That picture is clueless, they aren't opposed to corporations, they are opposed to crony capitalism.

Amazon appstore was a much needed way of downloading apps and the developers who are upset because they don't have the freedom to push out terrible applications for free need to grow up. I lost track of the number of times I downloaded an app from the android market and it totally killed my battery in a matter of minutes. Browsing the android market is still a total clusterfuck with more useless crap apps than anything else and actually searching for quality apps is a horrendous experience which is pretty funny considering google is a search company. The amazon market is much needed for those of us who want apps that are properly vetted for security and quality.

The problem is that at some of these places, no one actually knows how these systems work. They've become the mystery blackbox that no one touches for fear that it might stop working. If documentation exists it's in dozens of binders that someone put together in the 80s but hasn't been updated since the 90s, if documentation doesn't exist anyone who was involved in developing the application has moved on, retired, or died. They contain cute little coding trick there were nice when resources were expensive but are time consuming to follow and painful to workaround when a bug fix is required. These examples are real world I'm talking about and involve applications that would make you want to keep your money under a mattress.

There are banks, hospitals, utilities and other institutions that don't take kindly to change. These institutions have ancient (as in I ran across a piece of code that was written when I was in diapers) legacy systems running key functionality that many people's everyday lives depend on. If you ever had to take a look at any of the code for these legacy systems it would frighten you, but what is more frightening is that most of these institutions have an "if it's not broken don't fix it" mentality so don't expect modern security issues to be addressed in a lot of these legacy systems anytime soon.

I've worked at two companies where we created libraries for monitoring cursor movement, what the business folks used it for I'm not certain but this has been done over and over. What is so new and innovative about their implementation that it is patentable?

Actually yes http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/16/AR2010061605541.html?hpid=sec-business Lawmakers on Wednesday reached a compromise to allow expanded audits of the Federal Reserve, part of an effort to shine light on the central bank's emergency lending during the financial crisis while safeguarding its independence in setting monetary policy.

Sounds like Kumar and his friend Harold have been spending too much time baking weed brownies and not silicon wafers.

Where have you been? Sony was locking down really good hardware with ridiculous restrictions before Apple had even thought of it. See minidisc.

There is an easy solution to this, and it is easier said than done. Stop working for multi-national corporations. Start your own business, work for smaller local businesses or universities, and only do business with other like-minded individuals. Companies like IBM are able to do this only because the best and the brightest in the US allow them too. This is especially true in the world of IT where the startup costs are so low that if every developer, syadmin, dba, etc decided they were going to start their own companies and do business with each other exclusively we could. If IT ends up like manufacturing in 20 years we have no one to blame but ourselves we have way more power and formal education than factory workers ever had.

Don't worry, Carlos Slim is a generous man, he'll give Bill Gates some side work till he gets back on his feet.

On a more serious note, we now have more millionaires and billionaires than at any other time in the history of the world! The wealth is trickling down baby!