Btw... What's wrong with opening Google Maps in Safari and pinning it to the home screen? Opening it using the icon on the home screen should get rid of Safari's chrome if Google did this right.
You clearly have not been in that part of the world. You can make paper in your back yard, if you're patient enough.
Actually, I *live* in a similar part of the world, and as much as I can indeed make paper in me backyard if I'd feel like doing so, paper (tons of it anyway) happens to be pricey -- as is ink. I'm very suspicious that the bottom line cost is in favor of the mechanical typewriter.
Kids need to do homework (AKA practice) just like any other endeavor.
Eww, talk about dragging out that old mule of an argument. No offense, but you sound like a grumpy curmudgeon.
In other news, research upon research shows that homework is useless until very late in school. Research also suggests that less is more when it comes to learning -- at the very least in dogs, but I wouldn't be surprised the slightest bit, considering how homeschooled children tend to fare, that it also applies to humans.
Oh, and countries where people work less tend to fare higher on a variety of happiness and life quality scales unless I'm mistaking. (I'll let you google citations for that one, as homework, since I worked too much for you already; plus, you'll need to some try to find contrarian results to solve all that cognitive dissonance that's rearing it's ugly head, especially to dislocate the dissonance due to that you might learn something by doing homework after all.)
I estimate that maybe 80% of my adult patients born after 1975 are on some form of antidepressant drug.
Based on what? Your anecdotal evidence? You must be living in a very screwed up area. Plus, what kind of stat is that? 80% of your patients take anti-depressant drugs? Who knew?
The culprit, btw, may just as well have more to do with things such as a fucked up HR and management processes (which started in the 1960s and went full-on mental in the 1980s, what a coincidence), employee 360 evaluations, putting people in dead-end positions to pressure them out of their jobs, wage stagnation, and whatever increases stress levels of individuals and groups in the workplace.
I honestly have no fucking clue of the precise figure or reason. The only thing I do know, based on my own anecdotal evidence, and having been self-employed my whole work life, is that the least I can say is that I do not miss any of what little I experienced it while an intern in my early adulthood. It was all shite..
The next step is to get prescribed an antidepressant to help their bruised self-esteem cope with the fact that they never learned anything in school and are likely to remain unemployable for the rest of their lives.
Personally, I'm a lot less worried than you seem to be. Might you need a shrink to look into your anxiety issues, so he can prescribe you some anti-depressants?
Whether you do or not, and in case you need a yardstick for human adaptability, it literally took a year during WW2 for Europeans (the great majority of which were working in non-farm sectors at the war's onset) to relearn how to -- and actually -- grow potatoe in the face of food rationing. Almost everyone with anything resembling a garden grew some by 1941.
Not to mention, if they're all on anti-depressants and unemployed, someone has to pay for it. At some point the guy who pays will say "Stop!" and said anti-depressants -- the proverbial "be happy with your shit life" drugs if there are any -- will no longer be available to them. What happens then?
As in before, I can only offer you my best guess: when people have nothing to lose, they lose it. A quote from Jean Meslier in a similar context in case you need a colorful perspective: "May all the leading elite and noblemen get hanged and strangled with the bowels of clergymen."
Have you never encountered Shakespeare? It makes for an interesting and utterly geeky conversation with chicks every time, even when -- especially when -- they're allergic to math. Become the systems analyst for a brief moment, and let them come up with the actual code. Then pull out the laptop, compile their poetry, and watch them beam.
Lots of folks have strong logical thinking skills. Philosophers. Mathematicians. Lawyers. If logical thinking skills made a successful programmer these folks would be consistently good at it. They're usually not. In fact, mathematicians can be the worst: they think computer science is a subset of math and it really isn't.
Actually, you're technically incorrect on that last point. Anything that you can mathematically demonstrate can be calculated and vice versa. Not that knowing this is of much use in everyday coding of the type you do when you're maintaining a big ball of mud, but hey.
Also fwiw, and in my experience anyway, mathematicians are supremely better coders than CS guys: they abstract more, better, and faster, leading to fewer lines, fewer bugs, fewer edge cases left out, better tests, etc. (Your mileage may evidently vary, since everyone and his dog graduates nowadays.)
I think TFS misses on two big points that are helping to bring gaming to Linux.
One of which is Android. There are some pretty decent FPS games running on the SGS3 in 720p.
Android game development is probably doing Linux game development a disservice.
Basically, every variation of hardware and ROM is a debugging and support nightmare. Code that works on one device doesn't necessarily do so on the next. Fixing the bug on the next frequently introduces new bugs on the first. Heck, you can't even trust the same devices to work consistently, because they occasionally get subtle hardware changes.
Typically, you eat the extra development costs and develop on Android to try it out. You test it on leading devices before releasing. Upon releasing, you're then faced with a first hard reality: it adds little to your bottom line when compare to iOS sales. Still... assuming they compare or beat your extra development costs, you could conclude it was a worthwhile effort.
But oh how wrong you would be.
Peeking into the revues, you then notice many scathing, 1-star revues that mention how your app is buggy or crashes. Since you care about your customers and your reputation, you proceed to try to fix the issues. But as noted already, fixing them frequently introduces new bugs in devices that worked fine until now. And before you know, your full time job is dealing with Android-related issues.
That's the hidden cost related to developing Android games. The bug squash team's time would be much better spent developing new games. Your mileage may obviously vary, but some devs are quite open about it and their subsequent pulling out of Android for that reason.
In some respects, I think this will do Android a service in the long term, in the sense that devs might give up on devices, reducing fragmentation. When devs start telling customers to get lost unless they own a recent Nexus (other device makers be damned), things might work. Until they do, Android is a hard, cold reminder of everything that can potentially go wrong when driver support is poor or nonexistent.
The other one is the OUYA project, which is also built on Android. They've already raised over $8.5 million and they havent even shipped a console yet.
Oh wow! 8.5 million! Will the big publishers follow suit? I think not. That's pocket money compared to the billions being made on Windows and iOS.
While posting your ~400 comments, have you never noticed how modders tend to mod pro-Linux/Android/GPL and anti-MS/Apple comments up, and anti-Linux/Android/GPL and pro-MS/Apple down?
What would be the difference with a screen that is also cut a bit wider? More pixels is more pixels, I doubt it costs much different if they are on a wider or taller screen. Its not like the screens come on a giant roll that gets cut.
But then you'd need to change the assets in all apps. In particular icons.
If your professional or commercial circumstances require that you get a certificate or a degree just so people can cut to the chase and know that you are more reliable than the thousands of other pretenders, just go get the certificate, even if it means nothing more to you than toilet paper.
If the certificate is worth little to nothing, and most if not all certificate and degree do, I fail to see why I should enrich whichever self-proclaimed authority is issuing them. Seriously... Think for a second about the kind of egocentric parasite that it takes, to create a certificate out of thin air and to convince enough people of its value that it subsequently becomes a must-have piece of expensive toilet paper.
It allows to use the same displays as those manufactured for the iPhone 4's retina display, cut a bit longer. The cost overhead is likely very low as a result. Also, it allows older apps to run without any updates.
The author's take on this is further down in the comment section of Bookalicious. Quoting the key parts:
I want you to understand something. We contacted Ms. Marr and Harper Collins, way back in June and asked them to please respect our trademark. (...). My wife and I have built our company Carnival Comics over the last 10 years. In that time, we invested endless hours and tons of money building our brands. We have been very blessed. Carnival Of Souls, our series was the number 1 ebook on Blackberry for over a year. It was featured in the LA Times. (...)
So we protected our time and money and brand by registering a trademark for CARNIVAL OF SOULS. I started using the mark in commerce, way back in 2004. I applied for registration in 2009. and the USPTO granted me a mark.
The person you should be mad at is Harper Collins, who themselves own trademarks for book series. This is a big company, looking at someones lifetime of work and just taking it. We begged them to do the right thing. I had hoped Mrs. Marr would stand up for the rights of trademark owners, but she did not. Would you be angry at J.K. Rowling for stopping someone from putting out a HARRY POTTER series? She has a trademark as well.
See my point? I am not doing anything but trying to save my series from an out and out attack by a billion dollar corporation that feels they are above the law. I knew that if they released the Marr book, I would be the bad guy, for trying to defend my trademark. But what else can I do? Would J.K. sit back while someone else released another HARRY POTTER series. I think if you look at the facts in the case, you will see, that Harper Collins, should have not released a book and series, with a mark that they knew, was already out there.
Oh, it's simple enough to do with two separate fields and a check constraint. That's how you'd do it i other DB engines, in fact.
Ensuring there are no overlaps is an entirely different story, however: queries against those two fields cannot make any reasonable use of an index. The ranged type, by contrast, allows you to query the data using a nearest neighbour search and a GiST index.
Think of a GiST index as indexing the smallest boxes that enclose your shapes of interest. When queried, the DB scans for boxes that overlap your box of interest, and discards rows that don't match the data's actual shape.
"Experts" have been incorrectly predicting that vast swaths of humanity would startve to death at least since Malthus. How can claims like this still be taken seriously?
Because they're not claiming sensationalistic Malthusian version of "we're doomed, there are too many people" and instead merely pointing out that people revolt when they don't make enough to feed their family.
The WHO warns about similar numbers of people facing obesity problems as they do starvation problems.
That's an entirely different topic. Obesity is above all related to sugar consumption -- or more specifically, fructose consumption -- if recent developments in nutrition are anything to go by. If we distribute snack bars, sweet water and fruit juice in Japan, China or Africa, we'll start seeing rampant obesity there too. Make that since we do, actually.
Yes, there will always be governments that withhold food as a weapon against their own citizens, but beyond that any claim of a food shortage just seems silly.
You've the wrong culprit there.
Even accounting for the occasional drought such as this year in the US, we indeed currently produce more that enough food to feed everyone on the planet and more. The primary withholders of food, however, are the major food exporters. Chief among them, the USA and the EU, so as to keep food prices high enough to sustain farmers -- which makes sense, when you scratch the surface, since the last thing you want in case of total war is to depend on food imports.
At any rate, and contrary to what you're suggesting, no government in its right mind willfully withholds food from its population. Food shortage is the surest path to revolts and uprising. Because when you've nothing to lose, you basically lose it.
No paranoid parent would/should give a 7 year old as something as breakable and valuable as a multi-hundred dollar laptop
FTFY. Seriously. Just explain to them that the device is fragile, and that NO fighting for it will be tolerated.
Kids, especially at age 4+, are by no means dumb or clumsy; if you tell them beforehand that they need to pay attention that it never drops on the floor, and show that you trust them, they'll pay attention and do their very best to deserve that trust -- to make daddy proud.
Sure, accidents can happen. But do you keep them in a sterile environment so they don't catch a cold?
(Fwiw, I've a tablet that got its first bumps and scratches due to a friend's 13-year old daughter. The fucking brat needed the entire dining room table room to do her homework, so she wiped everything on it to the floor: phone, tablet, laptop, you name it. At least three dozen 4-8 year olds and two cats had played with the tablet unsupervised prior to that event; it had no scratches.)
+1. TFS's reason for not wanting an iPad left me skeptical.
Educational apps are second only to games in numbers. Both of these app store categories cater tremendously to kids. Some of the edu apps are really great.
If you want the kid to play with code, toss in Codea. The language underneath is Lua, which is very easy to pick up.
Mid- to long-term, chances are that schools will either supply or require a tablet (likely an iPad) for textbooks, edu apps or whatever. Imho, don't fight this trend; embrace it.
That being said, wait a month or so for Apple's next event if you're not in a rush. Rumor has it that Apple will announce a 7.85" iPad. (As much as kids love to play with my own iPad, it's clearly too heavy for 4-7 year olds; a smaller one would be a much better fit for their tiny fingers and juvenile forearms.)
Experience is something you don't get out of a vacuum (unless you are naturally talented, which most of us really are not.) The best thing for someone that is starting up in this business is to get a job with a good company or good team known for having some standards and a track record of putting quality systems up.
I respectfully disagree. The best thing one can do in this business is to create your own business upon hitting the job market -- if not before.
When the OP is done with university, complete with a few internships and several years of part-time freelancing behind him, I fail to see any reasonable incompatibility with becoming a freelance if that's his thing.
The "you need experience from working for a real company" sort of argument has no merit whatsoever for go-getters. (If it did, you'd never hear of people starting businesses at age 20.) You learn a lot more from other entrepreneurs, employees, clients, contractors, freelances you periodically partner with, forums, whatever, and by facing problems you never imagined you'd ever run into but still need to solve by yesterday -- typically the ones that make you traverse your address book and call contact upon contact until you find potential solutions.
The only realistic replacement argument I could offer is this one: you won't learn (or work) much if you work on your own, in complete isolation except for the occasional customer you interact with. As long as you don't do that, it doesn't matter the slightest bit if you're a corporate drone, a freelance or a serial entrepreneur. You'll be gaining experience over the years.
You cannot expect to say "I've just finished my secondary education.... I think I'll become a freelance programmer". Nobody will touch you. The first thing you need is experience. The second thing you need is more experience. After that, you need to demostrate a good, long, relaible history of producing successful results in sectors that have lots of vacancies.
That's only true if you try to sell your services to larger-sized businesses.
Most small businesses happily hire freelancers, whether in the EU or elsewhere. Any freelancer, really. It's a matter of picking up your phone or meeting the customer in person to present yourself. Almost literally "Might you have a few minutes to discuss your potential needs for IT help?" Most small businesses have very real IT needs that are poorly catered to, if at all. They're usually overworked and understaffed, and cannot afford a permanent, competent IT presence: whoever tinkers IT best usually takes care of it. More than a few small businesses are extremely happy to have the name of a local freelance or two on file.
Adding to this, small business owners invariably know each other in small to mid-sized cities, by means of entrepreneur clubs, meet-ups or simply running into one-another on a regular basis. If you make a few happy, you get phone calls from their business owning buddies.
You end up doing all sorts of odd jobs at first, ranging from setting up or changing a small web site to helping with PC installs and upgrades or cleaning up a virus-soaked PC, but it's an excellent way to establish business connections once the word is out. And inasfar as I read TFS, those jobs are exactly what OP wants.
You will also find that in some european countries, no company will hire you directly as the employment and tax laws could make the company liable if you fail to pay your taxes. The company could also find that i'ts taken on an employee, and that you have employment rights (long holiday entitlements - 25 days paid, min. , sick pay, pension, and/or that you are unsackable if you "contract" there for too long.
What you describe is for part-time or temporary employees.
When freelancing, customers contract with your company or some corporate version of yourself (the exact legal shape varies by country). In fact, one of your potential selling points is that they get to work with you without the hassles related to you being an employee. Your company/corporate self is responsible for paying taxes, pensions and what not, and that is something you usually hire an accountant for. (Asking the local chambers of commerce/Companies house also works.)
That being said, the OP should more simply ask around to know how individuals who clean houses or teach music are set up. He probably wants the same status (if it's legal) until he's either done with school and university or taking on large projects.
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds me of a sexist quote I once saw denounced on a feminist website:
Recruiter -- what's your understanding of a good salary?
Applicant (sales job) -- more than my wife can ever manage to spend.
Oddly, the pirate nation in chief, if history should remember any, no longer tolerates piracy today...
http://ageofpirates.com/article.php?English_Privateers
I'm suspicious. You really think these whack jobs deserve the publicity? They're already prominently featured on slashdot, ffs...
Yeah, my 3GS is eligible for iOS 6 - but there's no way I'm upgrading until Google's standalone Maps app is released.
That might be a very long wait/a.
Btw... What's wrong with opening Google Maps in Safari and pinning it to the home screen? Opening it using the icon on the home screen should get rid of Safari's chrome if Google did this right.
You clearly have not been in that part of the world. You can make paper in your back yard, if you're patient enough.
Actually, I *live* in a similar part of the world, and as much as I can indeed make paper in me backyard if I'd feel like doing so, paper (tons of it anyway) happens to be pricey -- as is ink. I'm very suspicious that the bottom line cost is in favor of the mechanical typewriter.
Plus, it needs paper...
Kids need to do homework (AKA practice) just like any other endeavor.
Eww, talk about dragging out that old mule of an argument. No offense, but you sound like a grumpy curmudgeon.
In other news, research upon research shows that homework is useless until very late in school. Research also suggests that less is more when it comes to learning -- at the very least in dogs, but I wouldn't be surprised the slightest bit, considering how homeschooled children tend to fare, that it also applies to humans.
Oh, and countries where people work less tend to fare higher on a variety of happiness and life quality scales unless I'm mistaking. (I'll let you google citations for that one, as homework, since I worked too much for you already; plus, you'll need to some try to find contrarian results to solve all that cognitive dissonance that's rearing it's ugly head, especially to dislocate the dissonance due to that you might learn something by doing homework after all.)
I estimate that maybe 80% of my adult patients born after 1975 are on some form of antidepressant drug.
Based on what? Your anecdotal evidence? You must be living in a very screwed up area. Plus, what kind of stat is that? 80% of your patients take anti-depressant drugs? Who knew?
The culprit, btw, may just as well have more to do with things such as a fucked up HR and management processes (which started in the 1960s and went full-on mental in the 1980s, what a coincidence), employee 360 evaluations, putting people in dead-end positions to pressure them out of their jobs, wage stagnation, and whatever increases stress levels of individuals and groups in the workplace.
I honestly have no fucking clue of the precise figure or reason. The only thing I do know, based on my own anecdotal evidence, and having been self-employed my whole work life, is that the least I can say is that I do not miss any of what little I experienced it while an intern in my early adulthood. It was all shite..
The next step is to get prescribed an antidepressant to help their bruised self-esteem cope with the fact that they never learned anything in school and are likely to remain unemployable for the rest of their lives.
Personally, I'm a lot less worried than you seem to be. Might you need a shrink to look into your anxiety issues, so he can prescribe you some anti-depressants?
Whether you do or not, and in case you need a yardstick for human adaptability, it literally took a year during WW2 for Europeans (the great majority of which were working in non-farm sectors at the war's onset) to relearn how to -- and actually -- grow potatoe in the face of food rationing. Almost everyone with anything resembling a garden grew some by 1941.
Not to mention, if they're all on anti-depressants and unemployed, someone has to pay for it. At some point the guy who pays will say "Stop!" and said anti-depressants -- the proverbial "be happy with your shit life" drugs if there are any -- will no longer be available to them. What happens then?
As in before, I can only offer you my best guess: when people have nothing to lose, they lose it. A quote from Jean Meslier in a similar context in case you need a colorful perspective: "May all the leading elite and noblemen get hanged and strangled with the bowels of clergymen."
Have you never encountered Shakespeare? It makes for an interesting and utterly geeky conversation with chicks every time, even when -- especially when -- they're allergic to math. Become the systems analyst for a brief moment, and let them come up with the actual code. Then pull out the laptop, compile their poetry, and watch them beam.
Lots of folks have strong logical thinking skills. Philosophers. Mathematicians. Lawyers. If logical thinking skills made a successful programmer these folks would be consistently good at it. They're usually not. In fact, mathematicians can be the worst: they think computer science is a subset of math and it really isn't.
Actually, you're technically incorrect on that last point. Anything that you can mathematically demonstrate can be calculated and vice versa. Not that knowing this is of much use in everyday coding of the type you do when you're maintaining a big ball of mud, but hey.
Also fwiw, and in my experience anyway, mathematicians are supremely better coders than CS guys: they abstract more, better, and faster, leading to fewer lines, fewer bugs, fewer edge cases left out, better tests, etc. (Your mileage may evidently vary, since everyone and his dog graduates nowadays.)
More often than not, I've found it actually is a three constraint problem. Work, play, women; pick two.
10 as in two, or ten?
I think the biggest issue is Direct X. It is what continues to flock developers and big studios to the Window's platform.
TFTFY
I think TFS misses on two big points that are helping to bring gaming to Linux.
One of which is Android. There are some pretty decent FPS games running on the SGS3 in 720p.
Android game development is probably doing Linux game development a disservice.
Basically, every variation of hardware and ROM is a debugging and support nightmare. Code that works on one device doesn't necessarily do so on the next. Fixing the bug on the next frequently introduces new bugs on the first. Heck, you can't even trust the same devices to work consistently, because they occasionally get subtle hardware changes.
Typically, you eat the extra development costs and develop on Android to try it out. You test it on leading devices before releasing. Upon releasing, you're then faced with a first hard reality: it adds little to your bottom line when compare to iOS sales. Still... assuming they compare or beat your extra development costs, you could conclude it was a worthwhile effort.
But oh how wrong you would be.
Peeking into the revues, you then notice many scathing, 1-star revues that mention how your app is buggy or crashes. Since you care about your customers and your reputation, you proceed to try to fix the issues. But as noted already, fixing them frequently introduces new bugs in devices that worked fine until now. And before you know, your full time job is dealing with Android-related issues.
That's the hidden cost related to developing Android games. The bug squash team's time would be much better spent developing new games. Your mileage may obviously vary, but some devs are quite open about it and their subsequent pulling out of Android for that reason.
In some respects, I think this will do Android a service in the long term, in the sense that devs might give up on devices, reducing fragmentation. When devs start telling customers to get lost unless they own a recent Nexus (other device makers be damned), things might work. Until they do, Android is a hard, cold reminder of everything that can potentially go wrong when driver support is poor or nonexistent.
The other one is the OUYA project, which is also built on Android. They've already raised over $8.5 million and they havent even shipped a console yet.
Oh wow! 8.5 million! Will the big publishers follow suit? I think not. That's pocket money compared to the billions being made on Windows and iOS.
And why on Earth was I modded troll?
While posting your ~400 comments, have you never noticed how modders tend to mod pro-Linux/Android/GPL and anti-MS/Apple comments up, and anti-Linux/Android/GPL and pro-MS/Apple down?
What would be the difference with a screen that is also cut a bit wider? More pixels is more pixels, I doubt it costs much different if they are on a wider or taller screen. Its not like the screens come on a giant roll that gets cut.
But then you'd need to change the assets in all apps. In particular icons.
If your professional or commercial circumstances require that you get a certificate or a degree just so people can cut to the chase and know that you are more reliable than the thousands of other pretenders, just go get the certificate, even if it means nothing more to you than toilet paper.
If the certificate is worth little to nothing, and most if not all certificate and degree do, I fail to see why I should enrich whichever self-proclaimed authority is issuing them. Seriously... Think for a second about the kind of egocentric parasite that it takes, to create a certificate out of thin air and to convince enough people of its value that it subsequently becomes a must-have piece of expensive toilet paper.
It allows to use the same displays as those manufactured for the iPhone 4's retina display, cut a bit longer. The cost overhead is likely very low as a result. Also, it allows older apps to run without any updates.
The author's take on this is further down in the comment section of Bookalicious. Quoting the key parts:
I want you to understand something. We contacted Ms. Marr and Harper Collins, way back in June and asked them to please respect our trademark. (...). My wife and I have built our company Carnival Comics over the last 10 years. In that time, we invested endless hours and tons of money building our brands. We have been very blessed. Carnival Of Souls, our series was the number 1 ebook on Blackberry for over a year. It was featured in the LA Times. (...)
So we protected our time and money and brand by registering a trademark for CARNIVAL OF SOULS. I started using the mark in commerce, way back in 2004. I applied for registration in 2009. and the USPTO granted me a mark.
The person you should be mad at is Harper Collins, who themselves own trademarks for book series. This is a big company, looking at someones lifetime of work and just taking it. We begged them to do the right thing. I had hoped Mrs. Marr would stand up for the rights of trademark owners, but she did not. Would you be angry at J.K. Rowling for stopping someone from putting out a HARRY POTTER series? She has a trademark as well.
See my point? I am not doing anything but trying to save my series from an out and out attack by a billion dollar corporation that feels they are above the law. I knew that if they released the Marr book, I would be the bad guy, for trying to defend my trademark. But what else can I do? Would J.K. sit back while someone else released another HARRY POTTER series. I think if you look at the facts in the case, you will see, that Harper Collins, should have not released a book and series, with a mark that they knew, was already out there.
Oh, it's simple enough to do with two separate fields and a check constraint. That's how you'd do it i other DB engines, in fact.
Ensuring there are no overlaps is an entirely different story, however: queries against those two fields cannot make any reasonable use of an index. The ranged type, by contrast, allows you to query the data using a nearest neighbour search and a GiST index.
Think of a GiST index as indexing the smallest boxes that enclose your shapes of interest. When queried, the DB scans for boxes that overlap your box of interest, and discards rows that don't match the data's actual shape.
"Experts" have been incorrectly predicting that vast swaths of humanity would startve to death at least since Malthus. How can claims like this still be taken seriously?
Because they're not claiming sensationalistic Malthusian version of "we're doomed, there are too many people" and instead merely pointing out that people revolt when they don't make enough to feed their family.
The WHO warns about similar numbers of people facing obesity problems as they do starvation problems.
That's an entirely different topic. Obesity is above all related to sugar consumption -- or more specifically, fructose consumption -- if recent developments in nutrition are anything to go by. If we distribute snack bars, sweet water and fruit juice in Japan, China or Africa, we'll start seeing rampant obesity there too. Make that since we do, actually.
Yes, there will always be governments that withhold food as a weapon against their own citizens, but beyond that any claim of a food shortage just seems silly.
You've the wrong culprit there.
Even accounting for the occasional drought such as this year in the US, we indeed currently produce more that enough food to feed everyone on the planet and more. The primary withholders of food, however, are the major food exporters. Chief among them, the USA and the EU, so as to keep food prices high enough to sustain farmers -- which makes sense, when you scratch the surface, since the last thing you want in case of total war is to depend on food imports.
At any rate, and contrary to what you're suggesting, no government in its right mind willfully withholds food from its population. Food shortage is the surest path to revolts and uprising. Because when you've nothing to lose, you basically lose it.
Color me confused. Doesn't red + blue = purple? Since when is it green?
No paranoid parent would/should give a 7 year old as something as breakable and valuable as a multi-hundred dollar laptop
FTFY. Seriously. Just explain to them that the device is fragile, and that NO fighting for it will be tolerated.
Kids, especially at age 4+, are by no means dumb or clumsy; if you tell them beforehand that they need to pay attention that it never drops on the floor, and show that you trust them, they'll pay attention and do their very best to deserve that trust -- to make daddy proud.
Sure, accidents can happen. But do you keep them in a sterile environment so they don't catch a cold?
(Fwiw, I've a tablet that got its first bumps and scratches due to a friend's 13-year old daughter. The fucking brat needed the entire dining room table room to do her homework, so she wiped everything on it to the floor: phone, tablet, laptop, you name it. At least three dozen 4-8 year olds and two cats had played with the tablet unsupervised prior to that event; it had no scratches.)
+1. TFS's reason for not wanting an iPad left me skeptical.
Educational apps are second only to games in numbers. Both of these app store categories cater tremendously to kids. Some of the edu apps are really great.
If you want the kid to play with code, toss in Codea. The language underneath is Lua, which is very easy to pick up.
Mid- to long-term, chances are that schools will either supply or require a tablet (likely an iPad) for textbooks, edu apps or whatever. Imho, don't fight this trend; embrace it.
That being said, wait a month or so for Apple's next event if you're not in a rush. Rumor has it that Apple will announce a 7.85" iPad. (As much as kids love to play with my own iPad, it's clearly too heavy for 4-7 year olds; a smaller one would be a much better fit for their tiny fingers and juvenile forearms.)
Experience is something you don't get out of a vacuum (unless you are naturally talented, which most of us really are not.) The best thing for someone that is starting up in this business is to get a job with a good company or good team known for having some standards and a track record of putting quality systems up.
I respectfully disagree. The best thing one can do in this business is to create your own business upon hitting the job market -- if not before.
When the OP is done with university, complete with a few internships and several years of part-time freelancing behind him, I fail to see any reasonable incompatibility with becoming a freelance if that's his thing.
The "you need experience from working for a real company" sort of argument has no merit whatsoever for go-getters. (If it did, you'd never hear of people starting businesses at age 20.) You learn a lot more from other entrepreneurs, employees, clients, contractors, freelances you periodically partner with, forums, whatever, and by facing problems you never imagined you'd ever run into but still need to solve by yesterday -- typically the ones that make you traverse your address book and call contact upon contact until you find potential solutions.
The only realistic replacement argument I could offer is this one: you won't learn (or work) much if you work on your own, in complete isolation except for the occasional customer you interact with. As long as you don't do that, it doesn't matter the slightest bit if you're a corporate drone, a freelance or a serial entrepreneur. You'll be gaining experience over the years.
You cannot expect to say "I've just finished my secondary education .... I think I'll become a freelance programmer". Nobody will touch you. The first thing you need is experience. The second thing you need is more experience. After that, you need to demostrate a good, long, relaible history of producing successful results in sectors that have lots of vacancies.
That's only true if you try to sell your services to larger-sized businesses.
Most small businesses happily hire freelancers, whether in the EU or elsewhere. Any freelancer, really. It's a matter of picking up your phone or meeting the customer in person to present yourself. Almost literally "Might you have a few minutes to discuss your potential needs for IT help?" Most small businesses have very real IT needs that are poorly catered to, if at all. They're usually overworked and understaffed, and cannot afford a permanent, competent IT presence: whoever tinkers IT best usually takes care of it. More than a few small businesses are extremely happy to have the name of a local freelance or two on file.
Adding to this, small business owners invariably know each other in small to mid-sized cities, by means of entrepreneur clubs, meet-ups or simply running into one-another on a regular basis. If you make a few happy, you get phone calls from their business owning buddies.
You end up doing all sorts of odd jobs at first, ranging from setting up or changing a small web site to helping with PC installs and upgrades or cleaning up a virus-soaked PC, but it's an excellent way to establish business connections once the word is out. And inasfar as I read TFS, those jobs are exactly what OP wants.
You will also find that in some european countries, no company will hire you directly as the employment and tax laws could make the company liable if you fail to pay your taxes. The company could also find that i'ts taken on an employee, and that you have employment rights (long holiday entitlements - 25 days paid, min. , sick pay, pension, and/or that you are unsackable if you "contract" there for too long.
What you describe is for part-time or temporary employees.
When freelancing, customers contract with your company or some corporate version of yourself (the exact legal shape varies by country). In fact, one of your potential selling points is that they get to work with you without the hassles related to you being an employee. Your company/corporate self is responsible for paying taxes, pensions and what not, and that is something you usually hire an accountant for. (Asking the local chambers of commerce/Companies house also works.)
That being said, the OP should more simply ask around to know how individuals who clean houses or teach music are set up. He probably wants the same status (if it's legal) until he's either done with school and university or taking on large projects.