not very good at your job.

And if you can't see the stupidity of giving something away that a client paid you thousands for then there's no help for you.

I started programming at about 6 because I wanted to make games. So I came up with game ideas and then learned what I needed to in order to make them. Then I got into web programming 10 years later because I wanted to make web sites. I make a good living making other people's web-sites and still make own as well when I need something. I needed to track my time for clients and projects so I wrote my own site to do it the way I wanted to do it. I needed to track my finances so I wrote a site to do that.

What does the kid want to do that involves programming?

What problem does he want to solve?

Java is free and it's not too terribly difficult to get a simple software rendering app going that he can start rendering math functions and apply what he's learning to graphical visualizations.

C# is free as well now. Visual Studio Express is more than sufficient to do graphics programming. Even JavaScript has gotten good enough to handle software rendering using the Canvas. I used that to show students how parameters affect a function during my student teaching.

Money is not a problem. Everything is free. There are tons of resources on the internet and libraries tend to have programming books. The problem is that you're looking for a solution to a problem the kid hasn't found yet.

Yep, and since 2010 the Republicans have been passing budgets in the house. The Democrat controlled house never passed a budget for the Democrat controlled house to pass. The Democrats just keep spending money without bothering to pass a budget first and refuse to vote on the house passed budgets. It's easier for them to spend when they don't have any guidelines for it.

If the Democrats can overspend by a trillion dollars every year, then they could include NASA in that budgetless spending if they wanted to. It's pretty absurd to blame the Republicans when they failed to block ObamaCare. Obviously, they weren't too much trouble for that.

Also note, the Democrats have controlled congress since 2007. Bush signed off on their runaway spending and the result was the tea party cleaning house in 2010. A lot of incumbent Republicans lost their jobs.

It's about time the Democrats cleaned house as well.

everything is possible.

It's physics that's the problem.