Which is precisely why so few developers per capita program in the languages any more. If tooling isn't making one's life easier year after year, you're becoming a drag on the industry. I'm sure you'll be quite happy driving your fully manual car decades from now when dual clutch cars own the highways, but most people won't care about how archaic your ride is, or how superior your belief in it is either.

If you want to freeze your development platform into somewhere in the mid-80's, that's your right, but the industry has moved on, and effeciency of development has long surpased most CLI based tooling for anything non-trivial. I wish you all the luck in the world though.

Division of labor my friend. Would you rather the alternative being that all developers need to understand deep knowledge of the environments they're running on potentially conflating the cost of writing for your platform by double? I didn't think so. Not every developer needs to know about every inch of code that exists in your corporate hierarchy and libraries, infrastructure, etc.. as long as SOME PEOPLE ARE, are easily accessible, and willing to field questions as needed.

Trust me, from a guy who's dealt with COBOL and Java, they're nothing alike in either corporate philosophy or boat-anchor of coding. For better or worse, Java and C# are essentially analogs in terms of what you can 'do' with them. Java sucks more in UI's, and some syntactic sugar that makes your life easier, and C#/.NET lacks the trillion toolkits used in Java for pretty much any common need. Many popular Java lib's are ported to .Net, but still a boat load you'll only find in Java land for now. Lets not labor the point. There will be a millions fan boys to jump on the point, but on a language stand point, they're so close that it shouldn't matter.

PHP is a simple language for beginners and it got its entrenched status because some novice PHP dev's wrote some great sites / tools which people have organically grown around. Its a lousy language, and a very specific use case. I've never used RoR, but sounds about the same but in a more sexy buzz word.

Erlang like all functional languages universally are very useful for their very limited number of business areas where they rock, and enevitably the evangelists of these languages always trump out how they're great for everything and the kitchen sink, but we all know they aren't, and will continually be relegated to areas where they shine. Hybrids like Scala have a chance, but frankly I'd hate to sit down and listen to a dev lead's meeting in a scala shop lay down the laws on when to use strictly functional no matter how broken it makes the code, and when to just use other paradigms that probably just work better, simpler, and faster to develop.

Population per sq. KM:

Rank Country/Region Density
(Pop. per km2)
1 Singapore 7301
2 Hong Kong 6396
3 Gaza Strip 5045
4 Bahrain 646
5 Bangladesh 1034
6 Palestine 711
7 Taiwan (R.O.C) 646
8 Mauritius 631
9 South Korea 505
10 Lebanon 475
11 Rwanda 407

Its hard to find a place in the west bank that wouldn't be around something of importance, and many many people. You may as well say that Hamas shouldn't set up missiles anywhere, because invariably any blow back will guarantee human fatalities. Just submit nicely and live in your holes while your friendly neighbourhood rulers do the same.

Because essentially all of that virtual money sitting in the banking system (unless you're exceedingly rich) has been very well insurred against losses, and has decades of technology and policies to help reduce 'people losing their entire life savings' or 'banks losing all their depositor's cash and now they're going belly up'. Bitcoin has literally no protections for prevention of all your value.

So if you lose your crypto key (dropped $1mil on the ground on the way to grandma's house - one reason BitCoin can't be equated to real cash) or if your bit coin repository gets robbed (akin to bank robbery but without the gov insurance), or the owners steal all your money (gov insured for certain levels), or the bank simply goes bust due to insolvancy (gov insured for certain levels) you have completely different levels of assurance that your wealth is 'safe'. If you deposit $1mil into the bank of fly-by-night, you only have so much protection for the ' being stupid with money' lever, but for people of more modest means where their money is essential to their livelihood, protections are in place to support them.

As much as you can pay your taxes in pesos, yes!

Money talks and no matter how much you huff and puff about useless semantics, the world will move on and accept e-sports into the cultural fabric like so many new forms of expression and entertainment before them.

DOTA in one form or another has been around since Warcraft III. League of Legends is close enough to DOTA that most pro's can swap between the two if they ever chose to. Strarcraft and its predecessors have been around since Starcraft 1, and most knowledge carries over. These people are used to rule changes, as generally every new game patch has the potential to introduce radically different play styles to succeed. Counterstrike and games like it haven't evolved significantly in style since the beginning of FPS's, so no worries there.

So absolutely, games change, but typically the games that are picked up for long term, high reward e-sports competitions are ones that have longevity.

I got really into watching DOTA 2. I first started watching games to learn how to play it better. The game has a pretty big learning curve, so being able to watch how people played helped me learn the basics. Once that was over, I found that there are actually a lot of interesting casters who do daily live plays which are *shocked* actually entertaining in themselves. I don't necessarily spend every moment glued to the screen like I would during major tourney's, but a nice semi-background activity to spend time on.

Well, if you've used it every job you've ever worked at, then clearly every liberal arts major should be mandated to learn it too. And by that vein, all CS grads will be required to take Latin Studies and Advanced Musical Therapy because, who the hell knows, some day you may need to learn these things.

Save a tree and use e-paper, man... =)

Clearly your ability to rationalize and look at the big picture had nothing to do with the roughly 6 years between when you hacked code and when you re-entered the market as an experienced software engineer. Don't get me wrong, eduction is great to help become a 'better person' (though I wouldn't judge them more capable than one without based on many job categories), but to assume your radical transformation had nothing to do with simply growing up is a little disengenous.

I know that when I left school, I was the biggeest hot shot coder on earth and everyone else was wrong. Flash forward 10-15 years and now I know I'm a piece of the team, and if I can't function well in the team, we all fail, etc. and so forth.

Wisdom, eduction, and experience (in life and career) change your outlook on how you do your job and live your life. Cookie-cuttering it into one category would be an oversight, and highly simplifies one's personal development.

Most applications from Google can be specifically configured to not run over mobile. Just don't watch videos or download countless imaginees and you'll be fine. The first month is ALWAYS the heaviest month you'll use mobile data on any given phone, at least from my experience (because you want to try everything, and still working out how best to integrate the phone into your life, etc..).

"We're whining that all products sold near us are designed to do something that we find undesirable."

Whining about a lack of choice is perfectly reasonable, and in the perfect world, a large enough population of people should be able to solve the issue with market forces and unrestricted market entry.

Dumb phones still exist, so the choice is yours for not settling for them, or the many other competing phone platforms in the market. We as a society have chosen walled gardens and interconnected services, many because they wanted it that way, many because the heavy marketing convinced us to do it despite reservations. Don't blame people for buying what they wanted.

I've got a Nexus 5 and the amount of data wasted on systems updates is pretty small, and that's with syncing my entire google catelog of services. How can someone sue for a service that can be TURNED OFF, hence saving your entire reason for sueing.

The shitty thing about this suit is that Google actually makes very good use of elecricity and has spent years getting it to the point where battery usage for regular background activities like described are well performing. Its an insult to all good nerds to be insulted by a bunch of ignorant people looking for their handount.