malmros

Mr/Ms bilboOs... seems your tax return has some discrepancies... possibly serious discrepancies. On another somewhat related topic... Did you say that Ms Wu assured you of... what was that? an 80% return on your investment? That might account for the discrepancy in your return. We can take care of that for you...

Yes! May have some "disclosure" issues...

There are three forms of communication (typically): verbal, written, and gestural. Verbal is either face to face - and often is heavily laced with gestural - or via telephone. And of course written in all its wondrous forms. Also the most "difficult" of the three. (Pardon... if I seem to be generalizing...) If you think about it, social networking is like a "holiday note" stuck in the card... sent to everyone on the list - but continually. You could do the same with email and then you would retain some ownership of your content. And Twitter is everyone's text messages - which would be spam if you got in your inbox. But it certainly is entertaining for some reason. I tried using Twitter as an RSS feed... eh! Actually, everyone has an email that uses a "social network"... so why not just use email? Email is peer-to-peer ... and creative developers could easily come up with a Facebook like email GUI. So you parse all your friends emails into a nice timeline and profile page... and when you update, you would send out a "group" email to your network - or select subset... and they would get it parsed out in their GUI. That's really all FB is... or Linkedin. What's the first thing they want to do when you sign up? Get your email contact list! So in essence, we give them our contacts and content so they can tell us what we can and cannot do with it (TOS) and then inundate us with more spam. What am I missing here?

If you have little to no coding experience, leave Java out of the mix for now. I "restarted" my programming skills about 6 years ago with Python and absolutely love it. (And have since added C, java, javascript and of course conversant in HTML, CSS, etc) I know nothing of Ruby other than it has a following as devoted as Python. Look at the wikipedia entries for each language and see what "feels" more comfortable to you. If you find python "feels" best, and you're relatively new to programming... take a look at "Python Programming" by John Zelle (at Amazon, check out the reviews).