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Off-topic but important to note: Dundee is not a "small Scottish town" but is a medium-sized city in the UK, the fourth-largest in Scotland:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dundee

I was once where you are now. My kids are not yet grown up, but both are older than your six-month old, so I can offer a bit of perspective. I will stick with my eldest here and will detail some of his life at the moment for perspective on what we did. I see this as giving you the benefit of learning from our experience and perhaps (hopefully) improving upon it. Our son is doing a lot better than many children his age, but I am sure there are others who are doing better than he. I, myself, wish I had accomplished half of what he has done by the time I was his age.

My eldest is 8 years old. He knows the basics of computer programming already, but he taught it to himself. Where we are native English speakers, he reads and speaks German without an accent. He also understands some French and a smattering of other languages. He reads at a 10 year old reading level, and has mathematics skills at the same level. His writing level is a bit lower. He is also one of the most affable children in his class, known and loved by all, and is generally thought of as conducting himself well, better than many of his peers. He has a solid grasp of the solar system and the fundamentals of astronomy; last year he found the four Galilean moons of Jupiter himself. On his own, he built his own electronics switch when he was barely six and still plays with electronics. He also has recently finished reading about WW1 and WW2, touching upon the Russian Revolution and the Great Depression along the way. And these were not little kid readings. He read "Im Westen nichts neues" - the German original of "All Quiet on the Western Front" - as well as "The Diary of Anne Frank" and several other works from various angles. I am already getting books for him out of the local university library. I say all this to illustrate that he is pretty far ahead of the game in many ways, and he has enjoyed all of it.

Now this is the tack that we have taken. First, we are big fans of the Mozart Effect on children. So we played Mozart a LOT when he was in utero and when he was a baby. We tended to play one of the major composers (Mozart, Beethoven, Bach) more often than other types of music until he was seven. We took to heart Hitler's observation about the importance the influences up to seven play. Therefore, we specifically kept from him any music that came out prior to about 1965. After that point, the lyrics and music start to become more complicated as protests and the civil strife of the time enter the music and then become "free love" and all that. We will now let him hear some of that, but not until he had a foundation from which to understand it.

One of our major guiding principles is to avoid something that might be abusive. "Abusive" is here defined as allowing something to enter your child's world for which s/he has no or very little framework for understanding it. So we were at pains to give him a framework and help him understand things in life as he encountered them early on.

Finally, we try our best not to say "no" when he wants to explore something. Rather, we do our best to find a way that he can safely delve in. For example, he found out the sixth graders at school were studying WW2. He wanted to learn, too, but the school wouldn't let him because he was in third grade. He approached me, and I cobbled together a reading list and a list of films that he could use to work through WW2. As WW2 makes no sense without WW1, he started there. So the point here is to never, ever, EVER limit your child but to take their curiosity as an invitation to find a way to help them interact with the world in a safe way.

We started playing and speaking French with him when he was two. When he was three, he caught a whiff of German and decided that he would rather learn German than French, so we switched (I speak both). We used Early Advantage's Muzzy program and cannot recommend it enough. It is an award-winning program that was developed by the BBC for teaching foreign languages to children. Combined with doing it at home, we also sought out speakers of the target language to help him learn. Today, my son reads full length novels in German and is yet to watch Apollo 13 in English. When I ask him what they said on Apollo 13, his first reply is "Houston, wir haben ein Problem!"

Finally, we encourage his learning to fight and staying physically fit through judo. This has helped a lot, and my son has consequently taken to reading Sun Tzu and thinking about strategy.

So, to sum it up, don't worry about tech. If you take care of the building blocks of logic and language and foster your child's natural desire to explore, there is no end to what they will do and where they will go.

Talk to your WorldPay account manager. We started off at 20 pounds/mo + a set transaction fee and then switched to 1%. It doesn't hurt so much when you are first starting out and it gives a helpful percentage to use in projections.

It may be. But it is true that most tax havens, including the other three I mentioned, do not tax anything that does not happen within their borders. That is why there is the infamous address in the Caymans to which some 8000 businesses are registered, according to Obama.

Technically, this is true. Being based in Luxembourg, however, effectively abrogates the effect of the regulatory aspect of things. I am not au fait with the ins and outs of Luxembourg's banking laws, but I do know it is a grey area of banking in the wider scene. Countries that tax worldwide income (e.g., US, Germany) routinely decry Luxembourg as a tax haven. I suspect, therefore, that Luxembourg does not regulate or apply its laws to commerce that occurs outside its borders. As I noted in the last round of "Paypal-was-architected-by-robber-barrons", Amazon in Europe is also incorporated in Luxembourg. Aside from its proximity to Brussels and being at the centre of western Europe, this is almost certainly for tax reasons. That is, they don't ship (or ship pitifully little) to Luxembourg itself and so pay considerably less in taxes than they otherwise might. Similar, though considerably less convenient, havens also include Jersey, Gibraltar, and Cyprus, all semi-autonomous regions belonging to the UK that attract businesses by taxing only commerce that occurs between two parties within their borders.

FWIW, I wouldn't touch PayPal with a barge pole. We use RBS WorldPay because 1. we get favourable terms as we have an account with RBS, 2. we get 1% transaction costs with no monthly fees,and 3. we get fraud protection by RBS WorldPay for free.

The tech folk at RBSWP are not the sharpest tools in the shed, but RBSWP itself has proven to be good for us financially. Another one that is quite popular but whose breadth of availability I do not know is SagePay.

I wonder how much of that is related to the psychology of the cost. That is, the more a product/service costs, the more the user is likely to assign value to that product/service that they otherwise would not note.

Psychological studies have been done that people who pay for something - anything at any price - always look more favourably on it than those who do not. One such study involved payment to see a film. Those who paid their own way ALWAYS had more favourable reviews of the film than those who were provided with a ticket for free.

Obviously, there is a limit to the psychology, but I wonder how much the feelings of a class' attendees can viably count toward evaluating the value of the workshop. Price is naturally where the willingness of the buyer to buy meets the willingness of the seller to sell, so the price of the workshop is beyond dispute in a free market context. But there are limits to what is rational, and I suspect there will be a significant percentage who will feel the workshop to be worth it merely because they paid a grand to be there. This "prestige" factor, after all, is one of the main components of a premium pricing plan.

In other professional fields, people do not pay $1000 a day for a session necessarily. The only ones who do (usually) are those requiring continuing education credits - therefore, the consultants get to charge outrageous fees because they have a captive audience/market. Otherwise, the only entities that I know of who regalarly drop a grand or more on a day with somebody - or even a team - is a medium-to-large business for whom it is a tax deduction. And such decisions frequently come down to a management type who is trying to justify his/her existence by being seen to do something.

For perspective, we had a marketing workshop here in Edinburgh that basically offered intensive, MBA-level instruction on marketing. It was taught by a former head of marketing for a major North American firm who had buckets of experience and now has his own major marketing consultancy here in the UK. Around a dozen of us worked with him for 8 workshops and had three extended consultations with him about our particular business circumstance. The cost to the company? £750 ($1200 USD at current exchange) for the first person, £500 ($800 USD) for each additional. Consequently, unless these three amigos are going to ensure the success of every company who signs up, I fail to see how a price tag of $1000 is justified.

When considering publishing a book, one must consider how widely applicable the subject matter is and how widely the publisher can actually disseminate your work. I just published my fourth book, seventh if you count works that I have written for hire. I do not expect it to do as well as my previous works because the publisher is smaller and the domain of application is much more restricted. The publisher of my first few books is a subsidiary of HarperCollins and runs bookstores itself, so its channels are much more pervasive. This is shown in the royalty statements.

Self-publishing naturally boosts the ROI on small runs, but it is not without its drawbacks. Whenever I have thought of a book that I might self-publish, I question whether it is worth writing. The major publishers know their customer better than I could realistically hope to ever know. If they would not take it on, one must wonder about the market for it. I do not say this to mean one should not self-publish, but self-publishing is usually reserved for pet projects that one has developed as a hobby and want to share. If one is looking for a high ROI on the effort it takes to write a book, the larger publishers are the way to go.

Also, the longevity of one's work is directly related to how evergreen the content is. If one writes something sexy or novel, I suspect one would be lucky to get a year or two of decent sales out of it. I write as evergreen as I can. so to this day, I am still receiving cheques from a book that I published 4-5 years ago that are close to the same level as what I received originally. It remains in the top 3% on Amazon.com. This is highly unusual, but it can be done. You will seldom get rich off a single title, but you can develop several streams of passive income if you write well and can engage readers. My 2¢, fwiw.

Perhaps share these pages with your professor:

http://python.org/about/success/

http://python.about.com/od/gettingstarted/ss/whatispython_3....

I'd say your prof is pretty myopic.

Of the success stories, I particularly like this email about Python on NYSE from 2003:

http://code.activestate.com/lists/python-list/%3COF78FB9C74....

Yes, it is horrible formatting. The PDF version of the original article can be had at

https://danpetre.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/kevin-lane-kell...

> You're making an implicit assumption; something exists, therefore it was created by an intelligent being.

On a certain level, this is true. It depends on how you define 'god' as a concept.

True, but the point of the article is that both now have this level of know-how. So all bets are again off once physical security is compromised - regardless of whether its a farmboy from Langley or Nebraska.

I find the printable format to be easier to read, even on screen:

http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-cla...

This article prompted me to do likewise. For the past 24 hours and running, I have used Duck Duck Go exclusively instead of Google. It is like a breath of fresh air. I tried DDG a few months back and it was a bit on the rough side. It has made tremendous strides in the intervening time.

As for Google, they have gone past their prime. As the other comments note, 2008 was the peak. Yahoo is in the midst of what may be the longest running identity crisis ever to hit a company. And the name of the game for both Google and Bing is to keep you on their site with their advertisements for as long as they possibly can. Like some tentacled monster, they don't want to just serve you and let you go. The cheap tricks masquerading as a flashy UI ruin the user experience and make me not want to go back. Duck Duck Go actually keeps you coming by serving salient information (aka 'value') and then lets you get on with life. Kinda reminds me of the difference between the personality ethic and the character ethic from Covey's 7HHEP.

This was a great post. Thanks for putting it forward.

As noted in the article, the legality of such a plan is questionable on safety grounds. I suspect a plan for tranquilizing and shelving passengers for the journey would fly further (and be a lot safer).

The threat is not against the Plans to the Empire but the password for the encryption system. That, as the video shows, can be done and without any particular haste. As the article suggests, freezing the RAM lengthens the decay process. The method is likely to have been known by three-letter agencies for some time now. The good guys are seldom, if ever, ahead of the bad guys, so it seems likely that the latter know it, too.

But, for the sake of argument, let's say that they don't crack it on the first go. So what? The password has to be in RAM every time the machine starts. AFAIK (and I would be pleased to be wrong about this), nobody shreds data on the hard drive because the user gets their password wrong. So, said bad guys can try to their heart's content.

As far as I'm concerned, it is a major hole in any argument for full-disk encryption.

This headline is not wholly accurate. The relevant sentence is at the bottom of the first page:

"At the 2003 meeting of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, two-thirds of the 350 divorce lawyers who attended said the Internet played a significant role in divorces in the past year, with excessive interest in online porn contributing to more than half of such cases. "

So two-thirds of divorce lawyers say the Internet played a role, but porn was involved in "more than half" of those. The article is silent on how much more than half.

Before you dive too far into full-disk encryption, you might want to contemplate the consequences of this research:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9876060-38.html

The paper referenced is available at:

http://citp.princeton.edu/pub/coldboot.pdf

From that paper, the most salient sentence for this discussion is:

"On all of our sample DRAMs, the decay rates were low enough that an attacker who cut power for 60 seconds would recover 99.9% of bits correctly."

The long and short is that your password has to be in RAM at some point in order to be matched against what is typed in. RAM decays slowly after a machine has been switched off. As the research shows, one can use a widely-available can of air to make that decay happen even slower. In the process, one can pull the value out of RAM.

Note that this is a hardware problem that no software on the market has been able to address. To do so, you would have to be able to validate x against y without having the value of y ever enter RAM.

Consequently, a reasonably good tech thief can read the password out of RAM. For the not-so-good tech thief, using passwords and social engineering tricks like being nice to someone and then asking them to watch your stuff for a moment will probably do the trick. I tend to see the various implementations of full-disk encryption as more for peace of mind and mitigation of liability than real security.

While that may be true, Luxembourg is known as a tax haven. I note that Amazon also registers its European operations there. From the same source as you cited:

"Concern about Luxembourg's banking secrecy laws, and its reputation as a tax haven, led in April 2009 to it being added to a "grey list" of nations with questionable banking arrangements by the G20." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Luxembourg#Banking]

So, in effect, Paypal is probably a bank in nominal terms only. They can still do pretty much whatever they want with your money and get away with it. That is why my company went with WorldPay even when we started out. We don't get charged any fees, just commission, and we get free fraud insurance on the major credit cards.

I would definitely go with the report. I have lost count of the number of software companies that I have encountered that win marketshare with similar ethics to that being reported here about Zynga. They talk up sunshine and value in public but then go Ballmer on their employees.

I can second Nagle's book. They could charge its weight in gold, and it would still be worth every penny. Where Davidson's freebie gives you the lay of the land on pricing and talks a bit about some dynamics, Nagle's "Strategy and Tactics" covers the details in some depth. You learn how to deploy pricing as part of your marketing strategy. They not only back up their points with detailed examples, but they explain why the pricing worked (or didn't) as it did. Simply invaluable.

For the OP, I would also recommend "Blue Ocean Strategy": http://amzn.com/1591396190 . The authors address how to move beyond mere competition, and pricing is one of those ways.

>A lot of US health spending is triggered by things that are >outside the healthcare system.

Can you give examples of this?

You can incorporate later, but the decisions you make as a sole proprietor or sole trader can come back to haunt you even after incorporation. Your liability after incorporating will depend on the nature of the app and the way you bring it into your corporation. If damage results from a problem that a lawyer can demonstrate pre-existed and should have reasonably been taken care of before incorporation, you will be in his cross-hairs.

The extent of your liability will depend on where you live (the UK is harsher on developer responsibilities, IMO). IANAL, but I have worked as both sole trader and company director. Incorporation is dirt cheap compared to the cost of liability.

I fail to see how his reasoning abrogates the notion of God and would appreciate any light anyone cares to shed. Anyone know of any recorded universes sprouting out of nothing? Why do multiple instances of intelligent life and mostly consistent laws of physics mean that there is no Creator? It just doesn't follow for me.

Okay, I think I see where you are coming from. Let me clarify what I said.

> you suggested that spending a larger fraction of gdp on healthcare was a bad thing.

I was probably in a rush when I wrote 'do more' and so apologise for any confusion. My meaning was not communicated well. If the data say anything, it is that the way the money is spent counts more than how much money is spent. That being said, getting the medical establishment and Big Pharma to take a pay cut is a Herculean task.

> "military spending" is the typical reply

I suppose for some it is, and the US does spend plenty on war. But I would agree with what I understand as your underlying point: The money needs to be spent better before more money is spent on anything.

>Note that US GDP is also significantly higher.

Maybe I am missing something, but this should mean that the US can afford to do more. No?

>No, military spending doesn't account for the difference.

I didn't say anything about military spending. Where is that coming from?

I used to be self-employed in the US and left in part because of the expense of health insurance. At the time, I had a family of three. When you declare yourself self-employed in the US, you are immediately projected into the highest tax bracket of (if memory serves correctly) 37.5%. Decent health insurance for three cost worked out to be around 40% of that at the time. So, to be self-employed with healthcare cost me around 52% of my then gross salary. And that is just for the plan - there is still a huge excess as well as a plethora of things that the insurance companies won't cover. If memory serves correctly, something like 40% of those in the US are without healthcare. At costs like that, little wonder why.

As for poverty in the US, 1 in 8 are in poverty if you use the CIA-polished statistics. I say CIA-polished because the CIA also says the US spends 12.5% of its GDP on healthcare. According to the OECD, it is more like 15.3%. By comparison, France (top healthcare in the world according to the WHO) spends around 9.5% or so. Canada, number 6 in the world, spends something similar, around 9.7%. The UK, which is somewhere around 20th on the WHO rankings, spends 6.25%. For its 12.5%/15.3%, the US ranks 33rd - just above Cuba.

As for saving up for children's college, university educations are an increasingly well-known bubble in the US. It is not uncommon to have 70 or even many more students packed into a single auditorium for lectures. Even in advanced degrees, there is not as much small group or singular education as there is in Europe. But the costs are nevertheless huge. If I recall correctly, American University in DC currently tops the charts with tuition at $50k per year. That is tuition ONLY. It does not include, books, dorm, clothes, etc. A four-year degree thus has a base cost of $200k. It is nothing anymore for universities to charge $25-30k per year just for tuition. Given that this is the case at a time when many people are losing their houses because they can't make the payments and others can't get on the property ladder because they can't afford the down payment, I would say it is damn hard in the US to pay for things that people in Sweden take for granted.

Just my 2¢. YMMV.

What do they do?

This is very, very true. Ministers of most all religions are among the loneliest of the lot. Because confidence is crucial to their social function and because people breed politics (i.e., backstabbing), many feel they cannot have friends in their congregations/parishes/communities/whatever. Too often they are right.

Almost certainly it was a matter of traction. This is, after all, one of the main arguments for open source and owning your own code: You can run it as long as you want it, independently of market pressures.