Imagine a perfectly spherical chicken...

Anyone can write software

No they can't.

If you switched me with a sales guy I could do the sales guy's job on a technical level. I could talk to people, I could make calls, I could ask for money. I couldn't do it nearly as well as the sales guy and I'm an antisocial introvert so I'm all wrong for the job on a proficiency level but I could do their job, albeit poorly.

The sales guy can't do my job at all. He wouldn't know an IDE from his own ass. He has no idea how to write code. He sure as fuck doesn't know how to interface with COM objects or write cross platform code or perform code signing to get apps to run on mobile devices. Not "I can do it but not do it well", he can't do it at all. Not even halfass.

This isn't me trying to say programmers are special snowflakes, this is me saying that programming is fundamentally more difficult than anything normal people do, and most normal people don't actually want anything to do with it, which is why you often hear "hire a programmer" and not "learn how to program"

So with all due respect, no not just "anyone" can write software.

The same thing? Why would anyone put up with physical assault by a superior in the workplace?

He means day one of Hamas' existence, silly. It's p. obvious that's what he meant.

Since when is Target a "small business?"

Yeah, much better to let Amazon to run all the book publishers out of business. :rolleyes:

I don't remember people getting up in arms over Analog Rights Management.

Porno movies don't cost ten or hundreds of millions to make, and don't employ dozens to hundreds of people to create.

Serious winning.

They had the Super Hornet. It was available. It was perfect for the Navy and Marines, and most foreign use such as Canada. The F35 sales pitch was bullshit, and they fell for it.

The F-35 is silly. The Navy and Marines need the Super Hornet, not a 35-style does nothing well plane. Canada bought into the 35 sales pitch, and our CF18s are dying in the field with nothing to replace them. Again, the 18E/F wouldn't been perfect and available NOW.

More like don't put nudes on an online photo sharing service, password-protected or not.

Unlike Bitcoin, which is totally anonymous and has no fees!

I've donated to a bunch of Kickstarters, and received what I pledged for each time. What's the big deal?

The Fire Phone runs Mayday, Amazon's live tech support service for devices.

I haven't experienced it myself but when I see the Amazon Kindle Fire commercials where they demonstrate you can talk to a live Amazon person to help you use your tablet, my first thought was "that would be great for my parents", especially since it would lessen the number of calls I would get from them on how to do something with their technology device du jour.

You would think that something locked down like an iOS device wouldn't lend itself to needing this kind of tech support help, but in certain areas - especially phone calls - there's a certain level of resistance to technology complexity with the older crowd. It sounds like I'm being mean with regards to age but I have known several older people over the last few years who went out and bought an iPhone because it was the new shiny thing and then took it back because they couldn't figure out how to use it or didn't like how complicated it made things. As much as it makes perfect sense to you and I that the phone is a more generalized computing device nowadays and wanting to make a phone call is basically launching a program, the older set knows that you used to just open the fucking thing and start dialing.

I'm not sure if the Fire Phone will make all that better (in particular I can almost guarantee my parents in particular would fucking hate the 3D screen thing) but I do think perhaps there's an untapped market out there for people who want a less-smartphone. After all, isn't that basically what "locked down" Android tablets like the Kindle Fire and the Nook are? Google, Apple and Microsoft are all trying to outdo each other on technical whiz-bang, and this entry from Amazon doesn't seem to impress the Slashdot crowd at all. Maybe this one is for our parents?