> Personally I also think frameworks are silly. If you can lash up a site in 30 minutes, then the request simply isn't distinctive enough.

Let me first point out that I agree with most of what you say (which is essentially that the value of a programmer is in solving problems which have not already been solved), however:

The entire point of a framework is to give you the underlying repetitive parts so you can focus on coding the complicated domain specific pieces later.

Frameworks and libraries are everywhere. In fact, many people judge the quality of a language by the quality of the libraries they have.

What you're asking for is silly. Corporations aim to eliminate free markets. That's what they do.

Free markets != Perfect markets, but corporations seek to eliminate the major components of free markets:

* Freedom of Information - Fraudulent Marketing (do you really get 5mb/s at any time?), Confusing pricing schemes (more common in retail), elimination of product information (what is you bandwidth cap, are certain services restricted?)
* Freedom to Price - Comcast wants to make it more difficult for Netflix to sell content cheaply, so it is effectively using it's monopoly status over users to cause netflix to raise prices
* Few Barriers to Entry - Starting a cable company is obviously a non-trivial task - many regulations (we'll give communications companies a pass here)
* Equal Access to Production Technology - One result of the comcast/nbc merger is now other cable companies and content companies will have to come to them for their product.

Because we are the people, and it's *our* damn airspace and we get to dictate the terms of the contract. It's straight-forward - the people have spoken, don't sell our airspace to corporations who want to make it as difficult as possible to move freely between other options in the marketplace.

Only 30mpg? The TDI does well enough, no need to overstate things:

The TDI gets 30mpg in city. Diesel isn't as plentiful in the US, but I think your point still stands, it will take a long time to make up the actual cost assuming the Volt doesn't come with a boatload of incentives (but they do, and will)

http://www.vw.com/jetta/completespecs/en/us/

Better yet, give people the ability to simply "shoot" text messages to the person in the car ahead of you - "You !@$#$!$, stop cutting me off!"

I paid a lot less than that for a land-line in the early 90's. There was a more infrastructure to support and that infrastructure was a whole lot more expensive. And, as I think it's been pointed out a number of times, that the cell service you are happy to overpay $50 here is much more advanced outside of the US, though I can't vouch for that myself.

*groan* (yknow, being made of air and whatnot)

Correction. This will be a tax on the current generation of those countries who chose to adopt these regulations.

Actually, going bankrupt is what brought the wall down.

You may find the following threads helpful:

http://serverfault.com/questions/4331/crashed-hard-drive-data-retrieval

http://serverfault.com/questions/4482/hard-drive-data-rescue-services