If this continues, phone company executives will be forced to live a life of only semi-luxury.

Graphene will not bring a hooker back to life, so stop trying!

SPICE started out as somebody's research at UCLA Berkley and has since "inspired and served as a basis for many other circuit simulation programs, in academia, in industry, and in commercial products." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPICE

It seems like he was just trying to make headlines.

Couldn't you just have a friend login to your facebook profile and post a update while you're out committing crimes?

I got a great beginning by learning Flash. This worked well for me because initially, I got immediate gratification from seeing my colored shapes tween around the screen. Once I got bored with that, I was able to make more involved projects by learning ActionScript, which is a very well documented and teachable language. Although it limited you to working in Flash, it gave excellent results for not that much work, and it taught me the basics of programming in any language (IFs, loops, functions) Once I wanted to expand my horizons, learning c++ was easy as pie. It also game me a reason to learn things like PHP, mySQL, and JavaScript, to make even more useful and involved projects.