Sadly, the only way to overturn this mess, and get it out and maybe revised would be to have the Reps in control of all 3x branches. But, I'm afraid what else they'd do if they had that much control.
Last time the GOP had the House, Senate, and Presidency, the United States got involved in Vietghanistan and Vietraq.
Clearly, some apps do need to launch and boot. In the example you listed, the launch could be "daily" instead of "at boot"
Even "daily" might not be enough for a messaging app that needs to check whether you received new e-mail or whatever since you last booted your device, or an online trading app that needs to check whether you've been outbid on your auctions since you last booted your device.
We want the kids to realize that everything complicated is just a collection of simpler parts (until you get small enough), and those simpler parts are generally designed by humans, so there's no good reason why they can't be the ones designing in the future.
Other than they happen to live several states away from the established companies that do such designing. If you want to act in a Broadway play, you have to move to New York. If you want to act in a Hollywood film, you have to move to Los Angeles. I can think of a few Slashdot users who would claim that people who have no way to move to where a trade is practiced shouldn't even bother learning the trade.
My company has an internal proprietary app that has an iOS front end
Touché. If you're only working on internal applications on the developer enterprise program, that's another factor reducing the urgent need to broaden your skill set, I'll grant.
And how do I get on the job experience programming Android in an iOS/MS shop?
That depends on whether your company also wants to produce an external application. I understand you're already set up to publish an iOS application, but your company probably doesn't want to turn away revenue from potential customers just because their phone isn't Apple.
Why would you bake in the ability to disable things like network access when ad serving is the main source of revenue for app developers?
Because Google screwed up early on. When Android launched, Google Checkout (now Google Wallet) was available in too few countries. Paid apps would not appear in the Android Market (now Google Play Store) application, and in the web, they would appear as "Not available in your country". So in order to get any sort of international user base for an application, the developer had to distribute it without charge. This led to a culture where users expect free apps. Apple, on the other hand, never launched the iPhone or iPad in a country until it had payment working in that country.
Don't like a permission? Don't install the app.
That doesn't help when there aren't enough competing apps that don't need the permission.
Old programmers never die, they just hit account block limit.
