It's not stealing; that would be taking someone else's software away.

It's more like sharing what you do not have a right to share. So if you put up a song, you get to pay for it a hundredfold. Seems pretty punitive to me.

The court said it awarded costs to plaintiffs. Any idea what price range that would be in?

Telco's are basically searching for a way to get a share of Google's profits. The plan was to introduce new subscriptions that would allow them to block Google. Unless Google agreed to pay them per search.

This wouldn't work if there was real competition. But there are just 3 telco's and they're all hurt by decreasing income form voice and sms.

This law will encourage telecoms to compete on bandwidth and network quality instead of financial trickery and monopoly abuse. Should be a good thing for consumers.

The idea of a programmer getting better in transitions is a fantasy. Programmers start out good or bad, and on average don't improve much. They move up the ladder by getting more knowledgeable about the organization; coding less, and talking more.

You sound like you moved past the coding long ago.

[quote]But the reality is that anyone who thinks they are a DTP isn't one, and they'll cut too many corners, and produce something that is the equivalent of a go-cart that makes it through one race and then falls to bits, because duct tape just isn't that durable, and people who rely on it in production environments are dangerous idiots.[/quote]

Netscape transformed the face of IT; maybe even of humanity.

What kind of impact do your programs have?

"Spaghetti code" is just a term used by programmers to describe someone else's work.

And guess what, they're right. If you show UI early on, people get a better mental image of where you are going. You can then respond to feedback early in the development cycle, which is priceless.

The strategy you ironically list as "unrewarding" results in an excellent code base that doesn't solve anyone's problem.