You mean write real code that does something... like a web browser?

"Taking tougher classes in school" isn't an option for the vast majority of people, for every millionaire investment banker there are tens of thousands of people who have been worried about keeping food on their plate, and their families plates, since they were old enough to understand that they needed to. That kind of poverty prevents them from focusing on schooling in all but the absolutely most driven people, there isn't anywhere near the level of opportunity provided to the impoverished as is provided to those who are raised wealthy.

Admittedly, this is a human condition, it's been like this for a few centuries. Those who want to succeed need to overcome it, but it's not as cut and dry as you're portraying it, and it's a very long shot from a level playing field that you can point a finger at and say "look, it's your own fault you're not a millionaire".

My dad sat me down when I was eight years old with the "Turbo C++ Bible" and had me copy the first example out of the portion dealing with graphics, this changed my life forever, but had very little to do with my dad and everything to do with the fact that I became immediately enraptured with my ability to make the computer do what I wanted. If that facet of programming doesn't have any sway with your son, there is probably a slim chance that he'll self educate (as is mandatory for anyone who wants to program professionally) but there is a trump card that I can think of that might help you out here: mobile development. I bet if you got your son an android device under the condition that he would learn how to develop applications for it it would turn out well for both parties. The main advantage here is that Android development is easy, and you can immediately interact with something on your phone that you've coded, which is way, way, way more engaging than white text on a black console, which is how most people start out. As a parent I'd say you don't have the ability to force your son to be a programmer, you do have the ability to enable him though.

I'm not one to take the word of a New York times columnist as absolute fact, but the review you yourself have posted of that book clearly indicates that it's horribly embellished.

They should task all of the potentially soon to be laid off workers with the new full time goal of dismantling internet censorship in China. I for one would welcome WWIII at their hands.

Facebook started out as a closed community available only to ivy league universities, but then eventually used the fanaticism of that user base to leverage its growth. I think that this won't be as large as facebook because step 2 can't really happen, but it's a far cry from something that just flat out won't work. A 'trekkie' is by definition already a fanatic so this might not be such a bad demographic.

If you keep the thing in your pocket there shouldn't be nearly that much of a problem, you would have to regularly be talking on the thing for an hour at a time in cold weather to reproduce this.

I know you want "free" resources, but IMO having legalzoom monitor all of this for you is easily worth the ~$100/yr you pay them for it, they alert you of all compliance deadlines for S/C/whatever corporations year round, tell you when to file your taxes, provide templates, guidelines and contracts for contracting, shareholders, act as the registered agent and respond to any state or federal inquiries immediately, giving you your own time to come up with a response... There are many more benefits to it, and I'm sorry if I sound like a fanboy but from my perspective I just paid them to take care of this and it was really worth it to never have to think about it and just follow the instructions on their website. That is kind of the point, instead of paying a lawyer x-thousand dollars to do this, they come up with professionally prepared, general resources similar to what you would get if you hired a lawyer, and make them available at a reduced price.

I have a few large scale magento projects under my belt, and I just want to pipe in here.

even the later systems are frequently criticized as suffering from poorly-written code and inadequate documentation

Magento does do a better job in these areas than say, osCommerce, but there are still massively underdocumented portions of the code base. The code is clean and extensible, but horribly inefficient, to the point where a lot of people speculate that the Magento team wants it to be like that, so when your store takes off you are more likely to hire them to speed things up.

I usually find experts exchange to be pretty well informed on the answers they give out, also a little trick that not a lot of people know about: If you scroll to the bottom of the page you'll find all of the answers to the question being asked, whether or not you have a paid for account.

1. portscan everything on your entire network and spit it out into a text file
2. set up a wiki
3. paste the results of the portscan into the wiki
4. start writing about everything that showed up


i've actually done this before with a pretty high degree of success, pm me if you want some help setting it up

curiously enough, this has been done in the proposal shown...

I don't really see facebook disappearing any time soon, there is an awful lot of value there for the people who use it. It's the equivalent of a "box of polariods" for about half of all college students in the US.

I'm not really clear on why he needs to use online data storage when he could just buy a computer and copy the files onto it.