Even if you're a FT employee, you are always selling yourself -- to your one and only client. The only difference with self-employment is you wake up to this fact (or starve, go back to selling yourself during a FT employment interview) and may have more than once client at a time. Even some FT employees work two or more jobs to get by. Self-employment is similar.

Want to get excellent at sales (even if you're going to stay with FT employment)? Read and re-read: Socratic Sales.

A lot of people believe that start-ups succeed or fail because of cash (enough or too little). Certainly cash flow is king when it comes to staying in business. However, the reality is: You either have time or you have money. It takes time to develop a clientèle through carefully crafted product fulfillment and good service. Or you can accelerate this process through expensive advertising. You can burn through a lot of cash if you solve everything with it. Or you can be more creative and leverage time, including other people's time, and spend from less to zero. Time and persistence can pay big dividends.

So, hone your skills. Sell them. Watch your cash. Develop relationships (clients vs customers). Bank!

The math works like this...

Apple: Government
Top 1%: "Job creators"
Bottom 80%: The poor saps

Apple takes 33% from 100% of all developers.

USA: Government
Top 1%: "Job creators"
Bottom 80%: The "poor" ([rolls eyes] have you visited Bolivia? Somalia? Haiti?)

USA takes 10%, 15%, 25%, 28%, 33% and 35% from citizens -- generally, depending on income level.

The highest tax brackets have been in decline since 2000:
1993–2000: 39.6%
2001: 39.1%
2002: 38.6%
2003–2007: 35%

Coincidently, so have incomes for the bottom 80% of US citizens (especially if one considers cost increases e.g. health care, interest rates on personal credit).

In the USA, 1% of the people are millionaires. In the US Congress, 48% of members are millionaires. Who do you think is duping who? It was once a government By the people, For the people. Now it boils down to, "Corporations are people, too, ya know!". So our once great country is now in tatters -- as far as people are concerned. Yet it remains a fantastic playground for corporations. Yay!

So, let that be a lesson for you, China. Oh... I'm sorry. Too late. You see, you will never grow to be the great country the USA once was because you are trying to emulate the wrong version of our government. Too bad for you.

Make the leap to Consultant. Consultant is just another word for "continuous, steep learning curve". At 30 it's a setup for failure. At 50 it's just right. Am on my 8th year, strictly corp-to-corp (including via regular recruiters) and it pays incredibly well. Corporations just want solutions. You just want to code. Perfect!

Why won't Google just use the Force?

New study out shows a distinct correlation between desktop preference and IQ.

Preemptive: Looks as though it might have been a hoax.

Really? Do I really need to enumerate for you the virtually endless list of hyper-corrupt small governments? Oh. I get it. You're just trolling. Cool. (No one could be that full of BS.)

"the battle for second place is neck and neck" Hey, if you're not first, you're last -- Ricky Bobby

Anonymous programmed one Gigabyte of data from NATO Huh...

"The AnonymousIRC software development organization have claimed this afternoon that they have programmed into NATO servers" Programmed into?

Hate to be a grammar Nazi but the message is a bit twisted. What did they do again?

"OTOH, who usually cleans up any messes that happens with it? Who gets blamed if the cloud provider has an outage?"

Precisely the stuff of why more IT professionals are moving to cloud vendors: Most people want to be seen as valuable contributors to the success of something.

So... Win, win?

I know a guy from La Paz who's first name is Pier? Yeah, that's the ticket...

"Researchers at the the National University of Cuyo, in Mendoza, Argentina"

Pier reviews or it didn't happen.

"I have always liked... Cowabunga."

"So, what, we solve this problem by voting for the dudes that say they're honest and working for the people?"

No. Just convince Glen Beck that patents are the spawn of the Devil. Congress will fix this inside of a week.