While retraining is a good idea, and one that should be available to everyone at reasonable cost (It's cheaper than welfare...) the idea that anyone can be a programmer is flawed.

I taught high school for 20 years. For 6 of those I was dungeon master of the computer lab. Yes, there are some clever kids out there. But well over 90% do not understand what a style is in Word.

I doubt that a course can teach you a marketable amount of programming skill in 6 months even if you have the aptitude for it.

Data entry? Yes, I can see that in 6 months or less.

Getting a new programming skill when you already have a bunch? Yeah. I can see a C programmer getting a FORTRAN retread in 6 months. But going from scratch to something useful? Not really.

If you think of it as being another physical location, then yes it's stupid. If you think of it as having a level of reality that can be mapped into a visual metaphor where in your metaphor you can hurl a ball of fire at a server and destory the server, then yes, it's stupid.

But viewing it as a set of constraints in a parallel universe makes sense.

E.g. On Planet Earth we have a distance function. Give me two locations, and I can tell you the great circle distance between them. A different distance function will give you one of several highway routes beween them.

In Cyber earth there is also a distance function. Generally called ''latency' Physically I live 50 miles from the University of Alberta. But the U of A is 750 ms from me. My local library, 10 km from here is only 35 ms from the U of A.

So Cyber Earth has a very different 'geography' Places that have much longer latency can be visualized as being on high mountain tops. Cyber Earth looks much like a spiny sea urchin with most of the space being very high 700 ms plateaus on a 40 ms diameter sphere.

There are entire transactions that can take place digitally e.g. you buy a digital song with digital representations of cash. Similarly the people I know as online personalities that I've neer meant. In that sense, cyber space is reality.

Also, that bits can move across borders mostly without impediment, creating confusion about jurisdiction when a crime has been committed, that lends some sense of reality to cyber space. (Dammit, it didn't happen here. I happened in Cyberspace)

Seriously. Macs are pricey, but are pretty solid hardware. At that point you can:
* run MacOS X
* run VirtualBox or Parallels, then inside that run your choise of windows operating systems.

(Recently I have hada to do this in order to run MS Access. So I've got Snow Leopard -> Virtual Box -> Windows XP -> Access.

Actually runs better than when I had a single purpose win xp box 8 years ago to do the same thing.

Getting it right all the time is impossible. Getting it right 80% of the time should be easy. Much of the problem is due to bad assumptions about 'progress' E.g. The classic windows file copying progress bar. I think it works on the basis of the number of files. The estimation doesn't take into account the size of the files, or the depth of the directory tree, or how busy the disk subsystem is.

What *should* happen:
* A better estimation algolrithm taking into account the 4-5 leading factors.
* Smart modification of that estimate based on a weighted average of the progress to date.

Sure it's not going to take into account the 'getting hit by a bus' scenario mentioned in another response. But it should be able to make better and better estimates for MOST of the circumstances.

In addtion, if the program is smart, and sees random events interfering with the progress, it could express a range.

Even in Canada global warming is a mixed blessing. Yes summers will get longer, winters shorter.

And that means that the edge of the permafrost moves north. The areas where the permafrost melts is close to impassible.

Lot of the northern mines depend on bringing equipment in over winter roads. It's not practical to make all weather roads for a single mine site. (There are still significant communities that have no all season road access.)

In addition while climate change makes northern lands warmer, the northern limit to agriculture in Canada is not limited by climate so much as it is by soil and drainage. The edge of agriculture is the edge of the Canadian sheild. Above that line is rock, and bog and lakes.

Now admitedly places that now only grow rye could grow wheat. Places that are currently pasture could grow crops.

The other issue is rainfall. GW is almost certainly going to change rainfall patterns. About half of Alberta's farm land is in the Palliser triangle which has long cycle periods of adequate rain and drought. In a good year we get 16-20 inches of precip. In a bad year 6. The current best guess of the climate modelers is that we will get more precipitation, but not as much as the increase in evaporation from the warmer temperatures.

This will mean that bunch grass ecozones move into the sod grass areas, sod grass moves into parkland. In the mountains it will get too dry for spruce, so the line demarking spruce/pine moves up and north. Depending on fire management policies pondersosa pine may replace lodgepole pine in forest land management.

Or pine may be locally extinct. We aren't getting cold enough winters to kill enough of hte pine beatle larva. Northern BC is a mess. Some cases where pine beatle has attacked and successfully reproduced using spruce. This could take out most of the southern half of the boreal forest.

Most of the GW deniers deny because:

A. "It's not my fault, so I don't have to do anything or change my way of life"

"Why" matters in the long run. Understanding the mechanisms that control climate is important in the long run, both for more accurate prediciton, and for geo-engineering a solution.

As an example: A garden hose spewing SO2 into the high stratosphere could generate enough clouds to drop the temperature. This was in effect what the erruption of Mt. Pinatubu did. Everyone points to that erruption and says "see! We can control this." It was also a drought year for major regions. Thinking: The SO2 produced high cloud. The surface temp dropped, the stratosphere temp rose, the lapse rate dropped, decreasing the height of rain clouds. Less rain gets over mountain barriers. Result: Drought.

In the short run, it's changing. Adapt, or die.

A hundred foot rise in ocean levels is going to call for some pretty massive resettlements.

I think there is merit in WYSIWYG editors for 'story boards' It's quick to layout. You can try various looks, even create sample navigation for interaction.

But any significant website is almost certain to use some form of template system.

I ended up doing a first stab at my personal web page using the composer in Mozilla. Once I got the LOOK I wanted, I redid the first few pages in HTML by hand. And then with MUCH cleaner and simpler HTML, I went to Template Toolkit to control page generation. And then I installed the Markdown module for TT and essentially eliminated 95% of my html. (I still have to use some divs for positioning.)

Spent a lot of time with a single CSS file so that the page behaves reasonably with any non-pathological browser/screen combo.

The end result is a site with about 80 pages, statically served, but regenerated as needed. http://sherwoods-forests.com/ if you want to look.

Even logging in manually to turn on the wifi has the problem of:
* Various people have to know to log in.
* Remember to turn it off.

How about wiring a plug into coat room light circuit. Plug with wifi hub into that plug. When the coat room light is on, you have wifi. When people are gone, the wife is turned off with the lights.