The wording of the first two traits is strong, and easily misinterpreted, like mistaking humility with being a pushover. "Superiority complex" might be better rendered as "the knowledge one can do better than this"; "insecurity" is crippling compared to "the sense that the present condition is unttnable")

I'll add one last one to the trio though: "fails often" or rather, being able to recognize that failure is a milestone in an endeavour, not a gravestone; failure is a better teacher than success. This concept is alive and well amongst entrepreneurs of all cultures, and is essential to not erode the forward drive offered by the "superiority complex."

The ability to digest one's own failure is also an essential trait to continue to foster curiosity and experimentation - an ability easily lost in our obsession of being right first time, embodied by our acceptance of "do or do not, there is no try."

I'll blow my own trumpet here. I wrote a few pages specifically for users of your kind: technical but needing a starting point.

It's incomplete and I'm still working on it, but should be helpful I hope. It's easy to dive into Linux properly once you know what it is you're looking for; thing is to know the name of what you're looking for in the first place.

If the NSA were likened to Nazism - powerful entity oppressing the populace - that would be a validly debatable point.

In this occurrence, it's more like he's sitting in Versailles employing the plebes to trim his wigs into topiary. The "we're doing so much so good for these people" argument does not fly when you're on the receiving end of so much wealth, and it's the surrounding citizens that are unhappy.

I know I'm late to the party, but I can't let this one slip :-). So, a bit of Free Software Philosophy 101 to serve up

First off, Stallman's definitions of Software Freedoms:

1. The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
2. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
3. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
4. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Secondly the consequence: Nobody but vBulletin is allowed to patch the hole, from a legal standpoint, lacking freedom 1, and thus lacking freedoms 2 and 3. Legally, SUSE cannot modify/improve/patch the software - they can only purchase upgrades.

I leave this here, you know, just in case.

Reading subsequent comments, 2 points stand out

If you know C, and it's not going anywhere soon, why change? Are you bored of the current projects you're on? Or do you think you'll be better off elsewhere? Greener grass etc

Some are being a bit more meta and suggesting fields to apply computing to, like data mining, marketing, etc. Worth investigating if you float that way, but I didn't think that was the point of the question.

You could also consider going into management as a techie, to at least have someone sane at meetings where the majority know more business than technology.

In web programming specifically? I'd say, make sure you know the fundamentals first and foremost.

As a previous poster said, knowing the HTTP protocol well (RFC2616 - be familiar with RFCs in general) will be important (more than you'd think - a misused verb led to Google's standard webcrawlers hosing a site because said site didn't implement forms/links properly), I'd recommend also getting intimate with some of the other building blocks such as SMTP, POP, FTP, SSL, ... you get the picture. They'll come in handy when trying to piece together/troubleshoot a larger solution.

On top of that, know the roles and differences between different server apps (app servers like JBoss/WebSphere; web servers like Apache, nginx), know at least 2 popular database engines (I personally favour MariaDB and SQLite but that's up to you; you might want to look at PostgreSQL or CouchDB for something radically different), after learning HTML and XML/DOM fundamentals, know about cookies and AJAX specifically (which are part of your HTTP knowledge, but revisit later) and a take a web security course, or at the very least read far and wide on the matter. Someone suggested focusing only on back-end - fine if that's what you want to do, but at least be aware of how things behave in theory on the front end. Again, fundamentals.

After (all) that (a fortnight's worth of reading, not counting any experimentation?), the choice of languages to work with these building blocks is entirely up to you. Most commonly mentioned are PHP and Ruby in different setups (honourable mention to JSP), Perl and Python for CGI and general scripting, Ruby on Rails as language+framework...

When staring out and for longevity, choose fairly popular languages that run in open source runtimes (they're durable, they're documented, there are plenty of communities), and stay nimble with frameworks - a previous ask.slashdot showed how some of them can easily get canned despite a strong user base, and frameworks are just a flavour of the year... more likely than not, someone else (project lead, customer, policy...) is going to tell you what framework to use, so just make sure you've mastered your chosen language set.

For iOS devel you're not going to escape Objective C. Android I understand is purely Java. But most things you're likely to want to do that are web facing, you might as well do in a web page.

And, in general, stay nimble. But you knew that, right?

Some people see "bugs," others see "features."

I've seen solution features designed around security holes before, and when we finally patched the breach, we received emails demanding that the decision be reversed and how dare we break customer solutions by surreptitiously patching things!

Sometimes you never can win.

In which case, why was the "for an Indian" phrase even mentioned, unless to single them out as opposed to other persons?

I'd be surprised if the court finds that context and lead-up is not relevant to their decision. If the senior managers are found to have been violating equal opportunities regulations, their handling of Mr Spandow, who was effectively trying to rectify their ill behaviour, could be a direct consequence of their violation, and encompass him. Possibly a grey zone to be clarified.

The salary and cost of hiring is secondary to the main issue here.

Mr Bambling will have to explain why he issued a "stern warning" in response to the request, rather than an explanation as to his reasoning; Mr Trudeau will have to explain his contemptuous choice of words, and failure in turn to explain his reasoning; both them and probably others will have to explain why firing the sales manager was considered fair and necessary, in the light of the previous two points.

I am trying to figure out the newsworthy part in this - it's been known for ages that you can get details out of reflxions and high-def images...

For the practical implications - we're not going to get any benefit from users' twitpics, blog images and fb photos, as those are rarely ever uploaded in full high-def+highest-quality, 41MP camera notwithstanding: I'd like to see

• the resolution and quality actually used by the camera (user setting rarely push the camera to its max capcity to save on storage)
• the resolution and quality of the image after the sharing app has had a go at it to improve bandwidth performance
• the resolution and quality of the reflexion when the person photographing is more than say 6ft away
• and finally, the quality of the reflection in sub-par lighting - which is generally the case for most average-Joe users

Yes, it is possible to get data out of reflections on small shiny objects (and I suspect forensics teams have been on top of this ever since cameras reached consumers), but the lighting conditions and capture mechanisms have to be set up perfectly.