The only part I care about is being able to take the interchangeable radio/baseband unit out of model A on carrier X and put it in model B and continue my service on X with them none the wiser, or even remove the radio entirely and operate without cellular features. Maybe even swap in a part97 radio instead. Ok, that's asking for the moon, but I can dream.

From the way the article reads, it's more like everyone else made their save vs spell... Or perhaps that he lost his save vs PPDM. Seems like after he made his initial critical mistake (allowing investment options to bypass his majority ownership), he couldn't recover without just divesting himself from TSR and starting over before the flagship D&D product was born, which, as a primary creator, he might have been able to pull off.
The behind closed doors shenanigans, manipulations and backstabbery are about right for any D&D game I've ever been in.

They probably have regression test cases to make sure bugs in the source are preserved. Wouldn't want to spoil the original experience...

Or more established/full featured, openvz, xen pv, lxc, cgroups/namespaces, and friends. I think linux (the kernel) already has the tools necessary to do task prioritization like the article requests.

Maybe.

I can design a shed and oversee or perform its construction. That does not make me an architect.
I can design and build a model car with a little spring-and-gear engine. That does not make me a mechanical engineer.
I can design and build a little circuit "piano" with pushbuttons and a 555 timer. That does not make me an electrical engineer.

I can lead a team to build proposals; reasonably accurately gauge task complexity; predict completion dates and manpower requirements; define deliverables and release criteria; control defect introduction through manual and automated unit and system tasting; build accurate development, maintenance, and operation documentation; and actually write, debug, and review efficient, best-practices-compliant code for custom software exceeding 100k LOC of new code or modifications per contract, not counting software packages integrated from other ISVs, capable of reliably processing millions of financial and medical transactions per day. Does that make me a software engineer?

Your cellphone is just a brick without software and firmware designed by thousands of developers with millions of hours of dev time, a significant portion of it in critical areas where flaws can result in physical damage, horrible performance or just plain crashing. Your car engine is controlled by a PCM driven by software, weighing in with probably multiple megabytes of code and lookup tables, designed to increase your fuel efficiency beyond what you could get with a mechanical system alone, where flaws will very likely cause serious mechanical and safety problems. The ridiculously convoluted system of wires, routers, switches, and servers that got this message from me to you is all dependent on software largely written by some team or other of developers in a controlled and systematic process and certainly not a million monkeys at random.

Software engineering is real. Many of them are even licensed as professional engineers now. Your conception of who they are, what they do, and their importance to your way of life appears to be flawed.

Of all the explanations given so far, AC is the only one that has hit the crux of the matter. I don't agree with his assessment of runtime/tooling as there is middleware which will enable porting with relative ease between platforms. But it's absolutely true that if the garden owner tosses you out, your options are few in number, especially as a small developer and they can do so for any reason they want. If the platform owner changes the way part of their platform works and it completely breaks your application (android 4.4.2 anyone?) you must quickly adapt or (get bad reviews and) die--hobbiests don't have time to drop everything and fix their app and if my understanding is correct, there is no expectation of long term (>2 yr) platform API stability (in specific example, push notifications on android).

Mobile devs are stuck with three evil giants who are conflicted on whether they want you to fill their garden with useful tools or toss you because you've stepped into their safety zone.

As far as development costs go, that is absolutely rock-bottom cheap. Indy mobile developers don't pay 1.5k+ USD for a development-only unit with in-system debugging capability. They don't pay 1k+ per year, per seat for the tool suite. They don't pay 10k+ for external auditing and verification for major releases. It costs nothing to load unsigned apks on android. It costs nothing to load a binary from Xcode onto a target iOS device. The only thing that costs money is development equipment, which is less than 600 USD each for all major mobile platforms, and distribution, the 100$/yr being discussed.

500 per year for an entire team is laughable if you produce one good app with 500 sales (or donations) per year at a dollar each. Get four friends with the same hobby as you. Buy your release licenses as a club. Hell, go to your mom with the app you wrote and have her play around with it. I bet if she likes it she'll just give you the 100 USD to buy an iOS distribution license.

The article would classify sandboxing as one of the many layers that the industry has added on instead of fixing the fundamental problem with software development culture that values minimizing time-to-market significantly over security.

Or maybe I'm putting words in their mouth.

Not to branch too far off topic here, but this sounds like a pretty ideal use-case for microkernels allowing developers to slowly squash features into the trusted memory spaces after they've proven themselves in untrusted memory spaces while still bringing new features in regularly. The security vs performance tradeoff seems pretty reasonable.

So small, there's no room for mounting holes, aside from the through-hole vias. Is that normal for COMs?

If you made a general-purpose pocket computer that has a LTE addon module (which you license as a single unit), how much of that royalty pool just melts away?

Even for domain experts, we're talking about hard problems; problems hard enough that we've only recently been able to apply them reliably in the field. This is definitely a nascent technology, and while I think it will be a societal net positive (decreased accident rate, increased fuel economy), there's still a lot of room to grow and improve. I know I personally won't be getting one until the cost is near parity with manual vehicles, whether that be through insurance incentives or vehicle time sharing; or I become a bit too old to drive myself around reliably.

Is it feasible to legally obligate all entities operating in the USA to abide by all safeguards and regulations required of HIPAA data if the data they have could be so classified?

Despite being in the running for the worst analogy ever, let's go with this.

You own the gun. Blizzard mails you bullets and invites you to their shooting range. You take the bullets and gun to the range and shoot them however you please as long as you follow the range rules. You bring sandbags and a bench to shoot straighter in competition without telling Blizzard. Blizzard sues the sandbag and bench makers because you cheated.

I only want the mod that disables reporting to external entities. Real safety features can stay in.