Top of the list. Has to be, for compliance reasons. Right behind that is an archiver that would also pass muster under those same rules. Aparently, no one wants to sell a "cloud" solution that includes those things.

You're only half right...

Correct, mostly. There's lobbying and then there are campaign contributions. Between those to funnels, a well-heeled corporat... ermm..., "citizen" can buy almost anything they want in the halls of Congress. And the telecom lobby is one bad-ass organization.

"They" being the Koch Brothers, and other interests, who executed a truly masterful campaign to manipulate a bunch of ignorant, scared, old white people into doing their bidding. Jeezuz, they even provided the buses at the "rallies". That's really more like astroturf than grassroots, but you have to hand it to them. It worked beautifully.

If you work for me, you work for me at my pleasure. If it is my pleasure that you not potentially cost me millions of dollars by infecting the children of my customers with dangerous diseases, I will require vaccinations as a condition of employment. If it is my pleasure that you not potentially cost me millions of dollars by driving my truck into minivan loaded with kids because you nodded off at an inappropriate time, I will require that you occasionally prove that are free from drugs that might cause such things.
If it is your pleasure not to work in such an environment, you may choose to work elsewhere. You are not compelled to do anything against your will.

That, or just ask the licensed drone hunters in Colorado what load they're using.

You keep using that word. I do not think that it means what you think it means. Unless, of course, you consider the failure to implement a more efficient single-payer system to be a "fuckup". On that, we'd agree, but for the vast majority of Americans, The Affordable Care Act is a net win as is.

High paying jobs for Americans is just P.C. code for "socialism". In a free market, I should be allowed to "import" my labor from anywhere. That way, my products, be they software, hardware, or even cotton or tobacco can make more profit for me.

This cool. Very cool. A solution that cuts out a largely unnecessary part of the process (agents) and it's expense is long overdue.
Still, there's an industry that I'd like to see "disrupted" even more - undertaking. Any business whose primary product is "...the last thing you'll ever be able to do for your late loved one..." deserves, more than any other, to be disrupted.

Yawn... Broadcast news is entertainment first, and journalism as a distant second. A a product it is crafted to attract eyeballs (or ears, in the case of radio) of a certain demographic so that they can more easily target ad buyers. Anyone who does not get this is an idiot. Anyone who takes any one of these sources as the source of his world view is a complete idiot. Guess which network has the highest number of complete idiots in their demographic?

Oh, please. Look, I know that's what a lot of people (those who get their world view from Fox News) believe, but it is simply not the case. So unless you have a citation (hint: their some isolated cases), kindly STFU with the echo chamber bullshit.

So it's a libertarian's wet dream, then. All the downsides, then are just "the price of doing business" in the wild free market. Right? Is this a great country or what?

I'm going to get jumped for saying this, but stick with Windows for fat client development. Unless you are looking at developing web apps, you are going to be almost completely disappointed at the selection of tools available to you on Linux when compared to those for Windows. I'm not saying that there aren't tools for doing this on Linux, but dear gawd, why would you want to when the VS tools are so much easier to work with. And by "work with" I mean get work done. Use MySQL on Linux as your db server, by all means, but do your client development with what you already know.

Insightful? Really? For a post that truly did miss Bruce's point? That point was, BTW, that if you don't have a good reason for keeping something, don't. Make that a policy and enforce it. Anything, not just evidence of corporate sleaze, can become a liability. Only a fool would keep potentially dangerous garbage when she didn't have to.

Plot device, perhaps, but if you've read the entire "robot" series of novels, you'll see that it was used to provide a unique "angle" from which to tackle some classical problems of ethics. As a practical matter, I rather doubt that such a set of such laws, even if they were logically sound, could be reliably built into a machine such that no contrivance, hardware or software, could be used to circumvent them.

Yeah? So? The message should be clear enough, find some other way to make money and stop being a leach.

TFTFY.