I saw no posts modded "5, Informative", so I thought I'd take a crack at it.

http://www.alice.org/ - software designed to disguise programming as storytelling. Aimed at young children and women, not really suitable for the 14-year-old-boy types.

He likes games, so start him onto games. Most first year computer science students at my university think they want to develop games. They figure out differently by about year 3. Start with Unreal Engine 2, or something like that, and let him build small levels for Quake/Doom/etc. There is a fair amount of programming-like scripting that goes into level generation.

I have played hundreds of games of WC3 dota, a thousand games of heroes of newerth, and I have to say your perspective resembles that of other noobs who misunderstand the game. Particularly, this statement is just plain wrong:

The more you play the hon, the more aggressive it gets.

I received my heroes of newerth beta key last July, and have been playing regularly ever since. I have played hundreds of games on both the windows and linux clients. The linux client works great and I suggest you try this game out :-).

A uniform in an IT company, where business casual is the norm, is insulting. If they want you to appear distinct, issue badges, or neon lanyards, etc.

Yes, daily active users is a proxy for revenue. Furthermore, 11% decline in revenue is >= 11% decline in profit, right? This certainly has Zynga's attention. This is an interesting example of a company pissing off their customers in an extremely lubricated market.

Note that Zynga was never particularly concerned with the quality of their gameplay.

I didn't read TFA too closely, and I appreciate all of the political hilarity above, but isn't the real lesson here back up your data? The guy was wailing about how he almost lost years of work.

The summary paints 'publicly display aggregate and non-personally identifiable statistics about particular shortened links' in a negative light, but this is actually a feature of su.pr.

'Su.pr is the only URL shortener that also helps your content get discovered! Every Su.pr URL exposes your content to StumbleUpon's nearly 8 million users!'. Yes well now it isn't the only one :p.

Google does some bad shit, but I'm getting a little tired of people pretending they are clever because they 'out' google for doing some nefarious value-adding or reasonable activity.

Article on hacker news yesterday:
'If Microsoft had Google’s market share in search, is there any doubt that they’d be systematically demoting or even banning their competitors in the search results? Demoting someone in Google is a virtual death sentence, and yet not only has Google never been accused of using this vast power, the idea itself is almost unimaginable.'

yeah! good editors should detect spelling mistakes, but I still may have been unnecessary to say microsoft was raped by a judge ;)

The interesting thing about this case, to me, is that Amazon's lawful customer will receive a bill in the mail for hacker usage charges.

EC2 instances will run Windows.

You're modded Insightful, but your comment is unfortunately off topic. The Japanese were a credible threat, Pearl Harbor was a preliminary strike, to be followed by like, a real war, and the WW2 and modern day political climates are completely different. For one thing, the Axis really was the biggest threat to the quality of life of the average citizen, hardly a claim any terrorist can back up with data. Although I guess these days there is data to suggest that a single terrorist attack really can affect average quality of life :/.

very interesting point.. who knew the secret to weight loss might be a fitness drug ;)