What decision for fuck's sake? "Allow them to stick needles in me or starve?"

That is no decision. That's like me offering you the decision to dance for my amusement or end up with a bullet in your head, and then me claiming that dancing like an idiot was your own free will.

Oh yeah, like they have a choice. A decision entails that there is a viable alternative. And I kinda doubt they go "hmm... become a human guinea pig or pursue my career in advertising...".

We're still talking abusing the plight of a person. I don't know about you, but in my books that's kinda immoral. According to our law books, that's even illegal under certain conditions.

You seem to think the institutions are racist because they wanted some "very sharp" kid to get a GED ?

Not at all. I don't think the institutions are racist at all. I think they saw talent.

And because of (and in some cases, despite) the efforts of people who have fought these fights for many decades, there are now such opportunities. There was a time, not that long ago, in my lifetime in fact, when this young man would have not gotten the opportunity because of the color of his skin and his station in life.

Now his job is to make sure he gets as much out of them as they get out of him. That is the hard fight.

You just conclusively explained Windows and WoW.

I don't really fear that you'll be going extinct anytime soon. Web designers were in that bind before. "Nephew art" anyone? Where webdesigners got fired 'cause "my nephew can do it, he's good with computers".

Development doesn't stop, especially not in a technical field so closely tied with marketing and PR as web design. What "anyone" can do will flood the market, to the point where webpages that offer it will be met with "been there, done that" yawns. What people want is something new. New ways of presenting stuff to them is the key. Because that's something those "web kits" can, of course, not offer.

And don't get me started on security...

Yeah, hate that $13 billion *developers* have made so far.

That money's been spent a long time ago. A lot of it on development of more apps that have not been profitable.

Assuming your figure of "$13billion" is correct, of course.

Anyway, this article is about the marketplace, not about the relative handful who have scored big on an app, then hired a staff, invested in their businesses, took venture capital and private equity and now are well and truly fucked.

Oh yeah, what the world needs is more advertising. If that takes off, I'll create an adblocker for the appstore and get rich, for there will be ONE app that EVERYBODY wants!

There has never been much of a market to begin with.

Given that you can today get quite decent indie games for your computer for 5-10 bucks, flashgames-gone-iPad can't sell for more than pennies. There was a bit of money in timewaster games, games you can pick up and put down at the spur of the moment as you have to kill a little time, waiting in line, waiting for the bus or waiting for your girlfriend to stop talking.

The problem is that these games are rather easy to make and that only the first handful of people who had the idea to do so actually had a market to speak of. After the flood of copycat games drowned everyone, nobody really could make more than a handful of bucks out of the 99 cent game fad.

The next step now are free-2-play, pay-2-stay games. Games that are "free" but require you to spend money (and often quite ridiculous amounts thereof) to keep playing. Considering that I now even start to see TV ads for them, I dare say that they, too, are no longer something an indie game maker can try his hand at, considering that very obviously the game mafia has cornered that market already.

So, essentially, I'd say indie games on phones are over. Get over to Steam, there seems to be a market for indie games left.

It's just reheating the American Dream: Anyone could win. Just not everyone.

So ... yes, it's a lottery. But then again, so is the Dream.

Why, in theory, build out municipal fiber when internet service is already offered by two respectable private businesses?

Because places have done it and saved the population money and provided better service?

If there's been consolidation to the point where there are only two providers, I completely understand a municipality providing the competition. I lived in a town with municipal power generation. It was cheap and the service excellent. Until a group of Koch-backed corporatists got elected to the county board and privatized the service without public hearings or comment.

Home energy bills doubled within six months.

Oh, of course not. It just demonstrates the hypocrisy of the accuser.

If you look up the definition of "madam", you will see that Lucianne Goldberg fits the bill rather well.

As a former government worker, I can tell you: no. Its far and above closer to the 75% mark in the public sector.

It just looked like 75% because you find black people so scary.

Fact is, in many government offices, what you're actually seeing is a more representative workforce for the community in which you live. You're not used to seeing that because racism is so pervasive in hiring.

he wants to shakedown businesses for money for his organization and those of his cronies.

Unlike the Chamber of Commerce or the "Club for Growth"? Or "Americans for Prosperity" or...what's the name of Karl Rove's PAC that had like a 8% success rate..."American Crossroads"?

Cracker, please.