codgercoder

Doesn't it ever dawn on anyone that employers insist on detailed, accurate information about applicants, in standardized forms, while the information available about employers is a mess? There's no standard, there's no requirement, and they can mislead in quite creative ways. Hardly seems fair.

Uh, no. There were once 15,000 ISPs! They were killed off when incumbents flexed their monopoly power. Instead of disrupting telecom, the new ISPs were forced into the old ways of state utility commissions. When the war was over, the incumbents picked up infrastructure for cents on the dollar. The 1996 Telecom Deregulation Act totally failed.

Oceania, Eastasia, and/or Eurasia :-)

GPL, and probably other licenses, were constructed to work with copyright law. Such cavalier dismissal (by rxrz) is disrespecting those who created the licenses, the legal system, and the open source community, at large. We live in the real world, not "The Matrix".

seems pretty subversive; may well be true

Of course, there's still no remedy for the fact that the annoyed are much more likely to speak up than the pleased, AFAIK.

Not every engineering solution survives politics.

How many atrocities have been committed in attempts to make it "not hard"?

Sadly, any developer of a 99 cent app might be sued for patent infringement, with no efficient and cost-effective way to find out ahead of time. Software companies have had this issue as long as software has been patentable (according to USPTO, anyway), but business insurance can be had for a price. The iPhone's conversion of software development into a "blockbuster" business (IE a few win big, most don't make anything), has encouraged small entities to enter the market who don't have the resources for insurance.

I wonder if this means I can buy a product from someone that, unbeknownst to me, violates a patent, and the patent holder can come after me.

The Republican War on Science goes on.

Let the unintended consequences begin! I always found this change suspect; a frequent rationale was that the rest of the world does it this way.

I agree that glamorizing programming is not particularly helpful, except that coder-entrepreneurs can get more attention from venture capital. Glamorizing programming, along with the app-stores, is pushing the independent programming business into a "blockbuster" mentality, a winner-take-all situation where a small number of practitioners do very well and most don't ever make their development money back. Thanks, Steve Jobs!

and don't forget the fact that there is new competition coming on the market everyday that is probably paid a tenth as much as you are.