There's nothing new under the sun. On the other hand, we still have to deliver finished work products to the ones paying the bills. I prefer to do this without tying myself into knots worrying about whether or not there's some brilliant framework or API out there that can magically solve all of my problems while ending hunger and bringing about world peace. You're no doubt familiar with KISS? I use it every day and you know what? It works.

Because the people who make the platforms don't care about interoperability or at least not very much. We live and work in the real world, not the world as we might like it to be. You accept this and move on or at least most of us who want to get shit done do.

In other words, why doesn't everyone just speak English? Languages, whether natural or constructed as with programming languages, are used by humans with different personal preferences, likes, dislikes and needs. We don't add translate to all languages because not everybody needs it, wants it or even cares about it.

It seems to bother you a great deal that other people "reinvent the wheel" instead of doing things the way that you think they ought to be doing them whereas I on other hand don't much care what other people do or what tools they use. As long as my clients are satisfied, I'm satisfied. If you want to spend your career being an architecture astronaut then by all means don't let me stop you, but I think you'll find that much of what we do in the world of paid software development is a matter of getting the job done and getting paid as quickly and expediently as possible so that we can move on to the next project. Duct tape and WD40 may not be glamorous tools, but they get the job done.

Subversion

Why not just pick the tools that you like and not worry about what other people use? This focus on what tools somebody else ought to be using is a curious feature of the programming profession. Do you see two construction contractors arguing over whether the other guy ought to be using the belt sander or the sand blaster? No? Then why should we expend such extraordinary effort arguing over other people's choice of programming tools?

It's a possible benefit, but even that's not guaranteed. Bob might have introduced a new bug that slipped past your passing tests because your tests were too specific or there were gaps in your coverage. Writing good unit tests is often as hard or harder than writing the code that's being tested and yet it's a task that's often handed off to the most junior member of a programming team.

In theory yes, but in practice how many actually do? I've often thought that legislatures would benefit greatly from version control systems to track changes and prevent sneaky edits and riders from making their way into bills at the last minute. Of course the legislators are very often lawyers with 19th century modes of thinking, so getting them to use version control with any kind of proficiency or regularity would be something of a minor miracle.

This is a management fad that comes and goes every five or ten years or so, sort of like fashions. Ever since programming became essential to modern business, managers have been looking for ways, mostly without success, to take the craftsmanship and artistry out of programming. The truth, which is immediately obvious to anyone who has done this for a living, is that software is fantastically varied and complex and yet at the same time there is a subtle and zen like quality to the work which appeals only to a small subset of the general population. Despite the recent push for more computer science and programming education, I doubt that more than five percent of the general population is even capable of doing what we do. A good analogy would be the piano or other music lessons that many of us had as children and yet only a relatively small number of us play with any sort of proficiency and fewer still have reached the level of a professional musician. I believe that programming is similar to music in this and other ways, it's just not for everyone and that's alright.

I use source control even in my personal projects where I'm the only one working on them. The change tracking, branch and merge features alone are worth the price of admission. Becoming fluent with source control is an a-ha kind of experience and once you get it you will never want to be without it, especially when working with other programmers.

If you've used some of the good point solutions in each of those areas: integrated development, source control, bug tracking, automated testing, build, deployment and continuous integration then you have some idea of how rich and complex these tools can be and must be to provide a truly satisfying software development experience. I think that were all of these tools and features to be gathered together into a single integrated system you would have something approaching or even perhaps exceeding the complexity of a modern operating system.

As others have said, the First Sale Doctrine prevents copyright owners from controlling, as much as they might like to, the rental of physical copies of their copyrighted works. This area of copyright and trademark law has already been well explored in the courts, especially as it applies to rental of physical media. The copyright owners tried and failed to shut down the VCR and tape rental in the early 1980s, but that ship has long since sailed. So asking why copyright owners "allow" DVDs, but not comparable streaming practices, misses this key piece of the puzzle.

You're a moron if you think that selling stolen art is easy or especially lucrative. It's not. Most art theft is a crime of opportunity with very low fencing value compared to jewelry, gemstones, precious metals or wine. Indeed, art is usually stolen for personal reasons, not for resale. Rarely a piece(s) of art will be stolen by thieves hired to target specific works on behalf of clients who want them badly but are unable to buy them, either because they cannot afford them or they're just not for sale. However, even then the thieves are paid a pittance compared to the auction values of typical items. Thieves go where the money is and compared to other more lucrative forms of theft, art just isn't very attractive dollar for dollar. The real theft in art isn't in stealing originals anyway, but creating and passing off fakes to unsuspecting or unsophisticated buyers.

The bargain bin is you taking advantage of an inventory error made by a business. The business has already tried to sell the item and failed and is looking to unload it for something better than zero, hopefully with a meager profit or at least not a loss, instead of keeping it around as taxable inventory. A business renting access to streamed media delivered over the Internet has very low fixed costs per user so losing a rental sale to you because you don't like the price is only fractions of a penny loss to them. They'd rather gamble that you will cave and pay $3-5 dollars for the stream rental, netting them a 50,000 percent profit in the process.

Any such attempt would be so expensive as to be practically impossible. However, even if it were done there would be no buyers. The Apollo artifacts left on the moon remain the property of NASA and by extension the US Government and no reputable collector, or at least none with the bankroll necessary to pay what the items would be worth if they were legitimately sold into private hands, deals in stolen property.

I disagree. The Soviets decided to put Kennedy to the test with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and they backed down, in exchange for a "private assurance" from Kennedy that he would remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey within six months, because the Russians were convinced that Kennedy would actually have ordered the attack on Cuba on Monday morning October 29th 1962 had they not agreed. We'll never know for sure because an agreement was reached to deescalate the situation in time, but I think that Kennedy would have gone through with the invasion, with disastrous consequences as we now know that Cuba had tactical nuclear rockets available for use against invasion forces by local commanders, had there been no agreement.

The Obama Administration has already answered that question, loud and clear, to all of our enemies through inaction and failure to honor promises or enforce "red lines".

Nuclear weapons do not prevent aggression unless one has large numbers of them and the means to deliver them against any potential adversary in a credible first or second strike. It's generally accepted that such deterrence requires what strategists call the Nuclear Triad. To date only two nations, The United States and Russia, have demonstrated all three necessary components on a continuous basis. Even then they only prevent full scale total war and not more limited engagements. Indeed, having a small number of nuclear weapons is arguably worse than having none at all since they make an attack by a great power more and not less likely. Some nations, notably South Africa and Libya, wisely recognized that having even one bomb was not actually in their political, military or economic best interests and so dismantled and abandoned their nuclear programs. The current Iranian regime, possessing neither wisdom nor good sense, continues theirs without meaningful pause. Time will tell where all of this leads, but history doesn't offer much to inspire confidence in a peaceful solution.