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"It's why programming is a form of art. It's where you get to express your creative vision in a concrete fashion."

No actually, it's an engineering discipline, that's probably why you're getting it so very wrong. People want solid, well structured applications, not arty farty bullshit.

http://www.burlingtontelecom.net/~ashawley/gnu/emacs/ConText-Kelty.pdf Page 2 ... nice reference to "Donald Knuth's monumental work The Art of Computer Programming [Knuth, 1997])" ... I'll take Knuth's opinion over yours any day, and I'm not the only one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Computer_Programming

American Scientist has included this work among "100 or so Books that shaped a Century of Science", referring to the 20th century,[2] and within the computer science community it is regarded as the first and still the best comprehensive treatment of its subject. Covers of the third edition of Volume 1 quote Bill Gates as saying, "If you think you're a really good programmer . . . read (Knuth's) Art of Computer Programming . . . You should definitely send me a résumé if you can read the whole thing." [nb 2] The New York Times referred to it as "the profession's defining treatise".[3]

Others:

The Art of Unix Programming: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/

Or this: http://onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/06/30/artofprog.html

Einstein:

After a certain level of technological skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in aesthetic plasticity and form. The greater scientists are artists as well.

Quotes from RMS, Brookes, etc. Programming is art when done right. You obviously are incapable of seeing that by your own words - must be the brain-damage from too much Java, if you have to write stupidity like this:

just get the fuck out of the industry, there is no place in it for you. If you want to do art then fuck off to hipster land and go do it, the software development industry is not the place, we don't want your poorly architected, insecure, poorly tested code polluting the world's computers based on the justification you were "being creative and expressing yourself" - with a fucking buffer overflow on a public internet facing system.

I'm the one who got called in to rewrite the server at one company when nobody else could complete the project (note - this is a server, not just an application) - it spawns 400 threads at startup, each one waiting for work, does the task, then goes back into the pool. It responds to 1,000 requests per second, without ever having a memory leak or killing and re-spawning a thread to retrieve memory. It's not impossible to write leak-proof c and c++ code, but it is an art, one you will never be able to achieve, because you are no artist.

-- Barbie

I see you failed critial thinking. Honestly, you were taught ALL monopolies are bad? What a crappy school.

No, there's nothing wrong with the postal system, and a government run data link would be good. The telecoms have failed here. Of course, you're free to your own opinion, but I'll go back to enjoying my 10mb up and download internet connection, and high quaility tv and phone service... which neither Verizon or comcast could not deliever. http://www.burlingtontelecom.net/

You can read the case study, or just go find out more.

I have known of NO endeavors ever done by big corporations (child of government) or the government itself that has EVER been honest, whether here in North America, or anywhere else.

Check out burlingtontelecom.net. Great service, great price, started as a muncipal service.

And in Burlington, we've got this alternative that I don't use because I don't have local phone service.

Vermont already has CoOps and municipal internet. Burlington Telecom provides FTTP over which they serve voice, television, and data.

Its not far off for me, I'll have fiber to the home by end of this year, give or take a few weeks.

No, not from the crappy telco or cable company, from the city itself. I for one welcome my city own fiber optic networking overlords.

Do what the city I live in did and start your (the citizens) own ISP. I get the speed I pay for on a fiber optic connection. Plus they offer TV and telephone service. Better service, cheaper rates, and it's owned by the people that use it.

Where I live (Burlington, VT) the city provides both electricity and fiber optic service. It's Interesting that it was more practical to run new fiber optics throughout the city than to use existing power lines, since the city already owns the electric department.