Maybe software could fulfill this role one day, but as you say we're not there yet.

It may be that I'm getting too old and cynical, but when I hear arguments about eliminating the middle-man I can't help but think of a quote from Malcolm Reynolds in the show Firefly:

"About 50% of the human race is middlemen and they don’t take kindly to being eliminated."

Taken to it's logical extreme, there are some other pretty radical examples of "middlemen":

* universities (another PG example, http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.html) * banks * financial regulators (see: xbrl) * lawmaking bodies * large corporations * etc.

Are we ready for this kind of disruption? I have no idea.

I'm not sure what their definition of "Starting a business" is though, since technically in Canada all you need for that is a GST number, which you can apply for online for free and comes in the mail as soon as they can get it to you. You get a temporary number that you can use prior to that.

Trade is about right though, especially from the US. Where this free trade that we're supposed to have is I have no idea.

Starting some sort of limited liability company that is its own legal entity, is my guess.

If you are Canadian and want to start a business, you can find everything you need on starting (and running) a corporation here: http://www.ic.gc.ca/cgi-bin/sc_mrksv/corpdir/corpFiling/regi...

If you buy a USD $2500 computer you can't deduct the expense immediately. Or if you just buy a printer and that plus the computer you use the printer with is more than the limit of around $2000, you can't deduct it from your taxes immediately.

It's true that the paperwork for starting a business is pretty quick and easy. But for a LLC or Corp. type of business structure you need to put a minimum of DKK 125K (about USD $25K) in the business.

Jeff occasionally has programming content on his blog, but he doesn't offer much insight. The most intelligent thing I heard him say was "XSS is bad, escape user data when embedding it in HTML!" A good message, but one that everyone should have heard about 10 years ago.

This is not the kind of stuff the elite read. LtU is.

If someone they describe is in the top 5-10%, there are still folks in the top 4-1% and at some point it becomes ridiculously difficult to get anymore "Elite" without prodigy-like skill. I read a lot of books and am skilled in numerous computer-related areas including programming, but Linus Torvalds I am not.

Alternatively, unless you instantly grok the crufties code only to instantly transform it into the best code ever, and then go home and do some more programming on the side, and then you're also a social butterfly who is never ever on the market and never has to stoop so low as to send out resumes to get a job - well then you're just a VB drone loser.

I myself don't know where I fit in, because while I read lots of programming and cs related stuff, I can not do the 8+2 hrs thing, and I got my last job by sending out resumes. So I must be somewhere between god and total loser.

I've had two really productive periods during that time.

One of those periods I spent about 4 hours a day coding, totally focused - get to work at about 5:30 after a leisurely brunch and a 30 minute bus ride during which I planned my coding for the day, jump on a machine and pound the teletype for 4 hours or so, and go home, nearly exhausted. This was writing device driver assembler routines and image processing code.

The second period, I was implementing a prototype of a distributed OS, about 10% of a 3 inch thick spec which defined the whole thing down to the level of small procedures, with a hard 6 month deadline (which was what I had estimated the job would take). I worked steadily for that 6 months on a 40 hour schedule, and finished about two weeks before the demo was given.

I'm currently reading On Lisp and The Four-Gated City (by Doris Lessing), for whatever that's worth.

I'm decent for most of those six hours, and I can churn out maybe 3000 lines a month, but I tend to need a holiday afterwards.

I just quit my cubicle job to switch to iPhone programming, and it's been interesting how hard it is to knuckle down and really get started.

There are times when I have done productive work for 20 hours straight, but most of the time I do about 4-6 hours of work.

We do need to do some of this

Thanks for the link to the Python framework though.

We tried to use a Java lib for Office docs but it was a pain in the neck. We had some very specific requirements for embedding an ActiveX control into a document and the OSS libs just weren't going to cut it. If your volume requirements aren't too high, I would just start with interoping with MS Office.

Thanks for the suggestion.

  //...

  char[] someChars = {'A', 'B', 'C'};

  var moreChars = new [] {'D', 'E', 'F'};

  SomeMethod(new[] { 'G', 'H', 'I' });

  //...

  new [] {'D', 'E', 'F'}