I have regularly wondered how all these Hedge Funds (let alone the Banks) are doing so well without some kind-of inside information and/or some means to "generate interest or concerns" in the direction they would find the most beneficial.
There is a continuing misunderstanding between "suits" and dev's, where most dev's _do_ learn the business through experience, but the suits continually choose not to, and instead of working as the "teacher" and filter between both areas, just push the demands down to the dev.
And "yes": teacher is always part of the job.
In the UK and NZ, the vaccine is only given to those at-risk from Chickenpox. Children don't receive it as a matter of policy, and I don't believe adults who've never caught the disease are normally offered it, either.
One of the reasons/theories I've heard for this, is that if you've had Chickenpox, you are at-risk for Shingles -- which is often extremely painful and difficult to overcome. However, if you are regularly exposed to Chickenpox, your immune-system gets "reawakened" to the virus, therefore can more-quickly recognise and fight-off a recurrance, before it becomes Shingles.
One of the easiest ways to aid this exposure is to keep the virus active, but under-control, in the community. This has a useful side-effect of the community also being aware and more-knowledgeable about the disease, too.
Another argument I've heard against the vaccine is that it's simply not possible to get rid of Chickenpox totally -- it's _highly_ infectious, and the infectious stage is before symptoms appear, etc -- but the vaccine gives a false sense of security of protection, perhaps in the same way as everyone thinks they're safe from Smallpox, Hepatitis, Ebola, etc because we worked so hard to get rid of or control it.
I agree. It's a little like a Java programmer knowing JVM bytecode: definitely not _needed_ but you'll be much better at understanding why (for example) some code structs are more efficient than others.
Years ago, before ActiveRecord, I started writing my own ORM for Ruby. I got a reasonable way into it, too.
I gave it up, because I realised that it was much, much simpler to write many small PL/SQL views and write-triggers and use temporary local objects and/or lazy writes (etc). The DB could do much better query-optimisation this way, for one thing. But anyway, that was a long time ago.
TBH: If you want all your relational logic in your app, NoSQL systems make an awful lot more sense these days -- esp. if you've got a decent API/wrapper-layer that can automatically manage the freshness of locally cached data for you.
Not quite: businesses (or corp's) are effectively made of groups of people.
These particular groups seem to want to act more psychopathically / self-interested than an individual might -- think mobs or riots.
I would say a Senior iPhone Dev in London would be £60k+ but since the number of com's who need ObjC is pretty small (even though London has a lot of Mobile dev's) then I wouldn't be surprised if it topped-out at £50k.
In London, a £75k job is very well paid, even in finance, therefore a £100k job (I assume you meant $160k) is getting into higher-management or Contractor territory, not Senior Dev.
Apple seems to have a policy of regularly testing the water for further lock-down/lock-out/lock-in.
Almost as if they think because an awful lot of people have accepted it on iTunes, a similar number accepted it from Microsoft for such a long time (and still do) that it's simply a matter of waiting until the public are too jaded to care any longer.
The usual effect of such misdirected management behaviour is most of the good/talented/valuable people leave earlier than later, as they smell blood in the water.
For a while, maybe 5+ years ago (7? I can't remember clearly) it seemed like Perl was stagnating a little. This was about the time Ruby really seemed to take off, and some neat Python projects appeared (e.g. Gentoo Linux).
Now, even though the core language hasn't changed, there seem to be all sorts of clever Perl modules appearing which take advantage of a lot of Perl's highly flexible nature.
I really like Ruby myself, and really hate Python (even though I have to use it at work) but when the other languages fail me, I can almost always turn to Perl in a pinch and get it to do what I want. I also have to admit that the potential power of Perl6's syntax is a little astonishing; I think I would pick Perl6 over Ruby, for example.
I kind-of agree with the idea of no damages -- where I assume you mean compensation to the aggrieved party -- and instead a fine (or other punishment) for illegal activity, collected and kept by the government.
Worse, the arguments seem to be based on "potential" rather than "fact".
It seems to me non-"internet" piracy cases are largely based on hard evidence, and when they try to include evidence for "potential to do" it's also based on some other hard-evidence, e.g. a large-scale CD-copying machine, a pallet of 100,000 blanks.
If you'd been convicted before for the same offence, then you're more likely to get more jail-time for repeat offending, i.e. a predilection for continuing that proven behaviour, but the punishment meted-out for copyright offences seems massively, unbelievably out-of-scale. Probably because they're often compensation paid to the copyright owner, rather than punishment for breaking the law.