I don't think cost explains or excuses this phenomenon. There is always a motive for doing anything but traditionally much of it was side projects, hobbies, getting famous, filling resumes, PR and making money off pay version upgrades... the primary goal was never making money by fucking people over until the rise of the app store.

There must be countless hundreds of unique pieces of "free" software I use all the time on my desktop.. none of it is engaged in this bullshit.

The culprit in my view are perverted market pressures brought about by existence of app stores.

There is no useful quality filter.. You don't go to Walmart and walk out with a "free" or $3 PS4 title. When everything is free people who want to publish real software get fucked over by everyone expecting free or $1.50 while their product appears as just another piece of flotsam in a vast ocean of mostly useless crap.

Couple this with undeserved global exposure all apps automatically get regardless of whether they deserve it or not and feedback loops that make profiting from advertising and spying networks easy for app vendors and you get the current cesspool of mediocrity and hostility.

"Pretty soon we'll be posting openings for technologies X, Y, and Z, so bone up on those" would be a start. Or "Customer service representatives need to be understandable on the phone. Here are some videos about improving your speech."

NASA did not invent a warp drive. Roger Shawer might have. The title should read, "NASA has not been robustly proven to have built a warp drive" Three teams have reported the same effect from three different devices. And these aren't teams of hacks. Furthermore the test duplicates our best prediction of the cause of the thrust. It's premature to throw a Singularity party but it's definitely premature to declare the device to not be a warp drive.

Skepticism is a good thing. This isn't proper skepticism.

Oh, good thing the US made so much money off the borrowed money spent on the Iraq war.....oh wait, they didn't. So yeah, being in debt is bad.

Sometimes you have to request the rejection letter by following up a week after the last contact to check the status of your job app.

Would the program look anything like SBA loans and grants or the several states' urban renewal programs?

Perl existed before PHP. Why was it so much easier to make a standard image for PHP than for Perl?

Anti-discrimination laws keep older people from becoming long-term unemployed before they are old enough to qualify for social security. Long-term unemployment is associated with increased costs to the government to control crime.

The form's answer to your answer is "Please choose an option from the list. ( ) Older ( ) Younger or same"

Would it be a bad idea to follow up a rejection letter with "Is there anything I could do to improve my skills to make myself a better fit for your company?"

Unless the question is multiple choice, the form offers no "yes" option, and the "older" option is believed to send your application to the circular file.

I thought "high demand" (movement of the demand curve to the right) caused an increase in price level, not a decrease. Are you claiming that the demand curve moved so much that hosting providers were able to build in enough economies of scale that they could move the supply curve so far to the right that it more than compensates for the increased demand? Or is there some particular shitty aspect inherent to PHP that happens to push its supply curve to the right?

If employers lose lawsuits over this, they'll probably change it to "up-to-date education" and "3 years of active use of a major social network, iOS or Android operating system, and electronic bill payment". This allows older people to technically qualify by having taken a relevant class at a local college and joining Facebook.

What it means is that history shows that education alone is not enough to scrub thinking in hours, days, and years from the public's habits.

Nice selective quoting. The original claim was that it "gains an advantage in market share" due to being added "as bloatware to a lot of products". The claim was specifically that growth in market share was due to being bundled.

And what evidence do you have that Google is paying anyone to include Chrome?