Seems like yesterday. Get off my lawn.

Parent is correct.

At large corporations such as Microsoft, Google, and others, there are always two tracks: management and individual contributor. You can reach the same levels of seniority and pay in either track. At the top of the management track, you can excel to be a director and then VP, etc. At the top of the individual contributor track, you can reach principal engineer, then distinguished engineer, etc.

Amount of money spent on lobbying in Washington, D.C., in 2012

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-06/samsung-s-patent-spat-with-apple-spurs-u-s-lobbying-push.html

• Samsung: $900K, up from $150K in 2011
• Google: $19.2M, up from $9.7M in 2011
• Facebook: $4M, up from $1.4M in 2011
• Apple: $2M, down from $2.3M in 2011

LOL. I work as a software engineer and have 12 patent applications submitted in my career. Each one of these represents at least 6 months' worth of research and development, so I know what the value of a patent is. How many patents do you have? 0? You probably have NOTHING because you haven't done a day's worth of original work in your life. You live off doing the same old database, the same old website, the same old crap and have nothing to contribute to society. You say "keep other corporations from being successful." You mean to "keep other corporations from copying and/or making the same old database, website, or other crap." I pity you, your children, and your children's children.

I find Groklaw to be filled with amateur web sleuths who have nothing better to do with their time than to shake their angry fists at successful corporations. A better source of information on patent law is FOSS Patents.

Preemptive "stop it, you immature clod."

I really disliked that as well, but as of Lion (2011), they added the feature to drag any side of the window to resize it.

Continuing to use a desktop environment as just "usable" is why we can't have nice things.

Here's how to fix the Linux desktop:

• Make it polished and reliable like Mac OS X.
• Enforce a single GUI environment like Mac OS X.
• Have it run real productivity applications (e.g. MS Office, Adobe Photoshop, Mathworks Matlab) like Mac OS X.
• Make it certified under Single Unix Specification like Mac OS X.
• Make it support smooth trackpad gestures like Mac OS X.

Those are just some minor suggestions.

The last several days the whining from the pro-Android fanboys has been incessant. When will it stop? I haven't observed this much whining since elementary school. Waaaa. I broke a rule and got punished for it. The rules aren't fair. Waaaaahhh. PROTIP: Go grow up and learn to live in an adult's world.

... and if the app isn't free, then Android users will make it free. You know what I'm talking about. Also, Android users vote for Romney.

This is not correct. In the US at research universities, a grad student is paid about $25K a year, and it includes almost full tuition coverage. Medical, dental, etc. are also included. The biggest loss vis-a-vis working full-time is the loss of the full-time salary, but since the PhD student is typically around age 23-29, the loss is reasonable since one isn't make all that much in that age range. In fact, after finishing the PhD, the salary should be substantially higher to make up for the loss in wages during that time. I made $95K in my first job after finishing my PhD, and my salary by my mid-to-late 30s has already made up the difference. However, the one area where I cannot make up the difference is 401k annual contributions with company match, but one can do "catch-up" contributions when one gets to 50.

I have a PhD in CS from a top-20 US university and now work in an industry research lab. Like most PhD recipients, I started grad school right after college and finished before starting my professional career. I would say getting the PhD is the single best decision I ever made, and looking back at my high school and college trajectory, it now seems like it was an inevitability. I always wanted to work in technology research, hack on software prototypes, work on R&D projects for a large influential company, and make more money. I've gotten all those, and I'm grateful for the opportunities. I make about 25% to 50% more in base salary than my friends who went to the same grad school but graduated with a MS degree. I also have more technical freedom at work because I have the publications and track record to back up what I'm saying. In the couple of times I sent my resume out for a new job (e.g. Google, MSFT, Facebook), I've gotten callbacks within 48 hours.

I do agree with some of the other unwashed heathens here who have only MS degrees that you can indeed get a great job with just a MS degree. But why limit yourself? Also, I agree that not all PhD programs are the same. I've seen some PhDs from 3rd tier universities work as test engineers. So in the end, I would say that you should get a PhD only if you can land at a CS grad school top-20 university. It is not worth your time getting a PhD from a university outside of this group. If you do get in, establish your area of expertise by publishing a lot of papers at top-tier conferences in order to strengthen your case for getting an interview at a lab like MSR. I recommend you do your dissertation in a field that has high value to companies, like machine learning or IR.

By the way, never take out a loan for grad school. If you work as a TA or research assistant, you will get paid while you attend school. The national average seems to be about $25k/year according to all my PhD colleagues.