You are talking about outsourcing the core focus of your business. That is a big fat no. If you have a store and you want to sell things online, contract, outsource, whatever. You make your money on the margins of your merchandise.

If your business is making software, you are outsourcing your core business model. That is a recipe for disaster.

South Carolina doesn't recognize clinical nutritionists as licensed practitioners. Apparently, the only state that doesn't too. In this case though, it creates a loophole by proximity for this guy.

My Volt is pretty much awesome. Gives great acceleration, range and plenty of space. My family uses it for everything after I get home and it literally paid for itself in gas savings. Granted, I went from an Expedition to a Volt...but still I could have a payment on 2 Volts for what I was spending in gas. Power bill will go up less than $15 / month too. I was paying between $400-600 a month on gas alone.

We were actually trying to design the interface in such a way that all of the relevant information could be extracted quickly from the teacher's lesson plans. We wanted to change the way lesson plans were written down so that we'd change the way a teacher did something rather than add a new one. Making sure the system reduced workload for teachers rather than added to it was a HUGE part of the overall design.

We designed a system to do everything the original poster mentioned and a whole lot more. Presented it across 5 states, had great buy in and 2 million dollars worth of funding tentatively committed. The whole thing eventually fell through due mainly to unforeseen costs of variable types of regulation on a district by district basis. Even had a very long conversation with the CEO of the nations largest private school software company that said he'd never touch the public school market for exactly that reason. The only players in public schools are people like Microsoft that can do very little other than provide tools for district IT people to create their own solutions.

Through all of that, one of the first questions I got asked was "what about people that don't have internet access or can't afford a computer?" It was such a common response that I started leaving the answer out of the initial presentation so that I could pull up that information when the people I was presenting to asked about it.

The answer is pretty simple: there are a lot of others ways to deliver information to people when it's already organized in a database.

At the time that I was setting this up, there weren't tools like Twilio available but we still had several solutions:

1. The obvious, public libraries have free computer access for everybody.
2. Using a customized PBX, setup a call in phone number with a parent code where parents can dial lin and then listen to their child's homework assignments / upcoming schedules.
3. With the same PBX, allow parents to request an automated phone call at a certain time every day with their child's homework assignments / other important notes.
4. Send an automated fax on a daily basis with the homework schedule (if the parent would like). A fax could be sent to a place of business or a home if available.
5. Somewhat more involved, but for parents that request it monthly or weekly letters could be sent with the same type of information.
6. Text messaging wasn't nearly as common back then but certainly, it would be included now. The PBX solution could be dramatically simplified with Twilio's infrastructure too.

None of those provide the same level of access a computer + internet would provide, but certainly...it's a start. In conjunction with a public library's computer access it makes all of the tools that a parent who wanted to be involved available at no charge. The idea was to help make it easier for parents that wanted to be involved in their children's education able to be involved. To find out if there's a problem in a class after the first bad grade and not after half of the class is over.

The core poverty issue in schools isn't that lack of access puts people at a huge disadvantage. If you've got a parent who really cares, they can get involved. The bigger issue is when you have kids going home at night and not knowing if they're going to be sleeping inside or outside because their deadbeat parents need to use the trailer for a "sleepover". Some of the stuff I heard about like that while my wife was in the school system were appalling. Being poor isn't the problem. Parent's that don't give a damn are the problem and those are certainly not a reason to avoid putting better tools in the hands of everybody else.

It seems like this could get pretty broad. Is Photoshop a derivative work of MS Paint? Is Pixelmator or GIMP a derivative work of Photoshop? Is Open Office a derivative work of MS Office? Is MS Office a derivative work of Lotus Notes?

If you're doing work for a company and being paid for it, you're working under "work for hire" terms and they will in fact, own the application. Whether you excelled in your job and created a lot of downtime is irrelevant because it really breaks down to this: there are X number of hours in a day and they're paying you for 8 of them, 5 days a week. During time when you're being paid by somebody else to do work, they own that work unless specific terms have been spelled out otherwise.

Now, this isn't to say that you can't negotiate other terms for such a system. The biggest thing though, if you're doing this for the challenge, with a moderate hobbyist skill set and the company can see some benefit that's great. If there are comparable systems out there that can do the job you're proposing building the system for, evaluate them, price them, and put together an estimate for the cost of your time vs the cost of having those systems implemented and maintained for a price comparison. If there's a system out there that costs $100,000 / year in licensing fees and you think you can build something in 1-3 months time, based on your expertise in your employer's needs they'll probably be willing to let you give it a shot and let you keep the rights to the system as long as they get to use it at no extra cost. They'll most likely want some percentage of the sales if you decide to sell it, because after all, they're funding you. That would be a pretty reasonable trade off though.

The downside to something like that is that you create the system, you're moderate skill set creates unforeseen problems that have to be fixed by somebody with more expertise, you end up getting all of your time sucked up by maintaining and fixing this system until your employer to either buy a piece of software or hire somebody else to fix your code. Just sayin. :-)

This is one area that a lot of programmers lose sight of though. If somebody is paying you to do work, the work is theirs, not yours under the terms of "work for hire". Just like if you're in construction and your team is building a house, then you decide to go build an outhouse while you're at work....they own that $h!t.

For what it's worth, you can. I was just running iOS5 beta 1 for the last couple of weeks. For some reason, I had an issue updating to beta 2 and it let me downgrade right back to 4.3.3.

I suppose that depends on your definition of what's worth using. If you're looking at the web as nothing more than submit form, browse table, load from database...yea, no javascript is fine.

If you want anything with a decent user interface that will work on multiple devices and not require people to visit 20 different pages to do something that could be simple...well, then you need javascript.

Saying everything works fine with javascript off is right up there with saying "we might as well all just use the command line". If you have no interest in an interface, then you're absolutely right.

And for the record, I detest using javascript unless I have to but you're comment is just plain wrong.

It's the best learning experience you'll ever have, even if it doesn't work out. Good luck!