Should the software industry be a regulated profession, in the way that law, medicine, architecture and civil engineering are? If so, what sort of industry standards should there be, and how should they be enforced?
1. Regulation would empower users because they would get superior software as a result and wouldn't have to wade through mountains of dreck to find it. 2. It would also empower clients since they would no longer have to worry about incompetent programmers who are 30 years behind the state of the art. 3. Finally, it would empower programmers since people would take programmers seriously instead of demonstrating contempt of them.