Whom has the US kept from escaping its regime?

Perhaps you missed it, but there were a bunch of people who didn't want to be part of the USA back in 1861, and the USA fought a war to force them to stay. Your country is literally defined by its unwillingness to let people leave.

In order to get onto the App Store, one has to stop thinking like an employee and start thinking like an entrepreneur

This is nonsense. You don't have to "think like an entrepreneur", you just have to pick an idea that hasn't been done to death.

I fail to see how it isn't secret.

Anybody with $99 can see it. The cost is the only barrier to seeing it. That's not a secret, that's charging money for something.

So how would one go about refuting that rant without violating NDA?

Why don't you compare the review guidelines it links to with what it claims those review guidelines state? It misrepresents the document it links to. One of the bullet points even admits that it might be wrong, but they don't know because they don't have all the information.

No, you don't have to spend over a thousand dollars buying a Mac, an iPad, and a certificate just to see the guidelines. You just have to have a paid developer account, which costs $99.

In other words, you are claiming that one should buy a paid developer account, read the Guidelines, and then buy a Mac on which to run Xcode and an iPad mini on which to test an application. Do I understand you correctly?

You're not even attempting to understand me, you're trying to ignore my point and push one of your points instead.

You claimed you had to spend more than a thousand dollars to get your hands on the review guidelines. That's clearly absolute bullshit. My point was that your claim was utterly false. Your response to that is not to hold your hands up and admit what you said was untrue, your response was to try to push another point while ignoring the fact you got caught in an outright lie.

You aren't arguing in good faith, so it's pointless continuing. If you would like to argue in good faith, then you can start by admitting you dishonestly inflated the cost of obtaining the guidelines by over 1000%.

That requires first thinking of a kind of app that neither has "massive amounts of similar apps in the App Store" nor violates the leaked copy of the guidelines. I imagine that a lot of beginning developers will draw a blank.

You really have to have a chronic lack of imagination to draw a blank there. Yes, there are several types of app that are over saturated in the App Store. No, that doesn't mean it's difficult to think of anything else.

With respect to the "leaked guidelines", do you realise this is not secret information and the "leaked copy" is several years out of date? That's a badly misinformed rant written by somebody who clearly has an axe to grind.

One problem is that a developer can't even see the latest guidelines without already having paid $1,100 for the devkit (Mac mini + iPad mini + certificate). I signed up for an Apple ID and registered as a developer, but when I tried to view the guidelines, I got an authorization failure because I'm not yet a paid member.

Wow, that's the most disingenuous thing I've seen in weeks. No, you don't have to spend over a thousand dollars buying a Mac, an iPad, and a certificate just to see the guidelines. You just have to have a paid developer account, which costs $99. You've exaggerated the cost by over 1000%.

Wait until the Great Firewall of The United States, as carried out by business interests

The USA doesn't need a Great Firewall. Anything it doesn't like, it takes down for everybody instead of blocking it.

When Slashdot commenters posted things the Church of Scientology didn't appreciate, the USA didn't block Slashdot for USA visitors, they forced Slashdot to remove the content for everybody.

When 2600 linked to DeCSS, the USA didn't block 2600 for USA visitors, they forced 2600 to remove the links.

When people set up gambling sites that USA citizens were using, they didn't block USA citizens from using them, they seized the gambling sites' domain names so nobody could visit them.

When Dmitry Skylarov wrote an ebook reader that circumvented copy protection so blind people could use it, the USA didn't block people from visiting his employers' website. They arrested him.

These are far from isolated examples. The USA censors all the time without having to bother with a Great Firewall. Why bother blocking something when you can take down the source and send a message to anybody else who might be thinking of doing something similar?

Build an app that doesn't have massive amounts of similar apps in the App Store. Whatever you build runs the risk of being rejected by Apple for any number of reasons, but as long as you stick to the guidelines, the risk is minimal.

Not to mention the fact that Objective-C has been around since the early 80s and isn't exactly a newcomer. The first ever web browser was written in it.

If you want to learn to program for Android/iOS, that's great, but do it as a hobby. Employers nowadays want 10 years experience on a tech that's only been available for 5 years (yes, it's that crazy), so by the time you get up to speed, the market will have already moved on to the next shiny thing.

That's not particularly accurate. I've never seen anybody ask for more than a few years of experience building iOS applications. I've been doing it since late 2008 and nobody has ever asked for more experience than I have, and most places have required significantly less. If there is one standard qualifier all the recruiters are looking for it's "must have an app in the App Store". We're not particularly concerned with the number of years in the field when we hire - so long as they can write decent code.

There's huge demand for iOS developers and there aren't enough to go around. If he picks up Objective-C and sticks an app in the App Store, he shouldn't have any trouble finding work as an iOS developer. It's relatively easy to find decent work even without substantial experience because for a lot of places, the choice is between inexperienced developers, expensive contractors, expensive external agencies, and nobody.

Although join.me is by logmein this one seems to be free

LogMeIn just discontinued their free service with zero warning. You'd have to be nuts not to expect the same thing to happen to join.me in the very near future, especially if they aren't trying to migrate people to it.

How is it that we landed men on the moon in ten years, but we can't write some web applications in six years?

NASA engineers didn't have non-technical stakeholders telling them what features the rockets should have. And the NASA engineers were employees at the top of their field not a collection of consultants put together by an outside firm.

Have you ever seen the episode of the Simpsons where Homer designs a car? Imagine that, except with a committee of politicians. Reckon you could fly to the moon in something they had a hand in?

Hey, my bank's mobile app has state of the art security - they require a five digit PIN to use their mobile app!

It's true to form. This guy tried to make an open-source time travel game a while back, but it ended up him having an idea and wanting everybody else to write the code and create the graphics while he made all the decisions. Needless to say it didn't go anywhere despite him calling in the favours to get it publicised on Slashdot and elsewhere.

Non-complaint #1: ESR states that bzr is "old and crufty" and that "it's mailing lists are dying and patches are dwindling", and that this is somehow bad.

It's not bad: that's what happens with mature, purpose-built tools: once the damn things work well enough

That's the thing - it doesn't work well enough. There are year-old bugs in bzr that affect EMACS that remain unfixed. This is not a codebase that has ceased development because it is finished, this is a codebase that has been largely abandoned.

Of interest: A group interview with the developers of SimCity months before the release date. They were told by thousands of people that DRM was a no-go.

Then you're using the term in a different way to everybody else. Safari running on iOS is a mobile browser. Every web developer I've worked with refers to it as a mobile browser. Popular web analytics systems refer to it as a mobile browser. Even Apple call it "Mobile Safari".

TFA says nothing of the sort; it was the submitter that said that. Safari on the iPad is a mobile browser (the actual name of the application is "Mobile Safari" FFS), and it is a bit more limited than desktop Safari, although it won't matter for the vast majority of websites.