My aunt is an original programmer from the 1960s. She programs satellite orbits to keep the metal boxes circling the earth. She knew Grace Hopper. I think that she has a Knuth check for $2.56.
Men find it fascinating that they can build a machine that can change its physical operation by the manipulation of symbols. It is the primal Promethean creation ability.
Women get the same emotional fulfillment through the creation of real living human beings. Women get the thrill of creating real life; creating artificial life doesn't hold the same kick.
It has nothing to do with sexism. In fact I personally don't think that sexism, as the feminist professors have defined it, actually exists.
When computers get as smart, cute, and interesting as babies, women will become more interested in guiding their development.

We need to face the possibility that Egypt is a basket case and we might just have to let it go back to the 13th century. If they cut the cable that connects them to the civilized world, then let them reconnect it when they are ready and able to. It's not our concern.

www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/ME10Ak01.html

  We can't do everything for everybody in the world. At best we can save 'our people' techies, rock musicians, and gays, from Egypt's mad mullahs and the hungry hoards. I realize that this is a complicated issue. But it all boils down to the two sentences above.

There's only three kinds of code:

    Code that works:
    Code that's documented:
    Code that was written quickly and cost-effectively:

    Chose two:
 
    Pay for one:

    If the three items above are not part of the problem, then maybe the issue isn't the code. Maybe it's the user interface that is associated with the code.
      I cringe whenever I click an item and a screen comes up that requires me to move the move pointer to a completely different part of the screen and click again in order to continue. Insane!
    Ever notice that a so-called professional user-interface developer will know everything about the code and the computer part of the interface but know absolutely nothing about anatomy or the human body aspect of the user-interface? Are retards still writing mouse code that doesn't allow the mouse wheel to scroll the mouse cursor to all the clickable options in the message text box?

More fantasy from the guys (never girls) of NASA. These guys don't seem to realize that that they are a cold-war relic, like NATO, and their reason for existence ended with the television shots of astronauts playing golf on the moon. Which was a long time ago. Now space exploits like 'lassoing asteriods' is the provence of Hollywood.
    These NASA boys are in a celestial cluster-fuck. They believe that the future in space is completely unlimited, if only the feds would simply give them enough money. Say, about ten percent of the entire federal budget like back in the good-old Apollo days. Sorry, chumps, but it ain't gonna happen. The feds are locked in a partisian battle unseen in American history just to allocate monies to keep basic services functioning. With half the politicians wanting to shut down every government service except the defence industry and the marijuana police and the other half wanting to give the treasury to billionaire bankers, there's nothing left for moonbeam projects like lassoing asteriods.
    So everything that you read about projected NASA exploits for the next decade or so is in reality just dreams and fantasies of the Tom Swift engineers and NASA project managers. NONE of it will ever come to pass.
    And that includes all the talk about sending astronauts to Mars or back to the moon. The Americans are broke, they ain't got no money, honey. And how they deal with it is by absolute denial. Which means endless talk and planning for fantasy projects like this one. Like Walter Cronkite used to say back when NASA actually was a powerful political force, " That's the way it is".

Contact the company again with your findings. They patched the hole that you pointed out before but kept the details of the exploit limited to senior programmers and support. When they reloaded the server after a down period, a SNAFU recreated the hole.

    So there are two problems. One is the security hole that you found and the other is their back-up and security breach repair process. Point out both problems to them.
    Then review the security of your data that you are exchanging with them. How important is it that this data remain secret? And secret to who? To another user who might have stumbled onto the same exploit window? To a Soviet/Russian criminal organization? (a three-way redundancy, yes, I know) To the American feds? To your wife or kid that looks over your shoulder while you type?

    Please understand, all this technology is still basically new. It has problems. Tech problems and social problems. The tech issues get discovered and solved faster than the social problems, i.e. crime issues. For example, we (the American government and Interpol) can not go after criminal organizations in the (former) Soviet Union because many of them are in alliance with the corrupt Soviet/Russian/Gangster government that still controls thousands of nuclear bombs. So criminal organizations there can loot American banks and businesses with stolen credit card information with near impunity. It's a defect of the modern computer age. It will get fixed someday, but for now, guard your data and be aware that every data and login password that you type on an internet-linked PC can be stolen.
    If the web-server company can't and/or won't fix the issue after you point it out to them several times, document the issue and submit this documentation in writing (not on-line) to both the local Better Business Bureau and your state Attorney General's Office. When they get inquiries from both parties about this issue, they will get the fear of God and fix it right. Until then, be patient and remind people to guard their data.

Small countries with complex legacy languages like Finland should have all Soumi subtitles in all media be subsidized by the Finnish government. The Finnish government should also set up a bureau that creates public domain software that translates Soumi into English and the other important world languages. And English into Soumi in real time. And the subtitles should be available for Finnish television that are both Soumi and English. And most importantly, the Soumi subtitles should *exactly* match the spoken Soumi. Naturally all these subtitles should be able to be turned off by the individual viewer. Soumi is a special and nearly unique language that is at the risk of disappearing within a hundred years or so if the Finnish people all wake up one day in the future and decide that they're going to just speak English from then on.
      I'm currently trying to learn French after completing two years of University French. I'm done lots of grammar drills that college language classes focus on. Now I'm trying to learn to comprehend the spoken language by watching DVDs of Hollywood movies with the audio set to French and the subtitles also set to French. However, I'm going nucking futs because none of the French language audio in any Hollywood movie matchs the French language subtitles. I suspect that the audio is dubbed by people in Quebec and the subtitles are done by a different group of people in Los Angeles because the audio French doesn't have quite the same accent as the French language spoken in all the original version French movies that I've seen. My french isn't good enough to tell regional accents or the difference between spoken Quebecois and Parisianne mannier of speaking. Nevertheless, DVD subtitles are becoming the primary tool for language spoken-comprehension learning. Just as on-line downloading of graphics-based videos will inevitably supercede physical attendence in college classrooms for higher education, so will DVD audio+subtitle immersion will supercede traditional foreign language learning. But it can only work when there is *exact* correspondence between the spoken language of the actors in the movie and the subtitles. At least on the level that most people are at after completing one/two years of college-level instruction in a foreign language.
      People learning English as a foreign language are lucky that the English language subtitles on region one (North America) DVDs (which are usually presented as closed-caption for deaf audience viewers) almost always exactly match the spoken dialog of the movie.

Every single time a story about manned Mars or Moon missions comes up here on Slashdot I am compelled to remind everyone that there are going to be no manned Mars or Moon missions in the next 50 years. The only entities that could do it (theoretically) are the federal governments of the USA, the former Soviet Union (which still exists as far a space exploration goes), and China (people's republic of, if you one of those people who still insist that there are two Chinas).
      All these governments are broke or broken. The Americans are completely broke, so much that for most the past 30 years they have had to borrow money to pay for their government expenditures. They talk a lot of trash, but when it comes time to cut Medicare, war budgets, or bail-outs to banks too-big-to-fail in order free up the funds to send people to Mars, well, it's just not going to happen. They are broke and have too many more important commitments.
    The Russians are broke also. And they are living on resource extraction and sales to Europe, the USA, and China. They will deliver people to the space station, but that's the last stop on the railroad line.
    The Chinese are in space for the 'me, too' glory of it. They MIGHT send a man to the moon in order to show the world that they can do what the Americans did 60 years ago (it will be at least that by the time that they can do it). But when they realize that there's no international glory in doing some stunt (which, to be honest, is all going to the Moon and coming back with a bag of rocks is) that was done long ago. Plus they have internal pressures the Americans and Russians don't have.
    So there it is.... Make plans and dreams, but don't expect real manned Mars missions to actually happen.

I rode bicycles everywhere in the 1980s when I had no car. There were very few bicycles on the road. However I noticed that there were two types of cyclists. There are those that use a bicycle because it is good, that is, 'good for the earth', reduction of resources and all that, and 'good for the body', health and aerobics and all that other good stuff.
    Then there are the people who ride bicycles because they are too poor to afford either a car or even expensive public transportation. In the USA almost all of the people NOW on bicycles are in the 'riding for the goodness of it' category. But back then, it was about 50/50 between the really poor and the 'public good/health' crowd.
      There was no way to tell them apart and since the USA is VERY class-conscious country, this made the 'public good' riders quite upset. People would see them on their bicycles and think that they were poor and not understand that they were riding to set an example of righteousness for all BFAC (big fucking American car) drivers. So they needed a way to show everyone that while there were dirt-poor people on bicycles out there, it certainly wasn't them. So they started wearing $100 helmets to show that what was under the helmet was a valuable social resource that needed serious protection, and they weren't just another minimum-wage burger flipper with six kids. Always insisting when asked that helmets were absolutely essencial and that no-one responsible would ever dream of riding without one. But basically they only wore them to not be confused with the burger flippers, who couldn't afford helmets and were smart enough to realize that if you just made sure that you stayed out of the way of moving cars, then you didn't really need a helmet when you're rolling around at 12 MPH on a couple of cheap metal tubes.
      I was in both categories: I was dirt-poor and affected with a social-righteousness mentality,. So I saw both sides. When I would point out to people that bicycle helmets were a social class marker more than a personal protection necessity, they would go absolutely ballistic. One thing that middle-class white Americans just can not stand is one of their own pointing out their hyprocisy and stupidity.
    But the same people wouldn't DREAM of riding a bicycle 10MPH on a quiet Sunday morning suburban street without racing car head protection think nothing of strapping a couple of boards on their feet and sliding down a snow-covered mountain at 40 MPH wearing nothing on their heads but sunglasses and an Hermes scarf!

There are only four motivators for human behavior including writing good software. They are:
  Money
  Sex
  Power
  Fear

Money: Figure out the minimum amount of money your programmer will NEED to continue to work for you writing your code. Start him at 50% higher than that number. IF version 1.0 works, then increase his salary to 100% more than the minimum amount that he needs.

Sex: Hire lots of cute young girls without husbands to work in your office. *Very sensitively* approach the subject to them that they can earn signifiant salary bonuses if they have inter-office affairs with the programmers. If you're not sure how to approach this subject sensitively then don't bring it up all, even as a joke. You don't need any sexual harassment lawsuit and the young ladies will probably figure your company policy out by themselves.

Power: Every dork programmer had some asshole in high school bully them. Tell your programming staff that if version 1.0 ships without major programming errors then you'll hire some local goons to track down the jerks who made their lives miserable and beat the fuck out them. All on high-definition video for their entertainment (or as supplemental erotic stimulation while they're boffing the administrative assistants)

Fear: Joseph Stalin told the nuclear physicists of the Soviet Union in 1946 that they would either deliver an atomic bomb in five years or spend the rest of their sweet short lives in the Arctic Salt Mine Gulag. He got his bomb. Then gave 'hero of the Soviet motherland' medals to all of them. He killed about 10000000 people and died peacefully in his sleep. He understood Fear.

Get a simple microphone like the blue-tooth-like headsets. Beg, borrow, or steal a speech-to-text program. (there's one buried in newer versions of MS Word) Train it. (for the S2T program in Word, you read the first few chapters of 'The Wizard of Oz' from the display on the PC screen).
    Now open a text file for your speech to go into and the software (or whatever) that you are trying to document. Describe what is displayed on the screen. Pretend that there is a beautiful woman next to you who is totally fascinated in the smallest most exact details of your program, and is totally in love with the sound of your voice describing it to her. If this is too much of a stretch then put a picture of your favorite gorgeous actress next to your PC, stare into her eyes, and describe your program to her.
      When you have a long and detailed text file describing your software project, close it and attach it to your source. Do this even if it means putting the whole thing in one long comment block and pasting it to the end of your Main file.
    Ignore all sentence structure, punctuation, and grammar mistakes in the file. You'll go crazy trying to repair them and most of the people who be needing this documentation will be so happy to have *anything* that they will overlook all the sentence structure, punctuation, and grammar mistakes in the file.
    If you don't speak English well enough to make the speech-to-text comprehend your words then either get a native English speaker to do all the steps above or use a Speech-to-text program that works with your native language. (if there are no speech-to-text programs that works with your native language, quit your present job and form a company is that based solely on making and selling such a program. Make it open-source free and have some NGO or your local Ministry of Culture pick up the cost). The people who are going to be reading the documentation in order to understand your program will either use a PC-based language translation program on your text file or hire someone at minimum wage to read your file and to translate it into more-or-less English.

    Read everything written above and Just-eF'ing-Do-It. Don't tell anyone that you did it. Just slip your rambling text 'documentation' file into the final shipping product disk or Zip file and let it be your little secret.
    Believe me, everyone who buys or uses your software will be glad that you did this. If you get fired, then become a consultant and teach other companys how to do exactly the steps described above and make twice as much money that you were before at the dingbat cement-head company that fired you.
    Just do it. Remember, every major advance in computer science made in the past 30 years was at one time called 'the stupidest fucking thing that I've ever heard' by Bill Gates. Speaking documentation to your PC seems stupid, but it gets the docs created when nothing else seems to work quite as well.

Pardon me for asking, but what's the point of a robotic self-driving automobile? Simply to show that it can be done?
Driving is straight forward and most people who buy cars enjoy driving. Maybe in a place that has horrible commutes, one could read a book instead of paying attention to road ragers. But likely not.
Too drunk to drive? get a taxi. or have someone give you a ride. Or sleep in the bar. We need bars with $15 overnight sleep-it-off bunks more than we need robot cars. Need the car in the morning? Take a taxi back to it.
Need a cheap chauffeur? Get an illegal alien with a California driver's license.

Best wishes for your family, but the boy is seven years old. Let him have a childhood.

"...and hopefully one wherein the guts are a bit exposed so that he can learn how a computer works "
Again, he's seven. C'mon, dad, lighten up. The 'guts' of a computer challenge the brains of intelligent people with college degrees. Ever try to explain to an elementary school teacher how a computer works? How to use electrical switches to represent numbers, or how to use numbers to make colors on a video screen? They have college degrees and still have great difficulty with 'simple' computer concepts. Again, your child's seven years old, so lighten up.

"...still keep him interested and without leaving him behind in school...."
  Young children have no reason to be interested in computers. So if he appears to be not interested, lighten up, he's seven. Go the the zoo, to the park, or to the library.
    With his dad pushing advanced computer technology into his child-like head, there's no way that anything going to be leaving him behind in school.
    Again, children are not miniature supermen, they're children. Lighten up dad.

No one in their right mind (which excludes many Germans) would go 150+ Kilo/hour on any Autobaun. These highways are filled with trucks from the former Soviet zone that are going 90-110 KPH. You can't get around them fast enough before some Schmuck (German='jewel'; Yiddish='truly stupid asshole') plows into the back of your 100 horsepower economy car with his Mercedes or BMW because he thought that 'on our glorious Autobaun, there are no speed limits'.

Then there is a huge crash and the autobaun is closed due to stalled traffic for 20 kilometers in both directions while the authorities make accident measurements for an hour.

    It's not 1965 anymore.

The best comments are done with a speech-to-text converter.
    Put a picture of some pretty movie star next to your screen (that shows your code). Pretend that she is just !fascinated! by you and your code. Turn on the speech-to-text so that everything that you say gets dumped into a text file. Pretend that you are talking to here and describe your code in all the detail that you can imagine. Describe everything. When finished, close the text file and include it with your source code. Way better documentation than any other method and faster also.
    THis is weird, but it really works if your speech-to-text is working. Not 100% is OK, but at least 90%.

By the way, there will be no Mars mission, ever...
The United States is broke, seriously broke from losing two trillion-dollar wars (lost in the sense that the money is gone and the assholes are still car-bombing and slicing off the noses of teenage girls). And there was the trillion dollars used to bail out the banks 'too big to fail'. Not to mention the trillion dollars pissed away on the housing bubble. And several hundred billion that disappeared after the dot-com bubble. Not forgetting the 100 million 60+-year-old people about to incur serious medical expenses for the first time. And totally ignoring the economic disruptions from peak-oil and global warming.

Broke means no money for things like manned Mars missions. So plan them endlessly to the exacting detail, debate and discuss them forever on Slashdot. But don't ever delude yourself that manned Mars missions are ever actually going to happen.