From my own personal experience I just want to say if you enjoy programming and think maybe you'd like to do it as a career... Go for it.

Every job type has a certain percentage of workers who are barely skirting by and somehow get paid for it. There's doctors who shouldn't be, lawyers, etc... There's also the elite that truly know what they're doing and are at a much higher level of skill.

Believe me when I say most programmers are the former.

The #1 most important thing IMNSHO is a continual desire to learn and improve. If you have that, you may start at the bottom but you will eventually become good or great at it.

As a hobbyist you already seem to have that, just keep it up.

Many "professional" developers do copy and paste coding, grabbing chunks of code off stackoverflow and not taking the time to understand them. They don't write test cases for their code, instead they patch it over and over whenever they run into an unexpected condition. Instead of reading through their code to spot the bug, they'll change random parts and attempt to run it over and over until they get lucky... Often leaving some of the unneeded changes in place causing more bugs.

If you can avoid doing those things, you're probably better than half the guys out there. :-)

So if you enjoy it, you can do it for a living, and maybe do it well.

Quite a difference where you read it. My idea of a flash bang has certainly changed.

I hear they're planning to change it to XML for easy reading and parsing, here's a preview of it:

<11101100>
    <10101101>
      <00101101>0011101101</00101101>
      <011101101>0110101101</011101101>
    </10101101>
</11101100>

I think the readability is much improved with the upcoming plaintext file format.

Right, he only perused it, he hasn't had the time to grok it.

I read the article on the hand grenade situation linked to by another replier to your post.

1. The cops were raiding a meth house, they had the right address according to the report.
2. They attempted entry via the front door with a battering ram and it was blocked. They thought it was a person pressing against the door so they tossed the flash grenade through the opening.
3. On discovering the infant they immediately go it medical care. Wished they knew it was there, would have used the side doors and no flash grenade.

Now unless that article is a total white-wash, it sounds like a tragic mistake. Like insurgents who hide their weapons behind children hoping to vilify their attackers, it seems quite strange someone would place a baby's crib blocking their own front door.

The way you post it... makes it like Officer Duke Nukem comes through the window... thinks "Where should I toss my grenade? Ahhh... that crib will do nicely!" and intentionally kills a child just to spite a criminal who doesn't even live in that house. I think most people imagine "hand grenade" and "flash grenade" to be very different things, it's interesting your choice of wording.

I agree that many officers abuse their authority and escape prosecution by cronyism. Exaggerating or twisting the facts does not help your argument. There's plenty of real and unquestionable abuse you can point to.

Hardware with only windows drivers. By requiring windows 8.1 computers to have a certain level of hardware spec, they can ensure incompatible components on every computer and argue that the OS is required by the computer chosen.

This reminds me of people who complain about slavery in the past, but have absolutely no concern about slavery in the world today.

It's more about perceived offense than freedom.

I can give a few points for the iOSification people out there.

1. Yosemite requires signed drivers. A bit more iOS like as you can't easily swap in hacked drivers for non-supported but basically the same hardware.
2. Such as 3rd party SSD disks which (afaik all Yosemite betas) do not have TRIM support in the official drivers. This makes people feel like Apple is discouraging self upgrading. Buy a more expensive OEM SSD, or just get a new Mac when you need a larger one?
3. RAM being soldered on more systems such as the new mini.
4. Built in video mode checks preventing retina scaling on 3rd party monitors and the driver signing limitations preventing workarounds.

There's a lot of people who have long feared Apple locking down hardware and making them more appliance like. It's looking like these fears are gradually becoming more realistic. With signed drivers in Yosemite, security has been improved but with another loss of freedom and apparently arbitrary hardware limitations. It's true the OSes at this point are quite distinct, the locking down trend can be easily argued however.

It totally screws up the Secret of Nymh. :_(

Buuuut... They were genetically enhanced rats, so it still works.

It's ok everybody CRISIS AVERTED!!

Fusion of the 3rd dimension into the 1st and 2nd.
Brilliant!
Once you repeat the process and fuse the 2nd into the 1st you get an exponential increase in power AND massive space savings.

There's a wifi enabled printer at the religious place I go, gets used every other week or so for printing out emails, forms and misc instructions, all from mobile devices. You may not print from mobile but it does have its uses.

That's easy!

A kilometer is 1000MB
A kibimeter is 1024MB
(Assuming a bitrate of 256mb/sec)

Equally silly is the "things are better than ever" response to that.

Some things are better, some things are worse. Let's look at the evidence to see which it is in the case of $RANDOM_TOPIC.

that'll teach those heathen "pill first" types to properly sip of the water and THEN put the pill in their mouths.

That's silly. Completing THIS Marathon in 2 hours, that would be a real accomplishment!
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_Trilogy