Why the hell does HBO (and everyone else for that matter) wait so long to release shows on DVD? Like don't they want to make money?
I tried being legitimate for a while. I didn't buy cable because it was way too expensive for the handful of shows I like. Instead, I started getting seasons of stuff at Blockbuster. But now when I talk to people who watch the shows when they're broadcast -- I'm two seasons behind!
HBO has sent me a simple message: the best way to get TV is to pirate it online.
Actually I'd wager that if the Canadian TV market was completely open to competition, the Quebecois channels would be just about the only Canadian channels left. Granted, you wouldn't get them in places like Alberta where they're broadcast now for a small minority, but Quebec is much more loyal to their local culture than the rest of us. For example, Quebecois films in Canada routinely make more money than some of the highest grossing English movies.
All the English channels would be quickly replaced by American broadcast channels. After all, the American shows bought by the current Canadian channels do significantly better than the CanCon. The cable channels are already being replaced as consumers lobby for direct access to things like HBO. And finally, the minority language and ethnic channels would be replaced by feeds directly from their mother country. You'd end up with the educated elite watching nothing but CBC (the way radio is currently stratified) while everyone else gets their fill of reality shows and Fox news.
Personally, I think CanCon ensures better programming nevermind the cultural preservation. I think the required percentage should be increased because if the networks aren't producing Canadian reality shows, then clearly they aren't being squeezed enough. And CanCon should also be extended to other media like movie theatres.
What is it with Crichton's obsession with inefficient software interfaces? Granted, Jurassic Park and hopefully Disclosure were written before VRML and Microsoft Bob were recognised as useless, but still, he shouldn't have jumped on such a stupid bandwagon.
"I remember the day when..." is a fallacy. Yeah, yeah, "back in the good, old days" everything was better... uh huh.
Are you suggesting that reference to the anecdotal values of propositions in an earlier time period is never a valid antecedent in an argument? Either you put exceptional faith in "official" history, you don't understand the word "fallacy", or you're a dumbass.
I've read that Canada is considered the best country to learn English in because it doesn't vary much across the country*, it sounds enough like American to avoid prejudice, and it is the easiest to understand by other English speakers. (Does anyone know if it's the case that a Texan and a Scot will understand a Ontarian better than each other?) I wonder if it also has something to do with not covering up other accents, for example Europeans who learned English from Brits have a hybrid accent (eg: actor Frederik de Groot, ING Direct Spokesperson)?
* My Canada does not include Quebec or Newfoundland.
In fact, this isn't even news in terms of consumer-level devices. Microsoft (who I'm sure we all agree should make more hardware and less software) used to make a left-hand HID called the "Strategic Commander". It was shaped like the relief of a hand and designed to be used by draping your whole hand over it. You could rock the device on the 2D plane thanks to LRF technology, and it had programmable buttons under each finger (a couple by the thumb, I believe).
It seems to me that the main reason it didn't become popular is that it was horribly marketed: the "Strategic" in its name was because it was intended for RTS games. I believe Starcraft was the top RTS game when it was released, but of course Starcraft is 2D and therefore a second movement device was only useful so far as you wanted to prevent having to move the mouse to the side of the screen to scroll around; of course scrolling around was simple enough that it could be easily accomplished by arrow keys. Even worse, in my opinion, was the idea that a few programmable keys made up for the whole keyboard, when clearly that is not the case for two major uses of hotkeys in Starcraft: command group control and navigating the build hierarchy.
A much better use, and the one I'd love to experiment with if I ever got my hands on a SC, is 3D shooters: left-hand movement is continuous, fewer buttons are typically used, and people are more willing to pay for hardware that gives them a tiny speed improvement. I can only imagine that MS decided this wasn't its market because Microsoft doesn't produce 3DSs.
Has anyone out there used one of these? I'd love to hear your comments.
By "industrial strength", we mean suitable for large applications, right? What could be more suitable for apps written by multiple people or one person over a long span of time, than enforced style? I take it to be self-evident that "industrial strength" apps should be well documented, a task that is most likely to occur the more the language is self-documenting. There's a reason Hungarian notation was popularised at Microsoft: when you have a whole bunch of bad programmers working on huge amounts of code, any visual hints you can insert into that code are great.
Think of Prothon as the anti-Perl: it aims to make it as easy as possible to identify blocks, global variables, functions with side-effects, etc. How can that be a bad thing unless you can't let go of the conventions you learned or invented in some other language?
Besides, Haskell has syntax-significant whitespace and capitalisation, and it was designed by people smarter than both of us.
A lot of the responses to this article are (rightfully, IMO) concerned that TC will only be used to serve the interests of corporations. So what I want to know is: why couldn't an open source trusted computing platform be created? One that we can be sure can be turned off at will and will sign applications for free and without bias.
At first glance, TC may be incompatible with the concept of open source because the system is useless if everybody can sign their own code. However, if the signatures are controlled by a neutral third-party, there's nothing that says a fork can't apply for a signature. And most users will be satisfied to use the signed packages provided by their distribution.
(Theoretical aside: ideally TC would rely on proof-carrying code and verify that certain properties hold rather than checking it line by line, but that runs into the Halting Problem and all sorts of other difficulties.)
So tell me: is there anything to stop the LinuxBIOS team from implementing the features of TC right now? And is there anyone who wouldn't be comfortable having a TC-enabled LinuxBIOS on their machine?
Actually, from what I can tell, Sun gets off on irritating admins, especially Solaris admins. I used to be a Solaris admin and Java helped with Solaris' "administrator hostile" philosophy in three ways:
The Sun Management Console was written in Java using AWT. It was slow, low-functionality, and it crashed alot. But Sun, in their infinite wisdom, neglected to create command-line tools for administering NFS, so I was stuck using it.
The Solaris "packages" (as a current Debian user I find it blackly humourous that they have the audacity to call them that) for Java were a pain to get (impossible using lynx, if I recall the last time I tried to setup a headless server correctly) and install. (To be fair: CLASSPATH hell isn't exactly fun on any other platform, but you think they'd try and make it easier on their flagship OS.)
The Solaris Java implementation was inferior to the Windows implementation and sometimes not even up to the latest minor revision. Windows also had better IDEs at the time, a problem which has been rectified largely by open source.
Personally, it's no surprise to me that Java will never be open sourced -- as far as I can tell, McNealy is doing his best to drive the company into the ground.
In my Dept this year marks the first time that there are more first-years in our Biomedical Computing program than straight CompSci. It's not clear whether there will be better job prospects for them*, although the press (and funding!) bioinformatics has been getting lately may be a factor. Supposedly a lot of the students think that they'll have more opportunity to help people in BioMed, and as a result the program has way more women than CompSci. The Dept believes that all future growth will be in interdisciplinary programs, so that's probably where a lot of the missing students mentioned in the article are ending up.
* Most of the development in Canada that could be done remotely was already being outsourced to US firms, so offshoring isn't effecting the industry up here very much.
In the original discussion of SMIL in Mozilla, someone says that it is an "IE parity issue". I've also heard Mozilla developers claim a desire that no excuses exist for staying with IE. The way I see it is that, yes, Mozilla is already superior to IE. However, since IE in bundled Mozilla needs to be better in every way to win. Certainly W3C standards are the most defensible area to match features on!
And lets face it: Microsoft research does come up with a few good ideas. They usually end up with mangled implementations, but that doesn't mean open source should ignore the abstract innovations.
But since everybody only gets 10 votes, isn't the system working just fine when a bug gets attention? Yes, I'm lobbying on behalf of those bugs, but that's because I think they're important. (Which is the same reason NGOs lobby governments in real life.) If I'm not allowed to ask other people to vote on a bug, then the system is screwed up.
As for bugs mattering, I always figured that they influenced developers ceteris paribus ("all other things being equal"). It's inconvenient for me to figure out who fixes a particular bug, so I can only show my appreciation in advance. But certainly in a gift culture, developers will devote their time to tasks yielding higher appreciation.
In this case I would appreciate having those bugs fixed so much that I lobby for them on Slashdot. I don't feel as strongly against all the bugs I vote for, but this is all I can do in the abscence of weighted votes.
SVG is very useful on its own, but having an open alternative to Flash would be even better. SMIL, a W3C Recommended standard for adding timing and animation to things like SVG and XHTML, is that alternative.
The Mozilla team has (wrongly, IMO) decided to leave full SMIL implementation to plugins. However, the W3C has designated a subset of the SMIL 2.0 modules as being suitable for integration with XHTML, which is obviously functionality that belongs in the browser and is already available in IE6.
To keep Mozilla competitive, allow SVG to reach its full potential, and help kill Flash, I'd like to encourage everyone to vote for two Bugzilla bugs:
Selecting "write in" for a position and then leaving the box blank results in a vote of "none", whereas not selecting any of the radio buttons at all results in "no preference indicated". There is no way to unselect all the radio buttons once you've selected one.
The rankings shift every candidate to the highest unused rank. So if you rank one candidate as first and another as third, they come out as first and second. Plus, the rankings and approval sections won't let you leave the write-in field blank, but will let you clear everything.
Not that any of these things actually matter, but it would have been amusing to follow the discussion leading to these decisions if the system was designed by a group.
Replace lost taxes with tarrifs, or, if most stockholders will still be in your country as I believe is the case for the US, replace lost corporate tax with capital gains tax.
In the past tax incentives and porkbarreling to attract HQs was because it was assumed that the jobs would also be local. Since that's no longer the case, these archaic practices will eventually end.
(Aside: offshored military forces are commonly known as "mercenaries" and they might be one of the oldest outsourced industries.)
Yeah, I was thinking of that exact article, actually.:)
Of course, only having the most recent posts listed for each user somewhat limits that technique (although I suppose Google indexes all of them?). I think that if you guys wanted to add job-hunting features to/. there's a lot of other possibilities. Hell, the brand is probably strong enough that a straight-up Monster clone would be competitive?
You know it could if it were leveraged properly. Your posts to Developers stories (even when filtered through our tendancies to troll and vent) probably say a lot more about your abilities than most of the brain-dead interview questions that get discussed here. And your posts to socially relevant stories hopefully demonstrate some of your logical thinking abilities.
If I were in a hiring position, I could imagine myself using Slashdot for recruiting: if I like your posts, I'm likely to check out your resume. In fact, I occasionally see taglines that are "employment wanted" ads -- I have no idea if the posters get any hits, but at least somebody's trying.
Unfortunately, the people who run Slashdot don't seem to be particularly driven to change it into something more powerful. They seem content to do the minimum amount of editing work possible to draw their salaries. I guess if OSDN (or whoever the parent company is these days) had some more cashflow they'd be able to afford R&D.
Nothing forcing you to make friends online, you could just one one of these pieces of software to track the F2F friends of your F2F friends. And then rather than dropping by their estate with a calling card, you could use some kind of digital medium to network with them.
Many of my F2F friends are in different parts of the world such that I haven't actually communicated with them F2F for months or years. As a result, I have no idea who their friends are anymore, and therefore without technology they are nothing more than a leaf in my network.
Until one of these sites acutally validates the data people enter about themselves, they will continue to be utterly useless.
I agree completely. I'm going to be switching careers in a few months and it'd be pretty damn helpful if I could find some friends of friends already on the inside, but it's clear to me that these networks are either secret or just for dating. So why hasn't anyone created one with validation? If VCs are giving out that kind of cash, one of us really should...
I thought the deal with IP was supposed to be that if you didn't defend it, you lost it. (Isn't that the excuse given for companies c&ding fan sites?) Shouldn't that prevent companies from pulling the trick Frauhofer did? I realise US courts are corrupt, but why didn't the European courts tell them to screw off?
The US is so insanely rich right now that if you took all the wealth in the country and invested it in the Indian stock market or whatever, gains would outstrip the rate of reproduction such that all Americans forever could simply live off the wealth accumulated so far. I figure all the colonial countries must have realised that they would eventually run out of parts of the world to exploit and so they were going to pull this scheme, but then WWII indebted them all to the US*, so now they're the only ones in a position to pull it. By 2010 the estate tax will be repealed and either one of the right-wing Presidential candidates will have scrapped most social programs, so you can just sit back and watch the income pour in for ever and ever.
* Who for some reason thinks they should be thanked for their involvement in WWII when in fact it pulled them out of the Great Depression and left them as one of only two world superpowers.
What's the difference between an American and Indian company that both have their sales force in the US and their developers in India? The registered location of a company effects, at most, the handful of people employed by the head office (and as far as I've heard, US MBA programs are still superior to India's) -- the shares will still be sold internationally. (And given that the US is still very rich despite the offshore scare, it will probably be owned by Americans.)
People need to stop thinking of multinationals as having a physical presence in some country or other. They are completely abstract entities, and therefore it makes sense to employ people wherever they will be most efficient.
If anybody else goes to Simonyi's company and still can't figure out what they're talking about (mostly because it's vapourware at the moment, I believe), may I direct you to this Wiki. It turns out that he thinks source transformation tools will change the world.
I'm told that my university is one of the leading source transformation research centres in the world, but the only interesting things they're producing right now are for understanding legacy systems. So yes, there's probably a lot of money in source transformation, but it's also boring as hell.
IANAL, but I believe the reason we don't have frivilous lawsuits in Canada is that you can't ask for immaterial damages. And of material damages, more of them are covered by our government. For example, in a medical suit, there are no hospital fees to sue for, and you can only be awards lost wages above disability benefits. For libel, you can only be awarded a reasonable amount of lost business revenue.
Our legal system is still unnecessarily corrupt because not all lawyers are required to accept legal aid certificates. If lawyers were employees of the state like doctors and anyone could go to any lawyer (that still had room for patients) for free, rich people wouldn't be able to buy the law.
Slashdot Mirror
...when the DVD box set comes out in a year...
Why the hell does HBO (and everyone else for that matter) wait so long to release shows on DVD? Like don't they want to make money?
I tried being legitimate for a while. I didn't buy cable because it was way too expensive for the handful of shows I like. Instead, I started getting seasons of stuff at Blockbuster. But now when I talk to people who watch the shows when they're broadcast -- I'm two seasons behind!
HBO has sent me a simple message: the best way to get TV is to pirate it online.
Actually I'd wager that if the Canadian TV market was completely open to competition, the Quebecois channels would be just about the only Canadian channels left. Granted, you wouldn't get them in places like Alberta where they're broadcast now for a small minority, but Quebec is much more loyal to their local culture than the rest of us. For example, Quebecois films in Canada routinely make more money than some of the highest grossing English movies.
All the English channels would be quickly replaced by American broadcast channels. After all, the American shows bought by the current Canadian channels do significantly better than the CanCon. The cable channels are already being replaced as consumers lobby for direct access to things like HBO. And finally, the minority language and ethnic channels would be replaced by feeds directly from their mother country. You'd end up with the educated elite watching nothing but CBC (the way radio is currently stratified) while everyone else gets their fill of reality shows and Fox news.
Personally, I think CanCon ensures better programming nevermind the cultural preservation. I think the required percentage should be increased because if the networks aren't producing Canadian reality shows, then clearly they aren't being squeezed enough. And CanCon should also be extended to other media like movie theatres.
What is it with Crichton's obsession with inefficient software interfaces? Granted, Jurassic Park and hopefully Disclosure were written before VRML and Microsoft Bob were recognised as useless, but still, he shouldn't have jumped on such a stupid bandwagon.
"I remember the day when..." is a fallacy. Yeah, yeah, "back in the good, old days" everything was better... uh huh.
Are you suggesting that reference to the anecdotal values of propositions in an earlier time period is never a valid antecedent in an argument? Either you put exceptional faith in "official" history, you don't understand the word "fallacy", or you're a dumbass.
I've read that Canada is considered the best country to learn English in because it doesn't vary much across the country*, it sounds enough like American to avoid prejudice, and it is the easiest to understand by other English speakers. (Does anyone know if it's the case that a Texan and a Scot will understand a Ontarian better than each other?) I wonder if it also has something to do with not covering up other accents, for example Europeans who learned English from Brits have a hybrid accent (eg: actor Frederik de Groot, ING Direct Spokesperson)?
* My Canada does not include Quebec or Newfoundland.
In fact, this isn't even news in terms of consumer-level devices. Microsoft (who I'm sure we all agree should make more hardware and less software) used to make a left-hand HID called the "Strategic Commander". It was shaped like the relief of a hand and designed to be used by draping your whole hand over it. You could rock the device on the 2D plane thanks to LRF technology, and it had programmable buttons under each finger (a couple by the thumb, I believe).
It seems to me that the main reason it didn't become popular is that it was horribly marketed: the "Strategic" in its name was because it was intended for RTS games. I believe Starcraft was the top RTS game when it was released, but of course Starcraft is 2D and therefore a second movement device was only useful so far as you wanted to prevent having to move the mouse to the side of the screen to scroll around; of course scrolling around was simple enough that it could be easily accomplished by arrow keys. Even worse, in my opinion, was the idea that a few programmable keys made up for the whole keyboard, when clearly that is not the case for two major uses of hotkeys in Starcraft: command group control and navigating the build hierarchy.
A much better use, and the one I'd love to experiment with if I ever got my hands on a SC, is 3D shooters: left-hand movement is continuous, fewer buttons are typically used, and people are more willing to pay for hardware that gives them a tiny speed improvement. I can only imagine that MS decided this wasn't its market because Microsoft doesn't produce 3DSs.
Has anyone out there used one of these? I'd love to hear your comments.
By "industrial strength", we mean suitable for large applications, right? What could be more suitable for apps written by multiple people or one person over a long span of time, than enforced style? I take it to be self-evident that "industrial strength" apps should be well documented, a task that is most likely to occur the more the language is self-documenting. There's a reason Hungarian notation was popularised at Microsoft: when you have a whole bunch of bad programmers working on huge amounts of code, any visual hints you can insert into that code are great.
Think of Prothon as the anti-Perl: it aims to make it as easy as possible to identify blocks, global variables, functions with side-effects, etc. How can that be a bad thing unless you can't let go of the conventions you learned or invented in some other language?
Besides, Haskell has syntax-significant whitespace and capitalisation, and it was designed by people smarter than both of us.
A lot of the responses to this article are (rightfully, IMO) concerned that TC will only be used to serve the interests of corporations. So what I want to know is: why couldn't an open source trusted computing platform be created? One that we can be sure can be turned off at will and will sign applications for free and without bias.
At first glance, TC may be incompatible with the concept of open source because the system is useless if everybody can sign their own code. However, if the signatures are controlled by a neutral third-party, there's nothing that says a fork can't apply for a signature. And most users will be satisfied to use the signed packages provided by their distribution.
(Theoretical aside: ideally TC would rely on proof-carrying code and verify that certain properties hold rather than checking it line by line, but that runs into the Halting Problem and all sorts of other difficulties.)
So tell me: is there anything to stop the LinuxBIOS team from implementing the features of TC right now? And is there anyone who wouldn't be comfortable having a TC-enabled LinuxBIOS on their machine?
Personally, it's no surprise to me that Java will never be open sourced -- as far as I can tell, McNealy is doing his best to drive the company into the ground.
In my Dept this year marks the first time that there are more first-years in our Biomedical Computing program than straight CompSci. It's not clear whether there will be better job prospects for them*, although the press (and funding!) bioinformatics has been getting lately may be a factor. Supposedly a lot of the students think that they'll have more opportunity to help people in BioMed, and as a result the program has way more women than CompSci. The Dept believes that all future growth will be in interdisciplinary programs, so that's probably where a lot of the missing students mentioned in the article are ending up.
* Most of the development in Canada that could be done remotely was already being outsourced to US firms, so offshoring isn't effecting the industry up here very much.
In the original discussion of SMIL in Mozilla, someone says that it is an "IE parity issue". I've also heard Mozilla developers claim a desire that no excuses exist for staying with IE. The way I see it is that, yes, Mozilla is already superior to IE. However, since IE in bundled Mozilla needs to be better in every way to win. Certainly W3C standards are the most defensible area to match features on!
And lets face it: Microsoft research does come up with a few good ideas. They usually end up with mangled implementations, but that doesn't mean open source should ignore the abstract innovations.
But since everybody only gets 10 votes, isn't the system working just fine when a bug gets attention? Yes, I'm lobbying on behalf of those bugs, but that's because I think they're important. (Which is the same reason NGOs lobby governments in real life.) If I'm not allowed to ask other people to vote on a bug, then the system is screwed up.
As for bugs mattering, I always figured that they influenced developers ceteris paribus ("all other things being equal"). It's inconvenient for me to figure out who fixes a particular bug, so I can only show my appreciation in advance. But certainly in a gift culture, developers will devote their time to tasks yielding higher appreciation.
In this case I would appreciate having those bugs fixed so much that I lobby for them on Slashdot. I don't feel as strongly against all the bugs I vote for, but this is all I can do in the abscence of weighted votes.
Teach me not to test my links! The bugs mentioned in the parent are #231729 and #216462.
Does anybody know why Bugzilla does this?
SVG is very useful on its own, but having an open alternative to Flash would be even better. SMIL, a W3C Recommended standard for adding timing and animation to things like SVG and XHTML, is that alternative.
The Mozilla team has (wrongly, IMO) decided to leave full SMIL implementation to plugins. However, the W3C has designated a subset of the SMIL 2.0 modules as being suitable for integration with XHTML, which is obviously functionality that belongs in the browser and is already available in IE6.
To keep Mozilla competitive, allow SVG to reach its full potential, and help kill Flash, I'd like to encourage everyone to vote for two Bugzilla bugs:
If you don't already have a Bugzilla account, you can get one painlessly -- if you use Mozilla you owe it to the community to help direct the project.
A few interesting notes on how the ballot works:
Not that any of these things actually matter, but it would have been amusing to follow the discussion leading to these decisions if the system was designed by a group.
Replace lost taxes with tarrifs, or, if most stockholders will still be in your country as I believe is the case for the US, replace lost corporate tax with capital gains tax.
In the past tax incentives and porkbarreling to attract HQs was because it was assumed that the jobs would also be local. Since that's no longer the case, these archaic practices will eventually end.
(Aside: offshored military forces are commonly known as "mercenaries" and they might be one of the oldest outsourced industries.)
Yeah, I was thinking of that exact article, actually. :)
/. there's a lot of other possibilities. Hell, the brand is probably strong enough that a straight-up Monster clone would be competitive?
Of course, only having the most recent posts listed for each user somewhat limits that technique (although I suppose Google indexes all of them?). I think that if you guys wanted to add job-hunting features to
You know it could if it were leveraged properly. Your posts to Developers stories (even when filtered through our tendancies to troll and vent) probably say a lot more about your abilities than most of the brain-dead interview questions that get discussed here. And your posts to socially relevant stories hopefully demonstrate some of your logical thinking abilities.
If I were in a hiring position, I could imagine myself using Slashdot for recruiting: if I like your posts, I'm likely to check out your resume. In fact, I occasionally see taglines that are "employment wanted" ads -- I have no idea if the posters get any hits, but at least somebody's trying.
Unfortunately, the people who run Slashdot don't seem to be particularly driven to change it into something more powerful. They seem content to do the minimum amount of editing work possible to draw their salaries. I guess if OSDN (or whoever the parent company is these days) had some more cashflow they'd be able to afford R&D.
Nothing forcing you to make friends online, you could just one one of these pieces of software to track the F2F friends of your F2F friends. And then rather than dropping by their estate with a calling card, you could use some kind of digital medium to network with them.
Many of my F2F friends are in different parts of the world such that I haven't actually communicated with them F2F for months or years. As a result, I have no idea who their friends are anymore, and therefore without technology they are nothing more than a leaf in my network.
I agree completely. I'm going to be switching careers in a few months and it'd be pretty damn helpful if I could find some friends of friends already on the inside, but it's clear to me that these networks are either secret or just for dating. So why hasn't anyone created one with validation? If VCs are giving out that kind of cash, one of us really should...
I thought the deal with IP was supposed to be that if you didn't defend it, you lost it. (Isn't that the excuse given for companies c&ding fan sites?) Shouldn't that prevent companies from pulling the trick Frauhofer did? I realise US courts are corrupt, but why didn't the European courts tell them to screw off?
The US is so insanely rich right now that if you took all the wealth in the country and invested it in the Indian stock market or whatever, gains would outstrip the rate of reproduction such that all Americans forever could simply live off the wealth accumulated so far. I figure all the colonial countries must have realised that they would eventually run out of parts of the world to exploit and so they were going to pull this scheme, but then WWII indebted them all to the US*, so now they're the only ones in a position to pull it. By 2010 the estate tax will be repealed and either one of the right-wing Presidential candidates will have scrapped most social programs, so you can just sit back and watch the income pour in for ever and ever.
* Who for some reason thinks they should be thanked for their involvement in WWII when in fact it pulled them out of the Great Depression and left them as one of only two world superpowers.
What's the difference between an American and Indian company that both have their sales force in the US and their developers in India? The registered location of a company effects, at most, the handful of people employed by the head office (and as far as I've heard, US MBA programs are still superior to India's) -- the shares will still be sold internationally. (And given that the US is still very rich despite the offshore scare, it will probably be owned by Americans.)
People need to stop thinking of multinationals as having a physical presence in some country or other. They are completely abstract entities, and therefore it makes sense to employ people wherever they will be most efficient.
If anybody else goes to Simonyi's company and still can't figure out what they're talking about (mostly because it's vapourware at the moment, I believe), may I direct you to this Wiki. It turns out that he thinks source transformation tools will change the world.
I'm told that my university is one of the leading source transformation research centres in the world, but the only interesting things they're producing right now are for understanding legacy systems. So yes, there's probably a lot of money in source transformation, but it's also boring as hell.
IANAL, but I believe the reason we don't have frivilous lawsuits in Canada is that you can't ask for immaterial damages. And of material damages, more of them are covered by our government. For example, in a medical suit, there are no hospital fees to sue for, and you can only be awards lost wages above disability benefits. For libel, you can only be awarded a reasonable amount of lost business revenue.
Our legal system is still unnecessarily corrupt because not all lawyers are required to accept legal aid certificates. If lawyers were employees of the state like doctors and anyone could go to any lawyer (that still had room for patients) for free, rich people wouldn't be able to buy the law.