Kids, much less adults, understand the repercussions of 'inking' something on the internet. This is why it's so important for their parents to step in and stop them from such things. Yes, kids need censors for some of the stupidity that they perpetrate while they are (gasp) children! That doesn't mean you suspend or expel. You take corrective action, and smack down the parents for not doing their job. Yes, their JOB. Having a child is a JOB. I get so tired of people that try to blame schools and governments for childrens stupidity. If their parents didn't allow it, it wouldn't happen.

On the flip side of this, I think that there is a majority of adults who don't understand the implications of 'inking' something on the 'net, either. The root of the problem isn't even the ink. It's the social contract tat people hold themselves to. Just saying "rape" with someones name connected to it can ruin their life, and that is crappy as hell.

Lets not forget speed of development, great community support, massive amounts of libraries to do just about anything you want, and the ability to work in any environment you want. They are the very definition of agile.

...and lets not even get started on build (maven, ant, et al) processes of Java. So, so tired of doing java builds every time I need to test new features.

Not so. In fact, yours is the circular dependency. Because technically, any 'computing device' including a calculator, a radio or anything else that utilized some form of a RISC or CISC processor, could -technically- be considered and used as a general purpose computing. Do I want my calculator to be a full powered computer? No! Because I want my calculator to do the one thing it does well- Calculate!

The iPad is not marketed, nor intended, as a general purpose computing device. I don't know why that's so hard to understand for geeks.

In one word: Google.

In more words: Which do you find more likely that is going to do what's right for the greater customers, Apple or Google? (I say this while typing on an Apple laptop, which I happen to love)

Google has a far better track record than Apple does, along with much better expectations and relations with those companies it's trying to make inroads with. That's not even speaking of the phones. Personally, I think there is a quiet revolution going on with Android right now. We used to have phones that couldn't talk nicely to each other, or talk nicely to computers, or the 'net... We're seeing lots of smart phones that can, now. Because the software (android) isn't limited to one piece of hardware.

Clearly, you have never used a modern programming IDE. Please check out Eclipse, IntelliJ, or even M$ Visual Studio, then, compare with XCode. Please check back in with your results.

Oh, and to the parent: Freedom == Friendliness, for a developer. Some of us don't feel like spending (read: wasting) a ton of time developing for a system that can summarily dismiss our application submission, without anything other than a "We don't like it."

This is a point I get so tired of.

What if you're not looking for an experience, but instead, a functional system that can run whatever app you put on it (or develop for it), without question?

The OS of any device has exactly one goal: Get out of my way and let me do what I want. That's it. Eye candy is certainly nice, but when the OS (of whatever device is in question) actually stops me from doing what I want it to do (provided an app has already been developed), that's a big BIG problem. One that I don't understand why more iPhone users aren't flapping their gap more, about. I love the iPhone OS. It's pretty. But any proprietary/controlled/gimped device is basically worthless to me (and plenty of others, as Android has shown). I own the device, I get to choose what I want to put on it. End of story. It's just iPhone users trying to console themselves by claiming that the iPhone is an "experience" when in fact they are being manipulated. Just like Kindle users are, with Amazon. It's no different, and just as insidious a way to control users as any other corp has ever put out.

Not to mention, someone had to come along eventually and start innovating telephones. Lord knows the Telco's weren't going to. :P

"Web monkeys"?

Yeah. The monkey-kind are a dime a dozen. Which is proven by how many crappy web pages/applications there are out there. The non-monkey kind exist too. Just like the difference between script kiddies that "play" with their *nix boxes and real system administrators that know how to solve real world problems.

Those mainframe "dudes" as you put it, make similar to what good (read: proficient, non-monkey) web designers make. Moreover, I know several mainframe admins that make significantly less. It just depends on if you're actually good at what you do.

It's already too late on both of those. Chrome + Privoxy is a very solid setup, though I'm not happy with that particular development setup. Safari 4 actually has the best development set of tools (or the ones I like the best, at least). It comes real close to the Firebug plug-in that you get for Firefox, and it all runs and much, much faster speeds. I'm not 100% off of Firefox yet, but I'm headed that direction. I can't deal with Firefox crashing 4-5 times per day, just because I have a bunch of plug-ins. If I can't use plug-ins, I might as well be using Chrome or Safari 4.

You may be right, but how did we get to using the knife as a solid every day tool for buttering bread, et al?

If it didn't exist in the first place (which is what the RIAA would like), how would we get to the point where we could use it as an everyday tool?

They're trying to stall progress because their business is suffering from it. In continuing with the same example: That's like saying that just because the butter knife is an 'acceptable' implement to cut meat with, that one shouldn't ever be allowed to invent a serrated knife to cut more easily with.

..I'm pretty sure I just took that metaphor too far.