I've been in the industry nearly 15 years now. I think not having a degree has only come up maybe one or two times. Sure didn't stop me from getting recruited by Microsoft.

What I would focus on is a couple of things:

1. Expand your horizon - learn the basics (See Michael Feathers Self-Education and the Craftsman talk from SCNA 2009). Then learn things like Functional Programming, Dynamic Typing and other languages.
2. Do other things - Make programming a hobby and a career. Start an open source project. Contribute to others. Scratch itches that bug you, but do them with software
3. Play Both Ends - Learn back end development. Learn front end development (CSS/Javascript). Do some hardware development (SparkFun's Arduino kit is fun, as well as the Roomba robot kits).
4. Read, Read, Read - Find books on software engineering. Reverse Engineering of Viruses. Design Patterns. Project Management. And go outside - books on Business topics are especially good, because you get to understand the tradeoff that often gets made.
5. Practice, Practice, Practice - Do Katas. Create projects. Explore ideas. Do things like Ludum Dare and hackathons. Build an iPhone app, then build an Android version.

I'm not trying to knock a college education - if you want it for the education. If you want it just for the advancement, the things above are going to have a much bigger impact on your career and your ability to find employment in many cases.

Joey Asher also wrote "Even a Geek Can Speak" - a book I give to just about anyone starting out giving presentations. This book looks just as awesome - can't wait to pick it up!

This was my thought as well. The analysis was wrong ("They have weapons! He has an RPG! Several AK-47s!") and that's a mistake which shows the need for better analysis. I mean, the guy did appear to have an RPG to me before they opened fire, but it didn't look like he was pointing it at any of them.

Far worse was the decision not to evacuate the kids. I mean, the soldiers on the ground had a much better view of what was going on, and to deny that was a travesty. And the cover-up makes it all that much worse.

In general, I see this as bad intelligence leading to a unfortunate call by soldiers looking to keep themselves safe. That doesn't excuse what happened by the commanders by any means. But I can't image being in that pilot's seat. Or the ground soldier when they made the call not to evacuate the kids.

Besides, if you really wanted to block them, wouldn't one just block the Googlebot? Or nofollow the entire site? Or robots.txt the entire site?

What they really want is to be in the top of the search results without having to have the stuff out there. You can't have it both ways.

The point is that /sometimes/ that's how he travels, and /sometimes/ there's the big motorcade, and the president is actually in a Hyundai sneaking up the backroads to wherever they are going. All the things like that they do could potentially be exposed if he had his BB on him.

Of course, they could just have him not have it some of the times, or put it in the motorcade when he isn't, etc, etc. I'd imagine that you could use some of the attacks mentioned in the article to foil the above scenario even without the president having a BB. For example, if you know which phones are SS phones, and suddenly 5 or 6 are *way* away from the "motorcade" you might suspect something is up.

For the US, I'd imagine it not being too big of an issue - but the point with him being in foreign countries is pretty important.

(Notice: I'm the reviewer)

iDang it. iI'm iSorry. iI iGot iToo iCaught iUp iIn iIing iEverything.

- iCory

Basically what I was thinking as well. I did it while I was on a conference call, and was disappointed to see that this was all there was to it. I figured at the very least that it was just a first-level and the real puzzle would be on the site. Oh well.