So according to this, dogs are responsible for the birth of civilization and they were the ones who domesticated us. By extension, doesn't that mean that civilization began in Soviet Russia?

Hire a dominatrix.

Replace the word "programmers" with almost anything and this is still true.

You make a valid point, but you see the same thing in a lot of fields. I work in pharma where lab personel are comparatively well paid. The same people doing the exact same thing in a less profitable industry are not as well paid, as reported by my coworkers who made the switch (of course the trade off is the lack of stability in pharma). Perhaps the difference is that with food service, we're in direct control of how much the server is getting paid.

While I am possibly the least qualified reader of Slashdot to attempt to answer this question, my guess it that it's the same reason I have trouble telling my boss when I'll have a given task or project done. Namely that different parts of the project take different amounts of time depending on difficulty, some of those processes are dependent on yet other processes that I can't directly measure myself (because others are involved), and because background processes occasionally spring up as a high priority event that interupts what it is you're asking me to measure (occasionally even causing me to never get back to the original process).

My sarcasm detector is broken. Are you actually saying that you think the world would benefit from more ignorance?

Really? You consider this a solved problem based on the information that was available in the 19th century? Do you also go see a doctor that relies on 19th century medical practices without any of the ridiculous new discoveries like that "germ theory" nonsense?

Considering that you have the chance of losing everything by not having this, and that you lost nothing at all by having it, I see no reason not to have a tracking device on your child.

That's probably the best explanation I've heard for this yet.

I'm looking for the present. Neither the past nor the future.

I believe the "scholarly" term they're looking for is captology, the study of persuasive technology.

This is all just recruiting the lower parts of the brain that B.F. Skinner studied. Pull-lever-get-food-pellet type of stuff. No play involved, really.

Well, that's not entirely true. Copyright does cover derivative works. For example there's the issue of The Wind Done Gone that was based on Gone with the Wind, but was written from the slaves' point of view. Much legal trouble ensued, and it had to be rebranded as a parody and the characters renamed (and some money spent) before the case could be settled.

If it weren't legal, Rupert Murdoch would surely be in jail by now.