That doing something for the money is the wrong reason and that doing something that combines your passion and an income is the better option, even if you initially earn less. I did a career switch from teaching performing arts to spoiled brats who often couldn't appreciate and went into FOSS-centric web-development at the turn of the millenium. I came on board just in time for the crash, but I never regretted it. Staying in my "real" profession with the only realistic occupation would've killed me. Or brought me into a mental health asylum.

I would go back to performing arts on the spot. As a performer and/or choreograph with the right crew and the right amount of funding. But not as a so-so paid overworked excuse for a nanny for spoiled kids of the wealthy who have no idea what life is like in the real world and are too spoiled to appreciate good art. The best students I had were those who came in from middle to low income families - they felt like they had stepped into paradise. Which the school basically was. And the appreciated it and behaved accordingly. Those I still remember with warm thoughts. The others I sometimes sort of hate, hoping they ran into some serious lesson somewhere on the way into adulthood.

It was roughly three years into teaching that I noticed I never wanted to become a teacher in that field, that I wanted to perform and that there was no money in performing. I left that field, went into IT and never turned back. Being your Type A 80ies computer kid and RPG nerd did help with that.

I'm getting by as an experienced part time webdev, consultant and software architect and fiddle with FOSS technologies on the side when I'm not out dancing. Feels great.

Any newcomer should consider switching job and hobby if things turn out to be a drag - it's what I did and it worked great for me.

My 2 cents.

Imagine your garments being woven and sewn entirely by machines! Imagine if all the farmers would be replaced by machines that sow and harvest everything - there would be rampage, murder, rage, and death! Humanity would end! OMG, we're all doomed! ... Errrmh, ...
Ok, scratch that. Never mind.

Machines taking over the dirty work. Awesome.
More time for me to dance tango, do yoga and live to become 120 years old.

Sorry, folks, but I'm welcoming the new robot army with open arms. No excuse me while I continue my job as a webdev, clicking together Wordpress apps and doing the type of work that would've needed a team of seven 10 years ago.

Rather spending that type of money on the bazillions pointless DOD contract where it doens't trickle down but simply trickles away, it goes to a guy and his various crews that actually get shit done. And manufactures mostly domestically. I don't see a problem here.

Earth can support 30+ billion people easyly. Three times the earths population would fit into the US, with room to spare and more than enough room for agriculture to feed them all. The problem - as usual - is management of society, of natural resources and wealth disparity. We are at a point where it is more feasible for all of us to hand out solar panels, food, transport and shelter to the poor for free rather than have them chop down the remainder of trees in order to burn them to cook and heat.

Imagine earth being managed / gouverned by a team of smart people, such as the exec teams of Google or Apple - that would be a totally different thing and we'd probably all be way better of than now.

As for the procreation: We'd have to start thinking outside of heritage and percieve all children as children of everyone. At the same time first world people are losing interest in having children. We need to spread wealth and education in such a way that the birth rate goes down. Combine that with the management mentioned above plus perhaps some unfied space travel efforts and we have a bright new utopia ahead of us. If we then manage to reach 50 billion and the place is getting crowded, we can than think about who gets to take the suicide pill.

Sadly, somehow I think this is not going to happen too soon. :-(

Shit like this are the artefacts from the steam age of computing.
As a web guy I deal with this every day. If I ever get around to building an OS and/plattform (Harhar) I'll force one text format and one only for all glyphs in existance (UTF seems like a good candidate).
Controll characters will be completely seperate.

Women want to have babies.
Men want to have sex.

If all things go right, women get a man who not only does the 5-minute job but also is a provider.
If all goes well for the man, he gets good sex regularly.

That's a broad simplification, but that's what it boils down to on an evolutionary scale.
It is this that determines our behaviour on a broad range, at least with the majority which are heterosexuals.

I see it every weekend when I go out Tango dancing - saw again and everywhere just this pentecost weekend on a Tango retreat in fact. Career power women who earn thrice my paygrade dressing up all girly-like and melting away in those awesome dance-teachers arms (meh!) or in mine (huzaaa!) when the best where taken. Me, an insecure geek/nerd with social issues going all manly and cool and feeling like a god, embracing women so beautyful you wouldn't believe it. It's a formalised environment where I can't go too wrong if I follow the rules.

Don't get me wrong, a huge part of the way things are is a grown culture that could use some fixing, but the essence is pretty much evolutionary biology at work. I wouldn't say it's all that bad and I wouldn't say it's a disaster if my daughter doesn't go into tech.

I would love to see it, but I won't force her.

The IDE that works, is free/FOSS and runs cross-plattform is the best for me. That would be Netbeans for me, since I mostly do PHP. QtCreator looks neat aswell. And after Anjuta, CodeBlocks and whatnot crashing on Ubuntu for me or not being supported for OS X it seems like a good candidate for C/C++.

In fact, I'd go as far and say that not having a good IDE that runs on Mac, Linux and perhaps Windows is actually a dealbreaker for a new programming language for me.

Example:
Yesterday I came across Dart again and clicked through a few websites on it. I still have it in the back of my head and haven't dismissed it yet because - Tadaa! - Google offers a chrome based IDE for it. ... Couldn't say though that I'm all ready for this cross-compiled for JavaScript fad that's going on right now, so I'm not gonna hold my breath.

That's my take on IDEs.

We need more of this around the world. It can't be that people work 3 jobs and barely get by why others buy a new car every year or a new cellphone or whatnot and do no more important stuff than the cleaning lady or the cook. ... And no, shoving around papers or hacking up the next bazillionth Twitter or IRC clone or setting up the next Wordpress installation that's going to be totally abandoned 15 months in is not more imporant than cleaning. Emphasis mine!

If it's not worth paying 15$ it's probably not worth being done by a human in the first place and should be left or automated. And if you're not ready to spend 15$ but insist you have cleaning personell you're an asocial *sshole and ought to clean up your own dirt.

My 3 cents.

Newsflash!
Closing of ThePirateBay top level domains forces millions of users to search two minutes for an alternative bittorrent infosite.

Next up: Bag of rice falls over in China! Situation unclear!

That is a *very* long story. I could tell a similar one about my father. ... Doesn't matter.

Just briefly: There are hardly any things I can discuss with my father - who is a type-a evangelical christian faith man, a charlatan and a fraud who took the easy way out of his responsiblities and who had the nerve to try and borrow money from me on my 37th birthday, after having left me and my mother to our fate when I was twelve. And countless other things of the same bizar proportions too strange to actually be believable. ("I'm praying for you ..." ... Yeah, great. Thanks a bunch, asshole.)

Also there are also things I can simply not discuss with my mother. There are things she never will appreciate and there are acknowlegements I will never get from her, no matter what I do. To deeply engrained is her feminist hate of men because of those who wronged her ... or she thinks who wronged her. I love her and she did her best. She says she tried as hard as she could and I believe her. There is actually literally nothing more you can ask from a parent. In that regard I got very lucky.

The thing im getting to is this:
It's most certainly an evolutionary and biological constant that some people have good parents, some people have so-so parents and some people have parents who are way in over their head with the parenting business. Think of how many children would simply die out of neglect just a few centuries ago. It's just a few decades ago when 12-year olds where expected to work 14 hours a day for a plate of food. It still is in some places of the world.

What I'm saying is this: If your burden happens to be having parents who you simply can't look up to anymore in this day and age, as a grown adult, it is time to move on. It's hard and I catch myself falling into relapse every once in a while, but move on I should. I try to associate with people I admire and I try to cope with the fact that quite a few things I learned from my parents are flat out wrong or at least based on a bias.

I try every day to move on, and so should you.

Little Tip: I've taken on the habit of calling my mother and my father by their first name about 15 years ago. It helps.

I also try to be the best Pop in the world to my daughter, that's a good thing to focus on aswell. I think I'm doing fine. Not perfect, but fine.

My 2 cents.

... take a look at mens rights groups.

In your teens and early 20's you're partying hard with friends, getting laid, and making lots of good memories.

You got *laid* in your teens? Dude, WTF? What are you? Some bizar creature from outer space? ... You're definitely wrong here.

Unlike other methods (and I'm strechting the term "method" here), agile methods rely on excellent optimised and product oriented software production pipelines. This is how you should do it anyway, agile or not. But in my experience roughly 1 in 20 software shops implement even the flakiest of standardised production. Most of the time you still have to explain to people why they should use versioning.

The decision makers, sales people and IT strategists also usually have a very hard time commiting to a product and produktion pipeline. They want to sell whatever goes and have the devs sort it out, understaffed, ill-equipped and with extra weekends.

There are a few companies that have sales and technology and perhaps even industrial design/user experience all on par (Apple for example), but most companies that offer software development have no decision makers that understand even the faintest about software development.

Agile methods such as Scrum are the ones that expose the fastest wether you actually are doing professional development or if your crew is just a bunch of people faking it with poor gouvernment, bad organsiation and a sales and production team that don't communicate professionally with each other. IT mostly is a second and third afterthought with most companies and in such environments the best method won't improve development, no matter what.

If a PM can't tell a client from a server or Java from JavaScript and couldn't be bothered to understand why it is important to make a call and a final decision about tabs or spaces Agile will show how shitty your environment is in an instant. Waterfall (i.e. we don't know what we're doing but we're doing it anyway) will disguise that indefinitely, because there's no fixed model for accountability built in.

Bottom line: Until IT stops being the cellar child of the company no method in the world will professionalise development as it is desperately needed. We're still like medicine in the 16th century in that regard.

Meaning the hype around big data has settled and its back to business. I'd say there less than 10 companies worldwide to whom big data actually might make sense. Others clean and aggregate their data in such a way that its actually useful. .... I don't want my bank guessing my balance with big data statistics, I want them to know it. And so do most other people.

Nuclear Power plants and solar powered things with no moving parts will probably be the last things still working. Perhaps a solar and condensator powered lamp in some ruggedized military component or something. Correctly built, a device like that could last thousands of years.

If we count decay of artificially saturated nuclear fuel as a man-made "machine" or "device", then we have 200 000 years of "worling devices" ahead of us.The problem here is that they "work", wether we want them to or not. Which sort of is the problem with nuclear waste.