Ask them what their official job title is - I can guarantee you that it is not Software Developer. http://canada.usembassy.gov/vi...

TN Visas actually don't allow for Software Developers. There are Computer Systems Analysts, but any talk of programming will cause the visa to be rejected. I'm a dual Canadian/Australian citizen who works in the USA on an E-3 visa even though it's more expensive to process the paperwork.

Take a very simple application that keeps a list of what money you get, and what you spend it on. A simple display screen of Amount Reason Then explain you need to add two buttons - add money and spend money. Each button opens up a screen where you enter the information, explain how you need fields to enter the data, and buttons to go OK. Then you can go, what if you hit the button by mistake? You need a cancel button. Around this time you need to talk about how dumb computers are, and how you have to tell them every single little detail of what needs to happen. Then assuming the OK button is hit, you need to update the screen to add the new Amount and Reason. After you explain the above (use a blackboard to draw simple versions of what the screen should look like), you will have spent probably 15 minutes explaining what you had to go through at least. Then, if you have the resources, open up something like excel. Explain that each and every little menu and option and button requires just as much if not more analysis like what you just described - and that keeping track of all that information with such detail gets very difficult. And voila, you've largely explained what software development is all about, without touching code.

So they can go for about an hour before recharging, and then they spent half their active time recharging? Keep in mind, there's also time required to leave from and return to whatever charging station you have. These things are useless.

Thankfully, you have a simple, legal option available to you: Don't buy the game. It's just entertainment :)

Simply put, this has nothing to do with globalization and everything to do with Monopoly.

Why people still routinely neglect compound interesting I'll never know. If he took that $38,000 and put it in a long term investment at a mere 5%, he'd had 68242.54 at the end of 12 years. Yes, it's green, yes, it's cool, but no, he's not saving money.

That was taken into consideration. From the viewpoint of developers and users, distribution costs are free. Yes, someone pays for it, but the cost is so low that it is provided for free to the participants. Even if we are talking p2p distribution, the distribution costs are at least fixed, which has a similar effect (sorry, it's been a while since I've taken economics).

There's always a fine line when to keep your post simple, and when to write an essay :)

"Most people in the West, including myself, were indoctrinated with the notion that extending the power of individuals necessarily diminishes the power of the state, and vice versa"

What? Western culture has been about empowering the individual, about heroes. Conversely, communist nations such as Russia and China are less about individuals, and more about "the good of many outweighs the good of the few".

Additionally, the "free" software you see isn't an affront to free market principles, in fact it is an application of "when a product has an infinitely increasing returns to scale, cost tends towards distribution costs", and since distribution costs are free, well, hello open source.

Open source is very much a product of western, capitalist countries that PROMOTE the power of the individual.

And is instead similar to the Agile software development process. If the average Web 2.0 monkey had some real software engineering background, maybe their work will be maintainable a few years down the road, and not just rewritten for the Next Big Buzzword.