I have found that asking the following about a potential workplace is a remarkably good predictor of the entire work culture and acceptability for devs:
* What version control tool is used
* What bug tracking system is used
* What technological measures are in place to prevent anyone breaking the build, with no need to back out changes
* What automated testing infrastructure is in place, and are new check-ins automatically sanity-checked immediately

You can really learn a lot from the tools used. Are the tools in place those that devs would choose, or some horrible crap sold to management by a good sales guy? Did projects to make dev life better by automating the programmer workflow get funded, or get blocked? How short-sighted is management when it comes to productivity?

Software dev as an industry is out of the downturn. Demand is way ahead of supply right now, mostly because devs still think there's no point in looking. Well, times have changed, and a dev has a lot of "pricing power" right now. E.g., my team has quite a few open positions, no one with experience seems to be looking, and we're definitely not going to lose anyone qualified we actually manage to find due to being cheap!

Sign of an engineering field that hasn't matured yet. Most big companies do have engineering promotion paths all the way up to VP-equivalent now, so that's something, but you still don't see as many devs in paygrades equivalent to senior management as you see senior dev managers. They're not really taking that career path as seriously as high-tech "real engineering" jobs yet. But, yeah, at least find a place that has a non-management paygrade above the one you're applying for!

We can trivially feed 11 billion today. The farmland once used in America alone could do it (though that would be a bad approach for many reasons).

Your ideas about nutrition are way off. Calories are key to survival, and meat is not where you get calories, carbs are. Meat is a tasty luxury that requires more farmland per meal than eating vegetarian.

Fresh-water availability, as I already said, is only an issue in large cities that insist on drawing down their aquifers (well, and a few low-population areas with regular drought). Cities tap their aquifers only because it's cheap compared to proper sewage reprocessing. No magic technology required, just infrastructure spending. There are very few big cities that actually lack the surface water (e.g., Dubai), but they have desalination already. Wikipedia has some notes on the plants currently under construction and operating around the world. Again, it's not high-tech, as long as you're on the coast.

Native-born net population change is either negative or barely positive in every industrialized nation. Many places with high barriers to immigration are in population collapse right now (e.g., Japan). America is only growing due to immigration. It's a common pattern, well, researched and well understood. People have enough kids such that enough survive to help them in old age. Pre-industrialization, that's 10 or more. Post-industrialization that's 2-3, or fewer once a good retirement safety net is in place. There's a one-generation blip seen in most places during industrialization when people are still having 10 kids, but all of them survive to adulthood, so population explodes.

The news that population was expected to peak at 11 billion is at least 10 years old - not sure why it's a /. story, but we do like old news here.

Sure, sure, preventing discrimination is good, but that's a somewhat limited excursion into regulating who can do business that ensures more people can participate in the economy. But what we usually see is government doing the opposite granting monopoly, and otherwise excluding people form the market, instead of busting trusts and otherwise enabling participation.

We see this in spades in the entertainment industry in the US, with cable monopolies being granted like localities were competing in "monopoly granting" as an Olympic sport or something.

But anyway, none of that has anything to do with giving the government access to what books you read, or what movies you watch, or the like. Governments just need to stay the Hell away from that data, even if it would be convenient for the government, well, too bad!

No, really, why is it anyone's business at all?

Governments' legitimate interest in regulation is in product safety and fraud prevention, not in deciding who gets to do business with whom and at what price.

We've had far too many "regulation: good vs bad?" debates here on /., and we should really stop that, as that's a silly question. The interesting question is "regulation: what scope?".

Is there any legitimate reason for a government regulatory body to inspect and control subscriber lists for an entertainment product? Any good reason for it to examine who has watched what? I can think of only evil reasons: to target people with the wrong tastes in (legal) entertainment as anti-government dissidents: likely troublemakers to take pre-emptive action against. That's an old song that many governments have seen before, and one we don't need ot hear in Canada or the US!

Yeah, Netflix should get their act together and stop showing shit movies like "The Elephant Man" and "There Will Be Blood". Comedies like "Grosse Pointe Blank" and "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure"? Who would ever want to watch those? Netflix is absolutely useless unless they can show truly great movies like "Transformers 4: Age of Extinction".

If piracy is the focus, then they're looking in the wrong place. Piracy is not a problem, it's a symptom. It'd be like if someone was slurring their speech because they were having a stroke, and you decided to solve the problem by sending them to a speech therapist.

Now, I don't think that you can't have rich, interactive experiences with music that are worthwhile. They may be 'glorified liner notes', but some of us have fond memories of liner notes. I thought the Bob Dylan app from a while back was actually really cool.

No.

No, actually, I comment at the end that we could do this now, but that companies don't want to.

No, I'm proposing that there be industry standards. There wasn't a government regulator necessary to determine that email providers must use SMTP to transfer email. It's just the standard, and it doesn't make sense for individual companies to go against the standard because it would cut themselves off from interoperability with everyone else.

Umm... bullshit? Ok, provide me with instructions on how to have Google Docs and Gmail store all my email and files on Dropbox in a way that's supported by Google. They may have some APIs for some things, but they aren't working with Apple and Microsoft to create a vendor agnostic platform for web storage. And why are you all defensive and butthurt over Google?

It's actually really convenient. You'd have to try it to see just how smooth it is. Much easier than the "share" button.