"Touch screen laptops will become a lot more popular eventually"

Touch screen laptops will do even worse than desktop touch screens. If you are in a physical position (in bed, laying down on the sofa so forth) where you can comfortably use a laptop touch screen, you are most likely not doing serious productivity work and would be better suited to be using a tablet. If you are doing serious productivity work you are most likely to be sitting at a desk/table and then you face same reason the desktop touch screens don't do well.

If anything, the whole concept of laptops is heading toward extinction, net-books are already dead (nearly everyone has stopped making them), laptops will be soon be such a very tiny niche market that we would not be far off off the truth calling them dead as well

It was more the other way around, MS did well in the consumer market because most users were familiar with their products at work. PC's were expensive investments for majority of individuals until the mid to late 90's, but not out of reach of enterprises,/p>

Microsoft's problem is not their developers or engineers, it's their management and the internal politics they play

For example, forced metro on the desktop (and server ffs) was very obviously a management (most likely sales) decision (hell beta versions had the option to turn it off in the registry, until everyone found out about that and MS removed it). No developer in their right mind would have forced on users something like, especially in the first version of the interface. It reaks of the "bright idea" of some sales guy who's most advanced use of IT is powerpoint presentation he got his PA to do for him. And there are countless other less obvious examples of this thinking

MS really needs to get another IT guy with some business sense back in charge and get rid of Ballmer the sales guy

But in the meantime is MS going anywhere? No a chance as for their business customers there really is no viable alternative. Apple have no real interest in catering for the business customers needs and linux does not have a big enough support infrastructure nor enough off the shelf software for the users. And lets not get into rewriting all the in house stuff for a different OS

Except it did not work,it actually backfired and many warned them it would.

Windows 8 on phones and tablets is actually pretty good, but the negativity/bad press generated by windows 8 on the pc has spilled over and affected peoples view of the phones and tablets.

If they had not forced metro on the pc and left it optional, not only would windows 8 pc sales have done a lot better, but also probably the phone and tablet sales would have been better as well.

All of those are would to company's with a physical presence (thus probably heavily invested financially) in your legal jurisdiction and thus subject to actually getting caught and going to jail.

While shit does happen it is far less likely to happen than on some random online web could be anywhere in the world (aka somewhere with little effective police presence) and who could have invested just a few bucks to set up "shop". Random small vendor online should be viewed as the same as using your cc in the worst, most corrupt country in the world, something you do very cautiously. Basic risk management.

Most game developers expect that around crunch time, problem with EA is it was "crunch time" 24-7 365 days a year. That's not due to nature of industry or even bad planning, that's planning to intentionally screw over staff for profit (especially as they generally avoided paying OT as well)

You train them on the system and the clients business (assume you should have good idea of that), if he is capable of learning such then all is fine and dandy and your job as contractor is done and done well.

If he not capable of learning to do the job due to basic lack of fundamentals/programming skills you inform the client of such and leave them to figure out what to do. You do not teach him to "program" under any circumstances as training in such from you would probably cost the client more than sending him back to school/hiring someone more qualified. If they have gone so "cheap" that they have hired someone totally unqualified that is the hiring managers problem, not yours.

"Hand over" is about handing over the the necessary knowledge/skills for that particular project to someone qualified, not about training someone in the basics of design/development

Forever? No. But some type of "desktop" will always exist until someone comes up with a better alternative for production based computing than the the mouse and keyboard and currently no one has. It's not about the the actual PC but rather the tools that humans use to interact with it and while touch screen/tablets have their uses (consumption) they are poor for production *Quotes around desktop because there will most likely come a time, at least in corp environment where the hardware, aka actual computer, will not be anywhere near the desk but rather some kind virtualized pc getting directly beamed to a screen with a just a receiver chip in it and at a later date the same even in the home environment

Europe (especially UK), while still a lot better better paying than the US is not really that far behind them on the downwards slope on rates of pay and the visa/outsourcing problems. The 'benefits' though remain better across the board, but that's generally a national things rather than sector specific

Don't know about him, but last time i looked (development) i would have to take about 10-20% paycut for an increase of working hours of about 40% if i worked again in the US. 'Benefits' are not much of concern in Europe as the US. But rates have been pretty stagnant/on the decline overall since about 2001 when inflation is taken into consideration

We do nearly the exact opposite, we save the company's gold (unless it's an IT company...then we do make gold out of thin air)

Hell most large company's today, could not even exist without IT no matter how many staff they hired

There is nothing arbitrary about it, it's basic supply and demand. If there's a skill shortage the price goes up. If it goes up enough supply will increase (people training for and moving to that sector) which will either stabilize or bring down prices again

The problem is, these so called capitalists/free marketers don't like the market when it costs them and try to circumvent it, either by paying off politicians for tax cuts to make offshoreing more viable or by either abusing existing visa regulation so they can import cheap labor or once again paying off politicians to change the regulations to suit themselves

Which in turn reduces prices locally, which means less people enter the market, which starts to once again generate a skills shortage, but instead of market forces being allowed to play out, for the capitalists it's back once again to the politicians with money in hand

Down the road we are going there will soon be no one left locally with the skills because they have been undercut so much that they will better off working at McDonald's flipping burgers

Networks and development are two totally different skill sets/job roles as different as night and day,rare to find someone who even wants to do both never mind have the actual skills (and if they do it's because they left one role in pursuit of the other and doubtful they would want to go backwards career wise to doing both), so no wonder you are having difficulties. The security clearance just makes it even worse

I would imagine most of the CV's you are getting are from people who want to make the career transition and thus are blagging half their skill set, so either you are going to need to break it into two roles or accept someone learning on the job.

Though what you are asking for, someone with skill sets from multiple roles is a pretty common requirement that i see , normally because the last guy in the job did that. What you forget is the last guy left, most likely because he used you to transition his career already and you are now advertising a spec for a transitional role while demanding a skill set on par with those who already completed the transition.

Company's need to stop hiring just based on what the skill-set of the last guy was but rather look back at what his role was originally and what it is now and compare the two and decide if the job as it is now should be broken up into various roles

They should, but those "job creators" pay a lot of money to politicians not to be subject to market forces when it suits them

Except "they" did not change the day or declare the jubilee a bank holiday, Government did (Labour if i remember correctly). Queen has no authority in creating laws or policy's beyond rubber stamping government policy's. Hell if they even try to talk publicly (or get caught trying to influence privately) about policy's/laws they would like changed/implemented they get lamblasted so in some ways they have less rights that the average citizen

It's more of a question of how bad the UK AND the US justice system is, as recent cases have proven, if the US does not get what they want out of the UK justice system, they can and will demand extradition and it will be granted due to the stupid one sided treaty. So even if the UK system finds them innocent (or refuses to hear the case) they will still face a few month's/years in a US jail awaiting trial in the US and with all the costs that entails