We're absolutely in a bubble right now. I'm not going to argue against that, but a high need for development is in no way going away anytime soon. The enrollment level in CS is pathetic, and aside from some technological breakthrough that renders developers useless or a massive wipe out of our level of technology, the jobs will remain in demand. As high as they are now? No, but still plenty high enough to not warrant the need for unionization. Look at the rest of the engineering fields. Extremely low unionization rate comparative to other fields and the ones that are unionized are mostly due to the unionization of lower manual labor jobs in connected work. I'm sorry, but I just don't see the general trajectory of need for developers being diverted anytime in the next decade. There will be waxes and wanes, but it would take something pretty monstrous to knock developers down that far. There are too many needs that the human race has to solve, and so many of them have software solutions.

Why would I want to belong to a union when the most of the power is on the developer's side? There's not enough developers to go around and thus plenty of job availability. Unions are meant to solidify workers rights in a situation where labor is plentiful, but that's nowhere near the case. Companies fight over us. I just made a decision between 3 offers this week to accept a new job. The power was in my hand.

Exactly. The biggest reason that the Nexus 7 is able to undercut the iPad in price is because it's a smaller screen and because Google isn't making a profit on hardware, not because of significantly less features. It's still as every bit capable and more internally, but the smaller screen on a device being sold at near cost is what makes it $200.

Because developers like me who are already making android games can easily make a few adjustments and sell our games on this console instead of having to work a lot harder to make a port.

Developer drops game price to $0, failing to cite that it was a really shitty game that charged for upgrades.

" even though they still use the crappy Java"

I was going to award you some points, and then I read that. Now I dislike you.

What really has me excited about Windows 8 is Kinect. I think we're going to see a big transformation in the landscape of user interface in the next several years pushing us towards device-less interfaces.

  Granted, this stuff isn't a replacement, it's a supplement. So don't think I'm preaching the death of touch or mouse and keyboard. The more options of well developed and useful interfaces we have the better.

I half expect /. to go dark in like 3 days since that's how long it normally takes the news to show up here.

man, some people just can't take a joke

Which I left.

This is such an obvious LOTR ripoff, please tell me this is a joke. It even looks like the same actor that palys the wizard...has Hollywood honestly come to this?

I did the same thing and graduated in 2010. Lived on my own for 3 of the years.

Getting the government out of loans does not mean there will be no student loans. What it means is that private loans will be issued which will look much more at if the student has the ability to pay the loan back.

Right now we give students loans regardless of what their gpa is and what field they're in, which is a huge factor on whether or not they'll be able to pay the loan back. We've created this massive demand for college, but without students being restricted to what they can afford with their savings, the universities aren't concerned with price control. So, they focus on providing the biggest features to the school like 24 hour fitness centers and deluxe dorm accommodations. Things that have nothing to do with the cost of education. The cost of education is rising very appropriately with the rate of inflation. The rate of tuition is not. That means the schools are spending the money on other things.

The massive increase in the cost of education is nothing but the result of government making loans super easy and accessible. It's the exact same thing that happened in the housing market. Government should get out of loans, allow private businesses to offer much stricter loans based on field of study and student performance, AND stop telling everyone to go to 4 year schools. I believe everyone should get an education, but we're ending up with generations of bachelor's in psychology and english who can't find jobs, when if they had just gone to a 2-year technical school, they could be earning more money and be less in debt.

WITHOUT government subsidization, you'd see schools focusing on how to provide cheaper education. Which means more online services, more telecommuting, better IT infrastructure, and more high tech jobs. But schools aren't focused on cutting costs. They're focused on getting big amenities to attract more students.

You sound like Jay Carney http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6bgwZGZiIo

It is often decades before something is ruled unconstitutional by the supreme court. The executive and legislative branches have often done things that it knew were unconstitutional with the knowledge that the checks against them were purely reactionary and delayed. This mentality of "act now and let the lawyers sort it out later" plagues washington.