I work as a software engineer for an affiliate networking advertising company. Our business wouldn't exist if we couldn't track a click from a publisher (affiliate, like a deal blog or a search engine) to an advertiser (merchant, somebody selling stuff). I am extremely familiar with how we handle customer data, and we have no use for it. Our tracking technology aggregates the majority of the information related to sales fairly early on in the data pipeline and discards a lot of it after a relatively short time (hours). We have external and internal auditors that check up on the methods we use to clean personally identifiable information (PII, as they always call it). Even something as relatively benign as our own client's e-mail addresses are secure. When it comes to the likes of our actual advertisements, our company culture is nearing paranoia about NOT storing PII because even an accidental leak would reflect poorly on our clients and be devastating to our business. I really hope the other advertising companies see the risk of collecting this information as expensive as we do and take as much effort to avoid letting it be traceable back to individuals.

I have to say this: the opinions and statements are my own and not those of my company in any way.

Collective bargaining is another word for collusion. The head of lettuce analogy only holds if all of the grocerie stores get together and decide how much lettuce will cost in some dark back room. It's possible, but illegal.

The vast majority of applications you COULD write would work just fine as web applications. If you want to reach the largest audience with the least API-lock-in, think HTML/Javascript. Frameworks like Sancha, Worklight, Sproutcore, Phonegap, Rhodes, and jQueryMobile are providing an extremely good API that allows you to target the web browser so that you not only can have users on iOS and Android, but also Blackberry, Symbian, Windows Mobile, webOS, and any other touch-based web browser.

These frameworks allow you to take advantage of the new features of HTML5 such as local/offline SQLight storage, canvas, drag/drop, OpenGL, etc. The main downsides are that you DON'T get listed in the various markets, you don't have access to many platform-specific features - notifications are still a little tricky, but I'm sure that there will be an open source app to handle web-based notifications in a multi-platform way in the future.

I wish most of the apps in the Android/iOS Markets would just go away and become web sites, because they have no purpose as downloaded apps, including many games.

Before the printing press, the duplication of data was a tedious, expensive and error-prone process. Burning books represented the destruction of knowledge. Countless volumes of data have been lost to all time at the hand of ancient book burnings. Today, we look back on every book burning as an act of ignorance. While I agree with the bulk of the comments that state, "who cares, it's just a book", I still feel upset when I see people exercising their right to destroy their own property (and whatever permanent knowledge it contained) even though I know there are an infinite number of copies of that knowledge now contained in digital media.

I just hope we don't reach a time where the mass-destruction of knowledge becomes possible again.

You're right. Or, as a large corporation, I would have a HUGE incentive to grease whatever wheels I can to make sure that:

1. My technology doesn't become an official open standard but remains an unofficial one.
2. My competitors technology DOES become an open standard to drive him out of business.
3. My technology DOES become an open standard, but some essential tooling to use my technology remains outside the standard and very costly.
4. Some really poor technology becomes the open standard so that I can achieve #1.

The result of a government policy of taking property (even patented inventions) from the ultra successful for the benefit of the common always provides an incentive for the ultra-successful to take it's business elsewhere. This is why countries that frequently practice such a policy of radical socialism or communism tend to grow at a slower pace in the long run than more capitalist oriented countries in terms of GDP, or any useful quality of life measurement.

Any economist I know would tell you that the greatest benefit to the people is to allow the successful to enjoy the fruits of their labour so long as they don't stifle competition more than to allow them to make a modest profit from their hard work. And, the political discussion then can surround what exactly is a "modest profit", and how do we keep from stifling competition "too much". You've stepped outside that argument with complete disregard for the rightful owner of property under the auspices of "the good of the people" which has been shown in the real world, at least until now, to be a failed philosophy due to the fact that determining "the good of the people" never actually happens better by some governing body when a free and open market is available (which isn't always the case: sanctioned monopolies, military, health care, fire/police, etc).

The G1 originally shipped with Android 1.0. It was upgraded to 1.5 which provided for an on-screen keyboard and bluetooth audio, and then to 1.6 with navigation and other useful features.

iPhone OS, on the other hand, is just now getting multitasking, something that has been around since the 1.0 version of Android.

What was once Android playing catchup to iPhone has quickly become iPhone playing catchup to Android, and now that the 3GS is being brought to the level of Android 1.6, then we can't really compare upgrade paths of the two phones in terms of time.

I agree that Javascript is quickly becoming an assembly language. GWT (the tooling Google used to get Quake running in Javascript) is exactly that. Java code is compiled to "native" Javascript.

Although, what you say about browser oddities is largely irrelevant with the usage of toolkits like jQuery, Prototype, Dojo, etc. Instead of targeting the Javascript DOM API, you target your toolkit's API. The DOM API is the part that differs between browsers, except for a few very rare cases. Targeting a toolkit's API is a thinner way to abstract the differences between browsers instead of inheriting the overhead of compiling one language to another before running against a machine. For instance, managing C++ pointers in a language with built in garbage collection is probably not the most performant process.

Additionally, there is a subset of the actual language that some consider the "good part" from which you can also target at the language level. This is a great book about how to do that:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517748

You can import class files compiled from other languages such as Scala, Jython, etc.

http://blog.headius.com/2009/08/return-of-ruboto.html
http://www.scala-lang.org/node/160

With Java's built in support for dynamic languages, and a little more time, you'll able to compile any language of your choosing into a .class that can be used in Android.

The difference between Health Care and Computer Security is that I don't get to choose my body's operating system, and I have limited control over the hardware and software in my body (short of diet, cleanliness, and exercise, but not genetic issues, or living “malware” from other humans). If I have a living virus, I need to clean it, else spread it to others and then die. On the other hand, a computer virus is not a life or death problem, and some users chose to run systems that are more susceptible to viruses only because it is more convenient or the cost to learn is too high for them. In other words, the opportunity cost associated with being completely virus-free is higher than the value of the convenience of not having to be bothered worrying.

The free market is fully capable of controlling viruses in computers up to the extent that it feels that they need to be dealt with. Government-sponsored virus cleaning will attempt to completely eradicate viruses at all cost (or whatever cost it deems necessary). While we have the same issues with health care, I think more people can agree that the life of a human is a lot more worth the extra work than the life of a machine or network. A certain acceptable level of community virus activity is cheaper than attempting to completely eradicate viruses or the cost of a bureaucracy that attempts to control that activity.

If you want to work in the real world, writing software, you're going to have to speak to other engineers about what you are doing at a level of abstraction higher than "for loop" or "switch statement". You'll want to talk about algorithms and even more commonly, patterns. You may already be familiar with "tree" and "linked list" so you're off to a good start. But, in the future, you'll find yourself saying: "This is a visitor", "this is a controller", "this is a command pattern", etc. The current "bible" of these patterns is known as the Gang of Four book:
http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns/dp/0201633612

That one is a hard read. I understand that a more digestible book is this one:
http://www.amazon.com/Holub/dp/159059388X/

Two other routes you will want to go down is that of algorithms, like you already mentioned, and refactoring. Algorithms are the most common next step in College, so it might be wise to do that before patterns and refactoring, but I don't think either is a prerequisite for the other. But, knowing what "Big O notation" is, and understanding why a divide and conquer sort is so fast is helpful in your career.

Finally, refactoring seems to be the hidden art of writing good code. So few programmers really understand how to refactor bad into good. This advanced topic will be what sets you apart from the other engineers you compete with for a job. This one is a good "bible"
http://www.amazon.com/refactoring/dp/0201485672

I've had this hardware running Linux with Firefox and Abiword for over a year now:
http://www.littlelinuxlaptop.com/

I don't understand why AOL is ripped on so much in the community. AOL mail supports unlimited IMAP/POP3/SMTP storage. REAL IMAP. REAL.

For those of us who prefer non-web-based mail readers such as Thunderbird or mutt (for their speed, configurability, or better offline-support), full and complete IMAP is a MUST. Gmail supports the IMAP protocol, but the mapping between tags and folders is so disparate that I find it completely useless.

(2^31) seconds = 68.0511039 years of uptime before the bug manifests? So this wasn't much of a problem for BSD?

PasswordMaker is a great way to hash a master password with the URL of the website you are visiting. You only need to remember one or a few master passwords and have access to PasswordMaker. Passwordmaker supports several different hashing algorithyms as well as lots of other options, so you can customize the security of your passwords.

There's a firefox extension:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/469

There's an open source javascript passwordmaker for when you are on the road, it runs completely client side - and you can self-host it if you are paranoid:
http://passwordmaker.org/passwordmaker.html

And, theres an Android app in the Market as well.