Does it still violate child labor laws if I hire him as an independent contractor?

I always always tell people who want programming experience to pick a language that they can do something with.

I'm assuming these things based on that he's 12 and interested in programming:
1) He's interested in computers so probably spends a lot of time on them
2) If he's spending a lot of time on them then he's likely got a favorite game or two
3) If he spends any significant time playing these games then he's likely interested in making tools/macros for these games

AHK (autohotkey) is probably one of the easiest game macro languages out there and that's beside the fact that you can use it for other stuff. My favorite feature is that it's loosely typed, so it's much easier to master initially, though debugging can be a pain because of this. The forums are very useful with a very dedicated community and the API is EXCELLENT, but there's no tutorials that I know of extensively devoted to learning to program using AHK. The most important thing I think you can note about this is that it can help him teach himself how to program, which is very important if he wants to move into other languages later. If memory serves it's also coded and extendable in C, so there's a natural extension into "real world" languages there.

So there's good things and bad things about using AHK, but it's the one I pick for people looking to learn the basics of programming.

As long as it's not a game where you start with ten "energy", 100 "health", 3 "stamina" and your standard attack/defense setup then I don't care what they do.

I remember hearing about tribe.net, it was hilarious to see the video on techcrunch with the interview where they mentioned that Pincus started two other internet startups, only mentioned tribe.net by name and didn't mention the tragic end of that company. Let's not even get into how EVERY SINGLE GAME that zynga has made is a rip-off of another previously successful game. They've not got a single original title to their name. God bless techcrunch for blowing this company wide open.

The problem at hand here is that zynga has created two games that encourage cheating.

MafiaWars is the worst because of the combat system. If you don't have at least 500 friends who play and are added to your "mafia" then you're shafted from the outset. This encourages the dangerous practice of adding people you don't know to your personal facebook account OR breaking facebook ToS by creating a second account for yourself.

Then you have the weight in the combat formula of the equipment being much higher than the weight of your stats. A person with lousy combat stats but maxed equipment will beat somebody with twice their stats but lousy equipment. They also have free trading of items between players with items that require (at my last calculation) over a year of play to be able to get the best equipment available.

To top things off their game isn't in flash or something that's not easily machine readable, their entire game is presented in an iframe, so it's relatively simple to create scripts that interact with the game directly using greasemonkey or bookmarklets with javascript. The best examples of these is the Mafia Wars AutoPlayer (http://www.mafiawarsplayer.org/) or Spockholm's bookmarklets (http://www.spockholm.com/mafia/bookmarklets.php)

Combine that with a game that's designed to appeal to highly competitive players and you have the perfect recipe for disaster for rampant cheating. Whether it's people who buy their combat items or people who run multiple accounts to "farm" items for their own use, it's all against the rules. The hilarity for me is watching zynga "combat" the cheaters and the bots when they could fix the game mechanics to make the cheating and bots unnecessary. Even if it was something as simple as offering the loot for sale in their ingame store, they would put the cheaters and under-the-table loot sellers out of business, and actually be honest about their microtransaction business model. People would complain that the richest player would be the one to win, but that's the way it is right now, so why not own up to it?

FarmVille is a different beast, in that they've got just about the worst leveling system I've seen in a game yet. A plant crop that grows in four hours will give you the same experience to grow, and more money per hour, than a crop that grows in 24 hours. That's just a broken game.

The clicks required for farmville are what is most astonishing. The average person will click 1200+ times per DAY playing that stupid game. The best thing they have to minimize that is the farm equipment, which naturally require gas to run that you have to buy, but even with that you're forced to click 300+ times in the best case scenario. I'm trying to make easy to use tools with autohotkey that I'm hosting on my site (http://www.kort-pleco.com/) but it's a challenge finding the time to do that. There's other people who sell full fledged farmville autoplayers, but the point is that it's still the game that is broken and should be changed to fix these problems.

A great example of a fun game that's NOT click intensive is happy aquarium by crowdstar or zynga's rollercoaster kingdom. They've both struck a great balance how much use you get per click, and I think it's a step in the right direction for facebook games in general.

Zynga is a game maker yes, but it doesn't mean that their popularity corresponds to the quality of their games. It just means they're able to out advertise everybody else using money they scammed from their players.

I seem to remember this "feature" having been around for several months now, it was released the same time they were testing product placements based on the clothing you were wearing in your profile picture. The example I saw was of a guy who was wearing a particular style of sunglasses in his profile picture, and on the advertisements on his profile page you saw an advertisement for similar sunglasses. Just because some morons are spreading viral status updates doesn't mean it's recent by any means.

isn't. I use it for most of my home browsing, until I can upgrade to a "land-line" connection. While it does work most of the time for general browsing, the battery for the modem has a nasty habit of dying in the middle of large up/downloads. Forget about streaming radio or watching many online videos, you'll get about 45 minutes before it will cut out on you for an hour. If you're a heavy data user, you WILL burn up the modem and have to jump through the customer service hoops to get a new one. So far I've gone through two modems and a battery. So, it's fast, when it works. But it cuts out, gives many difficulties connecting to the network and the modem itself will die on you whenever the stars aren't properly aligned for its functioning. Why they didn't design it to function completely on laptop power I'll never understand, but it's the 2nd to last thing over dial-up that I would recommend to somebody who needed reliable internet. Oh yes, and the software itself will also randomly crash and force a hard shutdown and reboot of my system on windows xp media center. Forget it if you want to run linux, I tried ubuntu and had no luck, even with much wine hacking. Wait, I think dial-up might be more reliable... (Just of note, I'm using the USBConnect by Sierra Wireless 881.)

I just have no desire to stop playing. At all. Ever.

Think of it as a locksmith learning how to open locked cars or houses, not so much policemen causing crimes to learn to solve them, as by definition as long as you aren't breaking the law, you're not a criminal.