You don't have to get the answers to all of Google's interview questions right. You have to show them that you know how to approach a problem and work towards a solution. They give you plenty of time and will often nudge you in the right direction if you're struggling. Most of the questions aren't particularly hard either if you have a decent understanding of data structures and algorithms.

a head-spinning battery of coding problems, riddles, and brain teasers, many of which seem only tangential to the task of software development.

Bullshit. The vast majority of the questions are about using an appropriate data structure and applying it to a relatively trivial algorithm. If you don't want to learn these things, and for some reason are determined to be a developer, I suggest picking up Ruby on Rails. After a week or two you might even be able to make significant improvements to MRI.

I don't care about jailbreaking, or Apple products in general, but the fact that for months you could jailbreak the iPhone merely by visiting a webpage shows ridiculously poor security. That webpage could just as easily install a keylogger, rootkit or do things even more malicious.

Sandboxing applications is a good idea that has already been implemented in various forms in Linux, OpenBSD and Windows, and the user I was responding to called it stupid merely because the most common attack vectors are primarily exploiting the user's trust. He also conveniently ignored the fact that with decent sandboxing even the damage done from those attack vectors would be significantly reduced.

Anyone that has attempted to attack a system with strict SELinux policies knows how much of a hassle these systems can be.

So when Raven Adler got her Mac rooted at Schmoocon, was that because she was pirating software or was it because she was being dumb and installing software without questioning it? I mean, it's not like Safari, or Apple's software stack in general, hasn't had a metric fuckton of vulnerabilities over the last few years... Right?

Do you realize that for a long time the primary method of jailbreaking iOS was to simply visit a webpage and that webpage would deliver the payload to root the device? Do you see why this might be a problem? Do you see why sandboxing applications that interact with the outside world, like many from the app store, might be beneficial?