$80K/yr? With presumably the elite skills and technological flexibility you need along with incredibly bad hours?

With that level (none) of job security?

Boy, am I glad I never got suckered into the game industry. Scary!

(Unless that's what they're paying right out of school.)

The fact that the return is very likely to be zero is why I generally don't put a 'donate' button on software I release. If I'm not doing it for the money, I might as well make people not feel guilty about not donating by not even mentioning the possibility.

The funny thing is (albeit with an incredibly small sample size) I've found that I get a lot more feedback/nice things said about the no-donation software. My speculation is that many people who like it but didn't donate feel guilty about emailing the author with praise. In the end, the ego boost is worth more than the few bucks I might have made.

I'd estimate the paperwork (including searching to ensure you are not ignoring legal obligations as a US citizen, occasional accountant/lawyer visits, etc.) to be on order of 20 hours a year. Less many years, some years you could spend 100 hours trying to make certain you are not breaking US law when you buy a house, are self-employed, etc.

Over 80 years, that's 1,600 hours. If you value your leisure time at $50/hours, than consider it to be about $80K worth of hassle to be a U.S. citizen. Add in $20K in lawyer/accountant fees over the years, and you could be looking at a total lifetime cost of about $100K.

Is it worth it? Well, if you're child chooses to work there, then it's easily worth it. But otherwise, probably not.

So, what you really want to decide (and only you can do so), is "Is the life-time option of working in the US worth $100K?"

This system will execute on Z/OS and iOS.

That is correct. Women are paid less than men with equal skills and equal jobs. And yet somehow there are still fewer women. Could it be that companies are so foolish with their money that even though a just as competent woman is cheaper, they would still hire the male?

Indeed, that's why discrimination against blacks never occurred in post-slavery America. Businesses used androids who weren't actually subject to exactly the same bias as society as a whole to decide their hiring thus maximizing their profits.

Anyone who doesn't believe that culture doesn't beat profit 9 times out of 10 doesn't understand how human beings work. Krikey, put culture vs. survival, and a strong majority will choose culture.

I'd wager that Windows and Office *are* 'utilities' in the sense that they will be around almost forever, and generate the usual mountain of cash each quarter (although that mountain will slowly grow smaller over time). MS's success doesn't depend on popularity, it depends on businesses 'having' to have it.

Facebook and Apple both rely on being 'cool', which is a very treacherous business to be in. How many consumer products of any sort survive changing tastes over 20 years?

I'd bet 3:1 that in 20 years, MS will larger than Facebook or Apple - my guess, MS is 2/3rds its size, Apple and Facebook are near non-existent.

Unfortunately, with buyouts, name purchases, etc, the odds are about 10:1 any such wager would actually be handing the money back to both bettors as 'technically unresolveable', so I'm not making any actual bets here.

Is this in fact (reasonably) true? I've shied away from tail recursion, but I'd be pleased to find out that that is no longer necessary.

Ah, Ackermann's function, the trusted test of "Do the students understand recursion?" of 1st year university courses everywhere.

The hangers are the adult stage, and if you open your closet very quickly sometimes you can catch them mating.

I told this joke in Japan once and got a polite explanation that (1) socks don't go missing because Japanese people usually hang up their laundry to dry (2) they don't keep other people's pens because they are other people's property and besides they have their own pens (3) hangers don't accumulate because they return them to the cleaners.

I can assure you that if the labels could "manufacture" success, they would do it a lot more. There's no quota system, and it's only slightly zero sum. (If it was zero sum, the music industry would be doing *much* better right now.)

After all, the labels do *lose* money on probably 80-90% of those they pick up. If they could manufacture just the successes, they'd drop the rest. It would be like a book publisher trying to only publishing best-sellers. Remember, we don't notice the artists that the labels spent a million or five to promote, but just dropped out of sight. We probably never even heard of them, they're forgotten so fast and a million dollars doesn't actually go that far. It is, however, enough to get some traction if there's traction to be had.

I suspect your mistake is assuming that talent (or any other single quality) is correlated with popularity. It's not quite random, but it's pretty damn close, although people are payed millions of dollars to make guesses in the creative arts that are only slightly better than chance.

What promotion does is get the artist in front of enough faces that if they have "it" (and nobody knows what "it" is), then they can succeed (as opposed to being liked, but never hitting the critical mass where people like your music because other people like your music - music is social).

It's fun to be cynical, but the truth is that in the creative arts, there's always massive insecurity because people's livelihood depends on predicting what cannot be predicted. You spend your entire life trying to control when you don't know what you're doing. Luck grants you a streak, and suddenly you're brilliant. Hit a dry spot, and suddenly you've "lost touch". No surprise it eats away at the psyche.

Sorry, went off topic there.

how many entities has MS sued for .net patent violations on the subsequent versions, as you referenced? It's been the better part of a decade now, right? No doubt they have sprung their trap...?

Ah, they're just deepening the trap, waiting for the day when they can take over the world. They may look like just another company trying to make money with their product, but just you watch.

Next you'll believe that the Soviet Union was dissolved and communism dead! Ha, yet another sucker, falling for the Red Army's trap!

Nice troll (mostly correct, but omit an important fact to come up with an incorrect conclusion).

In this case, you forgot that the *labels* don't know who will become a big hit, and there's no requirement that there be any big hitters at all. Indeed, promotion and marketing are necessary, but they are not sufficient.

This means that once artists have reached a certain level, the negotiation power is rather more equal. Sure, the label can stop promoting them, but there's no guarantee that the label can replace them and the income they generate. Likewise, as a potential income generator, other labels may well choose to take them on.

Of course, for low mid-list and below, you are quite correct. Given the labels inability to determine who has earning potential, artists are effectively interchangeable.

We don't even have to debate the evilness of walled gardens

Evilness? The walled garden is the *reason* I buy Apple products. The only annoying thing is that they don't set the walls highs enough. If they would charge a few hundred dollars per app submitted, they could (1) examine apps more closely, (2) do it faster, and (3) eliminate the millions upon millions of garbage apps that clutter the app store with the expectation it might make a few bucks.

Sure, there exists the theoretical possibility that a good app might not get submitted, but the reality is that if you don't believe in your app enough to put a few hundred dollars behind it (or find anyone else to), it's unlikely to be a very good app. Almost all successful apps have a minimum of $50-100K behind them already.

Some modest barriers to entry are a *good* thing for the vast majority of consumers. And for those who really, really want the choice? They've got a jillion Android phones to choose from. No one is forced into the walled garden.

Understood. So whining *but building anyway* makes sense.

But in the end, they want to make as much money as possible. Which means if they choose not to build, it means they think they can't make back their investment, even at the unpleasantly high rates they charge!

Wouldn't they just borrow and invest in the infrastructure? Given that interest rates are incredibly low, *any* money-making opportunity that's reasonably safe should be exploited using borrowed money.