Relax, I never expressed my desire to give your money to a third-party, simply stating an observation.

Wealth and Power are compounding, always siphoning to the top. Unless you place restrictions, i.e. socialist policy, it's only a matter of time before serfdom ensues, It's no coincidence that 80% of the wealth created over the past two decades have gone to the top 1% of the population. Remember the dream of being millionaires in the 90s? Nowadays, billion is the dream. Yes, inflation over time is real, however it doesn't warrant an increase of 10^3 magnitude.

Civilization is an ongoing collective effort. Why do we whine about this? Next time you or a loved one who desperately needs the same bright minds to come up with remedy or a cure to a devastating disease, tell me why you don't whine.

What about the bright minds coming up with new ways to kill people (military)?
Moral codes, ethics and philosophies are for the classroom, cash is what rules in the real world. The massive efforts of society to abstract our ill-doings (work) from our morals shouldn't be overlooked either.

Although, massive grouping of all old programmers to a stereotype is unfair, my experience is that It's a matter of desire/passion. Technically, I think the old programmer has a good grasp of the underlying foundation of logic. It's a matter or putting in the time to learn the new recipe and syntax. Often, their experience will get them up and running far quicker than a young buck.
Can a old programmer learn new tricks? Absolutely. Does he/she want to? Well.

1. Is he/she burnt out
2. Can he/she sacrifice the time required without neglecting his/her established lifestyle and family
3. Is he/she still passionate or is he/she disenfranchised by his/her negative experience in the field?
4. Does he/she have the guts to be a noob and feel stupid again? I know many who take pride in their area of expertise and rightfully do not want to dilute their worth by becoming less good in other sometimes newer areas.

I drank from the fire-hose and voted this story up.

I work for a dot com older than LinkedIn which is crippled by a similar (worse) monolith legacy webapp. Innovation, efficiency, development cycles, new features and site/product-wide roll-outs are a pain or in some cases impossible. This story gives one perspective/solution to the problem.

Software is a fast moving space, you snooze you lose. As the web matures, I see many more once-prolific trendsetting companies slip into bureaucratic process-driven monoliths milking every bit of value the antiquated software still holds. The wise companies invest in technology and reap the benefits of the initially intangible results of a flexible, maintainable, truly agile technological stack, however, most companies eventually fall into the cycle of:

1. Start-up and innovate
2. Grow and profit
3. Implement n-layers of bureaucratic oversight and process to protect the value
4. stop their ongoing evaluation
5. Loose market-share to newcomers and mavericks in your segment
6. paralyzed with more market-share loss, copy the competition wherever you can and desperately hold onto your scraps
7. keep losing market-share
8. disappear into the abyss

Separation of Church/Religion & State, be it whatever religion

It is common sense that information in the PUBLIC DOMAIN is available to well everyone, including "the enemy". Calling the witness to state that Bin Laden seeeked public domain knowledge is just tugging on strings of nationalist emotions. The goal is to smear Manning to Al-Qaeda/Bin Laden (evil, bad, them, enemy) and

This is far-fetched and paranoia until it happens to you. :) Truth is that we live under a totalitarian regime with some privileges. Our ongoing maltreatment of foreign people should have been a warning, now they are coming for us. No conspiracy here, man's self-perpetuating thirst for power has brought us here. My advice is to never grab the attention of your government and it's long-reaching arms. Stick to the masses and stay low.

Wish I had points to mod you up. Great point!

Replace no-poach agreements with price-fixing agreements. No-poach agreements cap the earnings of an employee and prevents him/her from getting market value salary based on free-market supply and demands.

Although all part of Western civilization, United Kingdom is NOT France nor the United States of America when it comes to law and its just execution. When it comes to offensive and hate speech, UK is far more stringent, limiting and consistent in tackling from my observations.

It's important to recognize the human bias when evaluating the venom and criminality of speech. Empathizing or the lack there of with the offended is subjective.

I'd like to draw three distinctions in such affairs:

First is the philosophical belief in freedom of offensive, non-popular speech very much at the core of Western civilization. Those who do believe in it ought to believe in it regardless of whether you empathize with those offended or not. Otherwise, you are a hypocrite. Don't come here defending freedom of press/speech when it comes to anti-Muslim rhetoric, but throw the book at those whose actions offended you and vice-versa.

Second is, based on philosophy, the crafting of legislation to combat/protect particular speech. Bias can and at times does creep into legislation where one form of speech deemed offensive towards a small group is legal, while speech that might offend the majority is deemed illegal by law. Simply regurgitation "the law says so, therefore it shall be" isn't a good justification. Law can be wrong, discriminating and amended.

Third, is the execution of law by the authorities. Authorities must address each offending according to law objectively. The size of the population offended, or one's subjective views should not creep in when it comes to enforcing the law. Furthermore, making up legal technicalities in order to make the arrest based on your core bias is unjust and corrupt in my opinion.

Even though I am critical of and find freedom of speech in England to be very limiting , I respect their just interpretation of the law in a variety of cases including this one. Unlike Britain, USA I feel has much more ground to make up when it comes to drafting of legislation and its just, fair execution. There is a reason why one out of every three African-Americans will be incarcerated in their lifetime and it isn't because they are inherently criminal.

I can live with laws I might disagree with, I can use my democratic rights as a citizen to protest and influence (through voting) to amend them. However, I can't live with biased laws and those that are subjectively and selectively applied and enforced.

You might find my rant off-topic perhaps, but the message I want to convey is:
If you were here supporting freedom of expression in cases such as the cartoons of Mohammed, don't let your bias and empathy treat this issue differently.

Right on! You forgot to add the Internet Service Providers.

ISPs get the benefit of less bandwidth usage and grounds on which they can throttle your connection to a grade above dial-up and/or suspend services all the while you pay them your monthly contract/non-contract fee. It's a win-win for all scumbags, everyone gets thrown a bone.

This is very true. A working man/woman simply doesn't have the time and resources and has much more to risk to dissent over such matters. More importantly, fear is the reason of not challenging such abuse of personal liberty. As civilized as we are, we all know deep down that if we dissent enough, we'll be dealt with, ultimately by force.

For the most part I agree agree with you in sentiment. However, there are those who want to control the internet, specifically governments and multi-national corporations whose sole business is built on IP and corporations who want even greater control over the physical infrastructure they currently maintain. With the dawn of something precious comes the vultures who want all of it under their control. This is mankind's nature. Through fear, propaganda, lobbying and sometimes force these vultures will eventually get their way. Cyber-attacks, piracy, SOPA, lack of bandwith, child pornography, ... It's all power grab.

Cyber-attacks - The door of company/gov't entity A was open and thieves stole X amount of value, therefore, everyone should send in their keys so we can protect you all, or better yet, we'll build one big door out front and decide who gets to come in and who does not. FUCK YOU, fix your security holes

Piracy - We push digital formats of IP that we own into the public domain with insufficient security and oversight. We are neither going to acknowledge our short-comings in protecting our IP nor are we going to adapt to the changing times and seek out new creative outlets for our products (i.e. rock band), instead we are going to lobby hard for the uber-privilege of regulating all content on the world wide web. FUCK YOU either evolve or don't publish your IP if you can't protect it.

In both of these instances, their fault is spun into request for greater control through fear (economical and national security). I draw a clear distinction between regulation of content and infrastructure. I too wish the internet to remain a "persistent stateless anarchy", however, there needs to be regulation and oversight of infrastructure, NOT content, when appropriate; i.e. detect/protect against DOS attacks, DNS spoofing, etc... But don't tell me what content I can consume and what content I can't.

Like you, I refuse the choose the lesser of the two evils.