It is different, actually. If you have an iPhone/iPod/iPad, you have two options: install apps from Apple's app store, or jailbreak your phone and get your apps "black market" style. It's as if you had bought a lawnmower at Sears and now you can only buy fuel for it at Sears, or in the black market.

Yeah yeah you can get an Android, I know (I do have an Android). The thing is, as a developer, if you want to enter the mobile app market today, your app has to run on iOS. And it's a lot of effort that can just go to waste if Apple decides to just remove your app from the store one day without any justification whatsoever.

Plus, I can say I like The Beatles in last.fm, as well as a lot of bands that don't have their music available in iTunes. Apple brags a lot about the millions of songs they sell in iTunes but if you're not into pop music, there are a lot of bands that just don't show up in the iTMS and so they don't exist in the Ping network.

I would like to read the clauses in the contract stating that the manager's also liable when they push software out the door before it's ready.

If the programmers are going to be held responsible, they also must have the authority to specify realistic release dates. What happens when some product manager forces everyone to just commit what they have and release something the programmers know it's not ready yet, or hasn't been thoroughly tested?

What liability will the testers have, in organizations with dedicated QA people?

You should take a look at SimpleJ, which was made precisely for teaching kids how to program. It emulates a simple 80's style game console and has its own language, with a Java-like syntax (but it's not OOP). The IDE allows you to run code immediately, it has a very decent debugger which shows you graphic representations of data structures such as linked lists, as well as all local and global variables, etc.

There's even an eBook, but it's in Spanish (SimpleJ is Made in Mexico). But it's free software and really cool, try it out.

The attention span is certainly a factor, but I think that albums similar to the ones you mentioned are very rare today, and I don't think it's only because producers/labels/whoever thinks that it's not worth it because of the short attention span people have today. It's just hard to come up with a masterpiece like that.

I don't think the latest Muse album was that great; the previous 2 were better IMHO. This year, the best thing that I've listened to was Porcupine Tree's The Incident, a great concept album which unfortunately has no iTunes LP version, which would have been great, because it's one of those albums that you have to listen to from beginning to end (actually if you buy the CD, it's only 1 track on the whole disc, although on iTunes there are separate tracks).

Sadly, some great thinkers would die off as well, presumably well before they could reproduce.

Yeah, I loved that editor. I still miss block selection every now and then and I haven't found any modern editors that implement it. I suppose it's not considered very useful now that all code editors have auto-indent but sometimes you just need it when editing certain text files (tsv, column data and stuff like that).

The only mobile company here that didn't have prepaid (I think they still don't) in Mexico is Nextel. They were the only ones who had push-to-talk (now Telcel offers that too) so it is popular among businesses here because you can talk to your employees without spending money on a call, you just pay the monthly fee.

Telcel, Movistar, Unefon/Iusacell all have prepaid phones and 3 years ago you could buy one for cash without showing any kind of ID. About 80% of all mobile phones in Mexico are prepaid.

You can display different instructions for the users. One time you see "please type the blue letters only" and the next time you see "please ignore the red letters and type the black letters", or "please type the green letters and ignore the blue letters" or even use Yoda-speak "the green letters you ignore, but the blue letters you type" so that besides all the image parsing, the bots have to parse the instructions.
Eventually they might get it right but it gives you more time to come up with something else.

That's what I was thinking... but maybe there could be some way to use random names for the fields, and also place them in the page via Javascript so that the layout always looks the same for the first field that was laid out in the code is also random; that way you don't know if the first field is the email, password, username, etc unless you analyze the js code to see where the field is placed.

I don't call them, it's usually the other way around, when they accept a project and suddenly they figure out that it's way beyond their abilities and they need someone to implement all that functionality they promised but have no idea how to do it.

I could have sworn everybody was gonna get that joke.

I don't know about Norris, but Reznor did, and it's on the news.

So Obama is now the Michael Scott of presidents?
And I was kinda worried about the Mexico City governor being identical to Dwight...

Four... I rarely use the radio feature, but the site is very useful for keeping track of what I listen to and also to find new music through my neighbors, and also for finding out about concerts.