To be a game programmer, they'll need strong maths and ideally physics skills. There are Games Programming courses out there, but most of them are too diverse (teaching design & art as well) to give the students the full depth of programming skills they'll actually need.

Yes, it's a hard life, with long hours and not the best pay ... but if it's their passion, then there's nothing better than working on something they really love. It makes coming to work a lot easier, even if you know you're going to be in for 12+ hours, if you're totally invested in what you're doing.

Maybe not now, but it probably was a reasonably big achievement the first time it happened.

They were hardly going to start it off with the whole Lord Of The Rings trilogy and then ask it the relevant merits of each race and who they were based on from the real world, followed up with "Who's hotter, Galadriel, Arwen or Eowyn?"

Absolutely... I have an HTC Magic on Vodafone in the UK, and there's no sign of the update to 2.0 / 2.1 - I've been looking into it lately because the Google Buzz page requires Android 2.0, so currently I can't use it at all.

A Google app that doesn't work on a Google branded phone because the Google OS hasn't been updated.

Great.

Am I the only one who read that as 'fictional calculations'? It may be more appropriate ...

Where I work, we have code reviews before checking in non-trivial changes. We don't have design reviews though, which I think are more worthwhile. If a problem is found pre-checkin, then it's usually too late to go back and re-code the work - meaning that these issues are recorded by the coder and should be looked at again when possible; however, with the constant deadlines we work to, there often isn't time to go back and make the improvements. I think design reviews are worthwhile for verifying the work that's going to take place, and a code review should be used to see if it matches the design (and find out the reasons if not), as well as making sure that the checkin isn't going to screw up the build (check for warnings, files missing from changelist etc).

Lua's a great place to start - the syntax isn't too fiddly, and it's versatile enough to handle anything you would want to show them. It's free, and all you need is a text editor. If you get a semi-decent editor (I use Crimson Editor, which is old but does everything I need) you should be able to set it up so that it executes the program on a hotkey.