People have been saying this for 60 years, and the reverse has happened. As programmable devices continue to propogate the need for programmers only grows. It's becoming standard for all medium to large sized businesses to have a software department, so they can get the software they need to run their business developed. I don't see that trend reversing anytime soon.

My daughter took a programming class using Basic during her freshman year. I encouraged her to take it, so she could see that there are multiple ways of solving problems. Unfortunately the teacher was having none of this. He dictated to his students exactly how he wanted them to write the programs. This was very disappointing and incredibly discouraging for my daughter. Let the students struggle a little bit, and let them find ways to complete their assignments. When they're done present some of the students' solutions to the class, and talk about how they solved the assignment and discuss alternatives. You'll need to be respectful. People that are new to programming can be pretty sensitive about their code, so make sure you take that into account. You don't want to make somebody feel stupid, especially when they probably worked very hard on completing the assignment. Lastly, maybe you should consider a different language. Maybe you should consider Python or even C++.

It costs me about $60 to take my family to the movies. That's a bit steep. It's certainly enough to beg the question: is it worth it? I'm finding that the answer is usually a big no.

It looks like you're getting hung up on some pretty trivial details. The crux of my argument is that ddos doesn't target security vulnerabilities, least ways they don't target vulnerabilities of a the victim. However if you click through the link on this post, you'll see that these ddos attacks are funny to them. They invented their justification later.

Target paid out big time when their security was breached. Also DDOS attacks don't target security vulnerabilities. Lizard Squad is just pretending to be a white knight when they're really just malicious pranksters.

This was a ddos attack. There's essentially no way to protect yourself from a ddos attack. It doesn't demonstrate a security issue with Xbox live or PSN. It just demonstrates that any cluster of servers anywhere can eventually be overloaded.

Mary Shelly's Frankenstein should definitely make the list. Frankenstein is considered by many people to be the first Science Fiction novel, and it maintains its relevancy by posing many of the ethical questions that Science faces today. You should also include Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, at least the first three books. The Foundation series discusses the fate of empires, alludes to humanities over dependence on technology, critiques religion, and examines human nature. I'm a big fan of anything Card puts together, particularly Ender's game, a book that examines war, ferocity, and even genocide. Also look for some short stories. Asimov has a number of short stories. I really like how he will often challenge our notion of life with his stories on Robots.

I don't know. I've written a number of programs with javascript, and each time it was a terrible development experience. The language was arcane at best. I can't stand how you have to fake inheritance in javascript, and it drives me crazy that I don't get any type checking. I'd much rather use a fully object oriented, strongly typed language like C# any day.

RIA stands for Rich Internet Application. It's a term that was coined by Macromedia in order to describe the rich user experiences that can be provided by flash. The term has gained a lot of popularity, and it generally refers to any technology that allows the user to have a rich application experience from within the browser. Currently the major RIA platforms are Flash, Silverlight, and Java FX, and I've also seen this term applied to Ajax before.

I'm sorry but I just can't stand developing in Javascript. Javascript is hands down the most arcane language I find myself developing in. At this point being locked into a language like Javascript by the standards community seems much more restrictive than what the proprietary plug-ins are offering. Programming in both Silverlight and Flex has been a liberating experience for me. When using Silverlight or Flex I'm able to focus on creating an application that satisfies my customer's needs; instead of focusing on the black magic tricks that are so often required when using Javascript and HTML. At the end of the day it's so obvious that HTML and Javascript were not intended for serious application development. Not only do Silverlight and Flex offer better programming models they also offer rich support for databinding, and that has simplified so many of my applications. So unless HTML 5 comes packaged with a better programming language and data binding you can count me out.

I know Android doesn't have near the market penetration that iPhone does, but I still have to wonder if it wouldn't be better to just create these applications for the Android rather then deal with the inevitable legal hassle apple will impose over this strategy. Furthermore by creating these apps on the Android you will increase the value of the Android to the customer which will eventually lead to better Android market penetration.

Symantec did just outsource a bunch of their support. I wonder if they'll reconsider the move.

I have a good friend that got his degree in computer science and realized about half way through an internship that he preferred administrating servers to programming. He got a good systems administrator job, but unfortunately he took a bit of a pay cut, $60,000 as opposed to $70,000 - $80,000 he could've gotten for developing software. He's now worked his way into a sales engineer position though, and with commissions he's probably clearing more with this position than I do as a full time developer.