Quoting Bob Marley, economy is the bloodline of any society. It's where the buck stops. I hope that our "patriotic"(nationalist) Orwellian ways can play a second fiddle to our economy. If not, we are paving our path to our own demise.

USA's authoritarian, Orwellian stance is hurting American companies' ability to compete in the global market, domestic and international. It hurts the American economy.

Shouldn't judge an iceberg by its tip.
Not to undermine the massive infrastructure twitter must maintain for its core service, Twitter has additional services such as Vine (short Video sharing) and TwitterTV (from the jobs posted). In addition, maintaining an API which multitude of businesses, academics and individuals rely has its own challenges. I'm sure I'm missing more info, but the point is there is much more going on at Twitter (as with most other companies) than the simple services the general public seems to be exposed to and these services are created and serviced by employees.

Software is a living thing with ongoing needs throughout its full life cycle, including BUG fixes. You need to understand and acknowledge this and communicate it to your clientele. Inform them that they will have "software needs" well beyond the duration of your contract. This is why maintenance support exists which might be another source of revenue for you.

Ignoring the nature of the product you are delivering will not do anyone any good.

This! You hit it the nail on the head dude. Software is a living thing. Given its dynamic habitat, it has ongoing efforts throughout it's full life cycle. Needs that include but not limited to BUG fixes. It's amazing how many people/companies seem to miss this point and fall into a rut.

Relax, I never expressed my desire to give your money to a third-party, simply stating an observation.

Wealth and Power are compounding, always siphoning to the top. Unless you place restrictions, i.e. socialist policy, it's only a matter of time before serfdom ensues, It's no coincidence that 80% of the wealth created over the past two decades have gone to the top 1% of the population. Remember the dream of being millionaires in the 90s? Nowadays, billion is the dream. Yes, inflation over time is real, however it doesn't warrant an increase of 10^3 magnitude.

Civilization is an ongoing collective effort. Why do we whine about this? Next time you or a loved one who desperately needs the same bright minds to come up with remedy or a cure to a devastating disease, tell me why you don't whine.

What about the bright minds coming up with new ways to kill people (military)?
Moral codes, ethics and philosophies are for the classroom, cash is what rules in the real world. The massive efforts of society to abstract our ill-doings (work) from our morals shouldn't be overlooked either.

Although, massive grouping of all old programmers to a stereotype is unfair, my experience is that It's a matter of desire/passion. Technically, I think the old programmer has a good grasp of the underlying foundation of logic. It's a matter or putting in the time to learn the new recipe and syntax. Often, their experience will get them up and running far quicker than a young buck.
Can a old programmer learn new tricks? Absolutely. Does he/she want to? Well.

1. Is he/she burnt out
2. Can he/she sacrifice the time required without neglecting his/her established lifestyle and family
3. Is he/she still passionate or is he/she disenfranchised by his/her negative experience in the field?
4. Does he/she have the guts to be a noob and feel stupid again? I know many who take pride in their area of expertise and rightfully do not want to dilute their worth by becoming less good in other sometimes newer areas.

I drank from the fire-hose and voted this story up.

I work for a dot com older than LinkedIn which is crippled by a similar (worse) monolith legacy webapp. Innovation, efficiency, development cycles, new features and site/product-wide roll-outs are a pain or in some cases impossible. This story gives one perspective/solution to the problem.

Software is a fast moving space, you snooze you lose. As the web matures, I see many more once-prolific trendsetting companies slip into bureaucratic process-driven monoliths milking every bit of value the antiquated software still holds. The wise companies invest in technology and reap the benefits of the initially intangible results of a flexible, maintainable, truly agile technological stack, however, most companies eventually fall into the cycle of:

1. Start-up and innovate
2. Grow and profit
3. Implement n-layers of bureaucratic oversight and process to protect the value
4. stop their ongoing evaluation
5. Loose market-share to newcomers and mavericks in your segment
6. paralyzed with more market-share loss, copy the competition wherever you can and desperately hold onto your scraps
7. keep losing market-share
8. disappear into the abyss

Separation of Church/Religion & State, be it whatever religion

It is common sense that information in the PUBLIC DOMAIN is available to well everyone, including "the enemy". Calling the witness to state that Bin Laden seeeked public domain knowledge is just tugging on strings of nationalist emotions. The goal is to smear Manning to Al-Qaeda/Bin Laden (evil, bad, them, enemy) and

This is far-fetched and paranoia until it happens to you. :) Truth is that we live under a totalitarian regime with some privileges. Our ongoing maltreatment of foreign people should have been a warning, now they are coming for us. No conspiracy here, man's self-perpetuating thirst for power has brought us here. My advice is to never grab the attention of your government and it's long-reaching arms. Stick to the masses and stay low.

Wish I had points to mod you up. Great point!