£10,000 is actually pretty reasonable. Assuming he's got... say... two programmers on staff, and they're good enough to demand industry standard wages? That's about 1-2 months of development and debugging, plus the costs of dev kits, testers, and software licenses.

As near as I can tell, the big issue is that RT can't run the object oriented code favored by Android and iOS. Result is that large portions of any program would have to be completely refactored instead of simply converted and debugged.

So if I write Pong 2013 for Surface, should I expect the full marketing force of Microsoft to make sure my crappy app makes a certain minimum profit?

No, probably not. But if they promised your and other developers that your games would get strong placement on the internal marketplace, then delisted your product because of an unexplained versioning requirement? (as happened here) I suspect you'd be very upset.

That's why it counts as Microsoft's problem. They didn't tell developers that full cross-compatibility between RT and 8 was required for marketplace listing, but then they penalized a developer for breaking the unspoken rule.

It's true that nothing forces them, but I'd guess that a vast majority of android users, especially non-developers, will be buying almost exclusively from the app store. That 30% cut is essentially payment for the promotion opportunity of being featured in the official app store. There's a lot of reasons this is actually a great deal for the developers:

Customers feel more comfortable buying from the official store. Things are pushed at them by recommended items, staff picks, reviews, ratings, and categories. To boot, they get easy updates and a convenient purchase process.

Add to that: since the store takes a cut as opposed to a flat listing fee it's in the store's best interest to promote the games as heavily as possible. If they can get the best games in front of the most customers, they can make the most money.

You might want to rethink that. Since the Android store is the main gateway for less tech-savvy users (i.e. the vast majority of users) and outside sales don't get reported, you might actually be hurting the company in the long run by buying straight from their personal site.

Sure they get to keep an extra $1.50 on your $7 game, but they also have one fewer sale on the marketplace, and any reviews you leave will be downgraded in terms of relevance because the Android store doesn't think you own the product. Being pushed down a few slots in the marketplace could greatly hurt their visibility, and they could lose a lot of sales as a result.

If you really want to help them? Buy from the marketplace, leave reviews, and discourage any friends who pirate the software.

Personally? I use Netflix Streaming instead of a traditional cable subscription, and easily watch an hour a day of content. Sometimes I just put a series I know on and stream things in the background while I'm painting or doing layout work, and on long days like that I could easily rack up 9-10 hours of video content.

Heck, 1.15 hours a day? That's an episode of Walking dead and an episode of IT Crowd, or a single short movie. After work me and my partner typically eat dinner, then put on something interesting and drink a glass of wine or two. I feel like that's pretty typical behavior among subscribers who actually use their subscriptions...

Seems to me that the states shouldn't be trying to deal with the taxes on this, and instead congress should be doing it under the mantle of "Regulating Interstate Commerce". Pass a law that says all sellers must collect and report both federal and state income tax on sales as if the sale were occurring at the buyer's physical location, or the location to which the product is delivered. (Whichever is easier to make into an enforceable law).

Simple, clean, unambiguous, very few loopholes, and understandable to customers.

Sure it will be. Eventually someone will slip a measure making it illegal onto a budget reform bill or approval for increased shoe wax allowance for interns. Then it will exist in a paradox state where it makes itself illegal.

Doesn't even necessarily come from that. Even when you promote people for being AWESOME at their jobs, who's to say that your badass Developer will make a good Lead Developer, or that even if he excels as a Lead Developer he will be good at being VP of Development? Those roles, while all in the same chain of promotion, require entirely different skillsets and capabilities.

If you've ever heard the Peter Principle: "Every employee, in recognition for their excellence, will be promoted to their position of maximum incompetence."

The way I see it you're actually making life more dangerous for children.

I pose this question to males out there: You're driving down the road and see a young child, maybe 12 years old, on the side of the road. It's cold, too cold to be safely outside, and they're trying to wave you down. You don't recognize them, but they're obviously distressed. Would you stop to help?

I, for one, would not. If it's some attention-seeking disturbed child, or just the child of some overzealous protective parents, I could wind up in jail with my life ruined for my efforts. Safer thing to do for me is pretend I never saw anything, and hope someone finds them. I'd even be nervous to call 911, because then it's "Why didn't you stop to help?" which makes me suspicious. Good luck kid, blame your parents' attitudes.

This. Even as an American I had contact with my several of my teachers outside of school. They were role models and sources of advice when I was in school, and friends now that I am an adult. Heck, last time I was in town I had a beer with my old art teacher and we bitched about clients together.

Maybe it's because he was their swimming instructor, and gave them a ride somewhere or something? It's not like he had dozens of minors' contacts lying around and a string of lewd messages to them in his contact history (believe me, the police will have checked with the phone company by now).

Christ, panic mongers like yourself are the reason children are increasingly living in padded isolation boxes to protect them from big scary reality, and men are terrified to so much as speak to a child lest they be accused of molesting them. It's at the point now where, out of self-preservation, I would drive right by a child alone on the side of the road in the middle of winter. I would not stop to help. Why? Because if god forbid something happened to them later, or they decided to say something about me, the world would ruin my life for the greater good.

Ask yourself if that's really the best thing for children. For every pedophile you've cowed into hiding (they don't go away mind you, and when they think nobody is looking they're still going to do horrible things) you scare away hundreds or thousands of decent human beings who would help a child in need. Your child is far more likely to be hurt by tripping and falling, getting lost, or eating something dangerous; and if you're not around, you'd best hope there's a woman nearby to help because with this attitude the men will stay the fuck away.

Kids of a friend? Friends of a kid? Nephew/Niece? He needed to give them a ride somewhere once, he's an emergency contact for them, or maybe they friended him on Facebook because he's a buddy of their dad's and around the house a lot, and included their numbers in their profile?

There's a decent number of reasons that a 30-something normal adult would have the numbers of a few children in their address book. If there were like... 20 children that would start to get weird, but two seems pretty normal especially if there's some logical connection.

Any reason why not? As long as they volunteer and they know they're being studied, I bet giving everyone on earth a brainscan and cataloging the results would do wonders for science.

And what, they're kids so we shouldn't study how their minds work? Do you have a better way to learn about how they develop? Won't someone please thing of what the children think?!

I think he's talking about the families where they'd serve too much food, like giving a child adult-sized portions for example, and tell them "Eat everything or you're in trouble! Don't waste food!". That kind of habit might train them to ignore their natural appetite limits, and lead to overeating later in life.

This story doesn't really support your claim. This story only proves that manipulative women who hook up with every guy in their workplace are poor relationship material, the fact that she happened to be a programmer is incidental to the story. You can tell because if you replaced "programming" with say... "painting" or "accounting" and change the other terms to match, the story still works exactly the same. I for one am a web developer, as is my girlfriend. We've been together six years and are very happy.