I wish I could. You don't have to go far to find some stupid shit on TV, apparently. It'd be a problem if I had kids, because I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want cable in that case, and I also wouldn't want them being exposed to it by their friends. "Tell me you're not going over there to watch TV, son. Oh, you're just playing violent video games? Well that's OK then!"
Dude on another forum I read was talking about hanging out in Malysia or somewhere and getting barbecued tarantula. I'd give that a shot. I eat crawly things out of the ocean on a pretty regular basis, don't see as how it's all that much different.
I find it vaguely ironic how many of my fellow US citizens wouldn't just eat anything that's put in front of them.
By golly, this is terrible! You know, I think I'm going to get elected and fix it! Hmm, that means I'm going to need a campaign and... how much money... eew... yeah... Some donors. A LOT of donors. Of course, I look out for my friends! Any of my donors want to be "Minister of Calenders"? I can totally do that if I get elected! Oh... my god... what have I become! Ok, effective immediately, I feel I must step down from my campaign, having been corrupted by campaign donations!
Hmm. I wandered over to the dropzone after work to get a skydive in. In the tandem waiting area, they have 3 TVs up, one of which has sound. The screen with sound has recently been tuned to a reality TV network which yesterday was featuring a segment of people getting hit in the nuts. Today it was some cops thing. I can't wait there too long, I feel my brain cells killing themselves one by one. They survived all that tequila, and now this. Terrible way to go.
In this media wasteland, you could do worse than a show with reasonably good writing that's not violent or cynical. The show is not a 20 minute cereal commercial, is not likely to cause epileptic seizures, and isn't so infantile that an adult can't sit through it. In other words, I approve of it, and I don't approve of... anything, really.
It was a good jump. There are two benches in the King Air which you straddle on the ride up. I was going out first, so I got the end seat, on the floor by the door. It was hot on the plane, so I opened it from 2000 to 6000 feet. It got a bit chilly at that point, so I closed it again. At 12000 feet, I exited the vehicle and went tracking for about half a mile before deploying my parachute. I'm... so not their target demographic. I'm also not the kind of person to be ashamed to admit that I like something I like. I'm also not the kind of person to snap to a judgment about an entire group of people, possibly after being exposed to their lunatic fringe. So... ha-ha! Feel the wrath of my frown of disapproval!:-/
I feel like if you want to use std::string you should stick to things that can use std::string. On a side note C++11 finally allows the iostream functions to use std::strings for file names. If you use char *s everywhere, that's somewhat less safe than not, but you can do that. If you want to use std::strings, you can take advantage of the cool things that work with strings. If you try to mix the two, it's a lot more work and a lot more complexity that I really don't care to add. So I stick with std::strings. 'Course I could just write my own damn string class, but that's just crazy talk.
I did C for a couple decades before delving into C++. I still have Lex and Yacc (Not even Flex and Bison) in my toolkit. I can be pretty damn effective in either language, but I'm still trying to un-learn a bunch of java-isms too. For the scientific computing I'm doing at the moment I'd much rather use C++ than anything else. I always feel like it's Grandpa's sword sitting up on the mantle. My weapon of choice, and a surprisingly effective one in the right hands. Kids these days, think they know how to program...
The printf family of functions is really the most convenient way to format output in C. Anything else you have to write yourself, or bring in an external library for. And it's perfectly safe as long as you don't directly printf or sprintf a string a user has input. Or screw up the number of parameters you pass it.
My current project is in C++ and I still find myself missing printf/sprintf. iostream operations are a bit more work to get the same stuff done. So far I haven't run into an instance where I've HAD to fall back to the old school library calls for that, so I'm trying to be good.
Hysterical people sure do make great leaders! Maybe we should elect more of them in the future! Yeah! That seems like a GREAT idea!
Of course, if we're going to go after causes of death, maybe we should work on low-hanging fruit. Oh wait, that's a rational argument and I forgot we were being all hysterical here for a second. Plus, if we put the same amount of resources into reducing heart disease that you were planning to use to regulate 3D printers, we'd have to buy into Obamacare and its associated death panels! Ahh... there we go... that's the stuff...
I may just happen to always get assigned to the nastiest maintenance projects, but I've worked on several projects that were in place for years before I came along. It's a little harder to find evidence of refactoring since it usually leads to code and comments being deleted, but it's very easy to see where someone was in a hurry, or where a previous maintenance programmer did something without really trying to fit his fix into the design of the code. These are far more common than evidence of well factored code.
After a couple years on a project, I can tell you the story of the program I'm working on based on the code. You can see where someone was in a hurry and decided to just cut and paste a function rather than change the original or the design. You can see where they didn't like how something worked and commented out dozens of lines of code. It helps understand the code when they don't use version control -- A couple of times the first thing I've done on a project was get the code base into some sort of version control. One guy who didn't have any formal training in software engineering actually commented code out of his program and then uncommented it for year-end processing. That was cute.
Of course, even in a career spanning more than two decades, you're still touching a miniscule percentage of the total code out there. Could be there are actually plenty of companies with clean, beautiful and well-factored code bases. I suspect that if they exist, they're in a minority, though. That's just based on how hard the industry seems to think developing software is. You always see stories like this one. You never see stories about how beautiful someone's code is (Except that one time, wasn't it the old Doom code or something?)
I never see anyone working to improve the quality of already working code. Unless it's actually not doing the job intended, no one will ever revisit that code. If something needs to be added to it, they'll go do that and everyone will probably hate working with the code because the design sucks, but no one will think to improve the design. If you told them they could, they'd look at you like some strange alien monster.
If a project has enough churn, you can actually justify cleaning up design, interfaces and even entire subsystems in some cases. If all you do is make each piece of code you touch suck just a little bit less, you'll hate having to work on that code less and less over time. All you have to do is look at the code and think "it doesn't HAVE to be this way!" If that old application everyone hates has gotten to the point where it requires a full time position just to maintain it, there's usually no reason why the design couldn't be improved along the way. My goal in maintenance positions is to eliminate the need for that job. There'll always be SOMETHING that needs maintenance, so I don't feel bad about doing so.
Skydiving will expand to consume all your available income and a bit more heh heh heh. You can expect the initial AFF course to set you back between $1500 and $2500 depending on how much you want to shop around. You don't have to pay that all at once, though. It's a minimum of 25 jumps to get to your USPA A license for solo jumping. Cost of that varies depending on gear rental and coaching fees. Some places offer a fixed rate to get you to the A license, as well. Once you get your A license, you need to jump every couple of months to keep current.
You can get pretty decent used gear for around $3000, which will pay for itself if you plan to jump a lot. Everyone progresses through it at their own pace. I had the resources and time to finish fast, I occasionally bump into a guy down there who started around the same time I did who hasn't exited the training program yet, but is happy to just come in and jump whenever he can. Friend of mine told me only about a third of AFF students actually graduate, the rest decide it's not for them and stop coming
If you really love doing it, you'll find a way to do it. I know several students who work at the dropzone for the cash they need to jump (And a discount on jump tickets.) Everyone always wants to go be an instructor, but it takes a LOT of skydives to do that. On a good day the packers can make more than the tandem instructors. I've met a few folks who are intentionally homeless -- they can afford rent, they just don't care to. Pretty much every skydiver I know thinks of the cost of anything in terms of how many jumps that would buy him. If you have your own gear, a jump ticket will only set you back about $25. So that new AAA title on Steam, that'd be two and a half jumps!
I haven't kept up exactly but with the recent gear purchases, training and 110 jumps I've probably spent 11 or 12 thousand dollars on since July (With your own gear, a moderately decent beater Honda is a couple hundred jumps.) Depends on whether you'd assign a value to the hours I spent in WoW, if I'd been trying to make money with them instead, I suppose. I don't spend anywhere near the same amount of time at the dropzone.
That's what I did. The company had a big deadline come up and they asked me to work some overtime. I didn't feel bad about agreeing, but didn't feel I had the time to devote to the hard-core raiding guild I was in, so I quit the game. After the deadlines were over, my manager told me to take a week off in comp time. Rather than pick up that old crack habit again, I decided to take a course of skydiving instead. Well very long story only long, I'm now at 110 jumps, just got my rig, have a couple hours of freefall time in a vertical wind tunnel, and oh yeah, lost 30 pounds. Somehow grinding the same fucking boss for some shiny thing that will be obsolete in a year no longer has the same appeal. This year I plan to travel to at least 2 new dropzones (Haven't decided which 2 yet,) jump from a hot air balloon, and get to the point where I can start thinking about wingsuit training. Turns out living an adventure is a lot more fun than pretending to live an adventure.
They probably can break their bandwidth cost down per-customer (on average.) It obviously must cost less than shipping a DVD via the USPS a few times a month. I'm a bit curious how close that margin is. Are the saving a few cents per customer per DVD, or closer to thirty or forty cents? I suppose they probably wouldn't want to tell us if they could, for fear of giving competitors useful information.
As far as I know, the courts have always ruled that reasonable restrictions can be put on the first amendment. Of particular note, it's illegal to make available instructions on the manufacture of methamphetamine on the internet. In the quaint and curious era known as "last tuesday", it's been OK to pass laws to censor pornography, if said pornography has no "artistic value." Then there are those ITAR laws under which math can be classified as a "munition." Eeh, if you don't like it, don't elect a functionally retarded technophobe to Congress next time. I know you did, because apparently we all did.
Seems easy; measure your cellphone with a geiger counter (Accounting for background radiation) and label it with the number of millisiverts you're shooting into your brain while using it (0). Done. Unless, as XKCD points out, it's a banana phone. I wonder how many of those damn hippies have a sliced banana in their granola in the morning. I'd like to see their reaction when it's pointed out that they're getting more radiation from that than their cell phone.
Just because you get paid to program doesn't mean you crap daisies and unicorns.
I've seen the guts of a fair bit of commercial code, and it's usually not that great. Couple of stories; back in the OS/2 days I had a customer complain that the OS/2 time API specified you could set milliseconds, but this didn't appear to be the case. Well I just so happened to have access to the assembly language function in OS/2 that did that (IIRC it was shipped on one of their dev CDs) and upon examination it appeared that it was keeping an eye on 2 different interrupts. The first one was a clock tick interrupt that happend every few milliseconds and incremented the millisecond counter by however many milliseconds that was (22 sticks in my head for some reason.) However, a comment in the function stated that these could occasionally be missed, and so whenever the periodic 1-second interrupt rolled around, it would zero the millis out. Brilliant.
Every IBM story should have a Sun story to go along with it, as karmic retribution for that time I was walking along behind some of their engineers and they were dissing on the code quality in the Linux kernel. Yeah well, I've seen the code out of Sun, too. Like that webapp they did where all the authentication routines were static methods. Worked great as long as there was only one user!
If anything, professional programmers are on average worse. I had to clean up behind one, back in the '90's, who didn't realize that C strings were null terminated. Every fucking string in her code (Which she'd apparently NEVER compiled or run) was exactly long enough for the constant string she was assigning. These people sneak into your company and work there until getting caught. Usually they have another job lined up and bail just before getting caught. At least the open source guys ENJOY programming.
It's pretty easy to set up a node on Tor. We could just declare the "open internet" lost to commercial interests and do all the "interesting" stuff on an encrypted network. Sure, it's slower than an open connection, but with increasingly common cable and optical connections it's still faster than even reasonably fast DSL from a couple years back.
It's all fun and games until you piss off a judge. Too bad you can't sentence someone to be beaten with a baseball bat in this country. Not that he should let THAT stop him...
Most of the "tester" positions that I'm seeing posted lately are actually development positions with tester pay. Companies have figured out that by calling them "testers" in the shit economy, they can offer a lower salary for the same work. Sadly for the swarm of recruiters, apparently there aren't any qualified "testers" around. At least not ones willing to take those salaries. Not that the salaries are particularly bad -- I'm seeing them advertised usually around $45 an hour, which is more than you can make as a highly specialized software engineer at some of the... lower budget... companies around here. They know who they are.
The spinning blades of death make me a little nervous but I really want to see how the software reacts to me jumping out of it at several thousand feet. If it can be programmed to depart from a certain point, go to 10000 feet for a couple minutes and then fly back to its starting point for less than $25 per flight in operating costs, and it doesn't shred the guy jumping out of it in spinning blades of death, that'd be an upgrade for me.
Appropriate FAA NOTAMs filed in advance yadda yadda yadda *handwave*
Sure some of their shit seemed insightful, allowing DOS 3.3 to be pirated so widely established their dominance. Playing "API of the Week Club" while OS/2 was prevalent was just short-sighted anticompetitive behavior that just happened to work out in their favor. They never had a long term strategy other than "copy successful shit from other people." Their surprise that the Internet wasn't just a passing fad is more than enough to prove that. That was nearly two decades ago now, people! Their "strategy" is to attempt to gain a monopoly position at whatever new market they try, and then use their dominance to dictate the standards and crush all opposition. That may have worked well enough when PCs were a new thing, but the only place they've really managed to ever gain a foothold was in the OS market, and OSX and Linux are both eroding even that bastion of their business.
This industry can turn on you in an instant (Well a decade-long instant, you really have to not be paying attention.) Look at Sun, no one ever thought anything would take them down. A decade before Sun went under, I attended a Linux con in Denver and had some SGI rep try to convince me that his company was crapping daisies and unicorns. I asked him point blank why I should buy a storage solution from him when I knew for a fact that IBM would be here two decades from now. He then tried to blow some marking smoke up my ass, but their company sank shortly thereafter. I started seeing the same writing on the wall for Sun later on, and they were gone a couple years later. I really feel like these guys believed their marketing and thought nothing could take them down. Well these days Microsoft's competitors are VERY quick on their feet and can take over emerging markets before Microsoft's lumbering behemoth even realizes there's something to take over. So they're coming in against already-established and VERY popular players. So unless Microsoft loses the complacency and learns how to compete in this new era, the gutted remains of their company will join Sun and all the others in the "Also-Ran" bin of history. This is not an anti-Microsoft rant. This is a warning.
My guess is the future will be pretty robust competition between an Android-based Google OS and OSX. Though I'm still not sure about Apple without Steve Jobs' vision to keep them rolling. Plus, once they exhaust the world's supply of brushed aluminum, things will get difficult for them, too.
For a second there I thought they were patenting not being evil as a business process or something and I thought "Damn! Guess I'm just going to have to keep being evil!" But they're really just trying to patent not being caught at it. Not getting caught is actually pretty easy as long as you don't have dumbasses in your company. So maybe Google should invent a technology to jettison the dumbasses in your company into the sun! Except, I suppose that would be pretty evil. Maybe I should patent that! It'd go nicely alongside the death ray patent...
Paul doesn't really seem to do that much to advance the libertarian agenda. I get the feeling he's just another Washington insider, talking the talk enough to retain the branding but otherwise just working the system for his own benefit. I imagine him rather like Barbie's Ken -- nice abs, but lacking where it counts.
We the people must like this state of affairs or something would be done about it. So there's no sense in becoming hysterically angry that someone would make light of the circumstance. If you're an American, why haven't you fixed the problem yet, if you feel that strongly about it? If you're not, why aren't you busy feeling smugly superior that your own culture is better? And, for what it's worth, the only rational explanation I can come up with for our behavior in the USA is that it's all a secret eugenics project to breed children who will always somehow not be where the bullets are. Sure, to make an omelette you have to break a few eggs, but once we have our first generation of kids who can dodge bullets, our military will be able to stalk through the battlefield like some action movie star. Then who'll be laughing? In fact.. someone's coming... THEY KNOW! Oh, false alarm. It was just my pizza.
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I wish I could. You don't have to go far to find some stupid shit on TV, apparently. It'd be a problem if I had kids, because I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want cable in that case, and I also wouldn't want them being exposed to it by their friends. "Tell me you're not going over there to watch TV, son. Oh, you're just playing violent video games? Well that's OK then!"
I find it vaguely ironic how many of my fellow US citizens wouldn't just eat anything that's put in front of them.
By golly, this is terrible! You know, I think I'm going to get elected and fix it! Hmm, that means I'm going to need a campaign and... how much money... eew... yeah... Some donors. A LOT of donors. Of course, I look out for my friends! Any of my donors want to be "Minister of Calenders"? I can totally do that if I get elected! Oh... my god... what have I become! Ok, effective immediately, I feel I must step down from my campaign, having been corrupted by campaign donations!
In this media wasteland, you could do worse than a show with reasonably good writing that's not violent or cynical. The show is not a 20 minute cereal commercial, is not likely to cause epileptic seizures, and isn't so infantile that an adult can't sit through it. In other words, I approve of it, and I don't approve of... anything, really.
It was a good jump. There are two benches in the King Air which you straddle on the ride up. I was going out first, so I got the end seat, on the floor by the door. It was hot on the plane, so I opened it from 2000 to 6000 feet. It got a bit chilly at that point, so I closed it again. At 12000 feet, I exited the vehicle and went tracking for about half a mile before deploying my parachute. I'm... so not their target demographic. I'm also not the kind of person to be ashamed to admit that I like something I like. I'm also not the kind of person to snap to a judgment about an entire group of people, possibly after being exposed to their lunatic fringe. So... ha-ha! Feel the wrath of my frown of disapproval! :-/
I did C for a couple decades before delving into C++. I still have Lex and Yacc (Not even Flex and Bison) in my toolkit. I can be pretty damn effective in either language, but I'm still trying to un-learn a bunch of java-isms too. For the scientific computing I'm doing at the moment I'd much rather use C++ than anything else. I always feel like it's Grandpa's sword sitting up on the mantle. My weapon of choice, and a surprisingly effective one in the right hands. Kids these days, think they know how to program...
My current project is in C++ and I still find myself missing printf/sprintf. iostream operations are a bit more work to get the same stuff done. So far I haven't run into an instance where I've HAD to fall back to the old school library calls for that, so I'm trying to be good.
Of course, if we're going to go after causes of death, maybe we should work on low-hanging fruit. Oh wait, that's a rational argument and I forgot we were being all hysterical here for a second. Plus, if we put the same amount of resources into reducing heart disease that you were planning to use to regulate 3D printers, we'd have to buy into Obamacare and its associated death panels! Ahh... there we go... that's the stuff...
After a couple years on a project, I can tell you the story of the program I'm working on based on the code. You can see where someone was in a hurry and decided to just cut and paste a function rather than change the original or the design. You can see where they didn't like how something worked and commented out dozens of lines of code. It helps understand the code when they don't use version control -- A couple of times the first thing I've done on a project was get the code base into some sort of version control. One guy who didn't have any formal training in software engineering actually commented code out of his program and then uncommented it for year-end processing. That was cute.
Of course, even in a career spanning more than two decades, you're still touching a miniscule percentage of the total code out there. Could be there are actually plenty of companies with clean, beautiful and well-factored code bases. I suspect that if they exist, they're in a minority, though. That's just based on how hard the industry seems to think developing software is. You always see stories like this one. You never see stories about how beautiful someone's code is (Except that one time, wasn't it the old Doom code or something?)
If a project has enough churn, you can actually justify cleaning up design, interfaces and even entire subsystems in some cases. If all you do is make each piece of code you touch suck just a little bit less, you'll hate having to work on that code less and less over time. All you have to do is look at the code and think "it doesn't HAVE to be this way!" If that old application everyone hates has gotten to the point where it requires a full time position just to maintain it, there's usually no reason why the design couldn't be improved along the way. My goal in maintenance positions is to eliminate the need for that job. There'll always be SOMETHING that needs maintenance, so I don't feel bad about doing so.
You can get pretty decent used gear for around $3000, which will pay for itself if you plan to jump a lot. Everyone progresses through it at their own pace. I had the resources and time to finish fast, I occasionally bump into a guy down there who started around the same time I did who hasn't exited the training program yet, but is happy to just come in and jump whenever he can. Friend of mine told me only about a third of AFF students actually graduate, the rest decide it's not for them and stop coming
If you really love doing it, you'll find a way to do it. I know several students who work at the dropzone for the cash they need to jump (And a discount on jump tickets.) Everyone always wants to go be an instructor, but it takes a LOT of skydives to do that. On a good day the packers can make more than the tandem instructors. I've met a few folks who are intentionally homeless -- they can afford rent, they just don't care to. Pretty much every skydiver I know thinks of the cost of anything in terms of how many jumps that would buy him. If you have your own gear, a jump ticket will only set you back about $25. So that new AAA title on Steam, that'd be two and a half jumps!
I haven't kept up exactly but with the recent gear purchases, training and 110 jumps I've probably spent 11 or 12 thousand dollars on since July (With your own gear, a moderately decent beater Honda is a couple hundred jumps.) Depends on whether you'd assign a value to the hours I spent in WoW, if I'd been trying to make money with them instead, I suppose. I don't spend anywhere near the same amount of time at the dropzone.
That's what I did. The company had a big deadline come up and they asked me to work some overtime. I didn't feel bad about agreeing, but didn't feel I had the time to devote to the hard-core raiding guild I was in, so I quit the game. After the deadlines were over, my manager told me to take a week off in comp time. Rather than pick up that old crack habit again, I decided to take a course of skydiving instead. Well very long story only long, I'm now at 110 jumps, just got my rig, have a couple hours of freefall time in a vertical wind tunnel, and oh yeah, lost 30 pounds. Somehow grinding the same fucking boss for some shiny thing that will be obsolete in a year no longer has the same appeal. This year I plan to travel to at least 2 new dropzones (Haven't decided which 2 yet,) jump from a hot air balloon, and get to the point where I can start thinking about wingsuit training. Turns out living an adventure is a lot more fun than pretending to live an adventure.
They probably can break their bandwidth cost down per-customer (on average.) It obviously must cost less than shipping a DVD via the USPS a few times a month. I'm a bit curious how close that margin is. Are the saving a few cents per customer per DVD, or closer to thirty or forty cents? I suppose they probably wouldn't want to tell us if they could, for fear of giving competitors useful information.
As far as I know, the courts have always ruled that reasonable restrictions can be put on the first amendment. Of particular note, it's illegal to make available instructions on the manufacture of methamphetamine on the internet. In the quaint and curious era known as "last tuesday", it's been OK to pass laws to censor pornography, if said pornography has no "artistic value." Then there are those ITAR laws under which math can be classified as a "munition." Eeh, if you don't like it, don't elect a functionally retarded technophobe to Congress next time. I know you did, because apparently we all did.
Seems easy; measure your cellphone with a geiger counter (Accounting for background radiation) and label it with the number of millisiverts you're shooting into your brain while using it (0). Done. Unless, as XKCD points out, it's a banana phone. I wonder how many of those damn hippies have a sliced banana in their granola in the morning. I'd like to see their reaction when it's pointed out that they're getting more radiation from that than their cell phone.
I've seen the guts of a fair bit of commercial code, and it's usually not that great. Couple of stories; back in the OS/2 days I had a customer complain that the OS/2 time API specified you could set milliseconds, but this didn't appear to be the case. Well I just so happened to have access to the assembly language function in OS/2 that did that (IIRC it was shipped on one of their dev CDs) and upon examination it appeared that it was keeping an eye on 2 different interrupts. The first one was a clock tick interrupt that happend every few milliseconds and incremented the millisecond counter by however many milliseconds that was (22 sticks in my head for some reason.) However, a comment in the function stated that these could occasionally be missed, and so whenever the periodic 1-second interrupt rolled around, it would zero the millis out. Brilliant.
Every IBM story should have a Sun story to go along with it, as karmic retribution for that time I was walking along behind some of their engineers and they were dissing on the code quality in the Linux kernel. Yeah well, I've seen the code out of Sun, too. Like that webapp they did where all the authentication routines were static methods. Worked great as long as there was only one user!
If anything, professional programmers are on average worse. I had to clean up behind one, back in the '90's, who didn't realize that C strings were null terminated. Every fucking string in her code (Which she'd apparently NEVER compiled or run) was exactly long enough for the constant string she was assigning. These people sneak into your company and work there until getting caught. Usually they have another job lined up and bail just before getting caught. At least the open source guys ENJOY programming.
It's pretty easy to set up a node on Tor. We could just declare the "open internet" lost to commercial interests and do all the "interesting" stuff on an encrypted network. Sure, it's slower than an open connection, but with increasingly common cable and optical connections it's still faster than even reasonably fast DSL from a couple years back.
It's all fun and games until you piss off a judge. Too bad you can't sentence someone to be beaten with a baseball bat in this country. Not that he should let THAT stop him...
Most of the "tester" positions that I'm seeing posted lately are actually development positions with tester pay. Companies have figured out that by calling them "testers" in the shit economy, they can offer a lower salary for the same work. Sadly for the swarm of recruiters, apparently there aren't any qualified "testers" around. At least not ones willing to take those salaries. Not that the salaries are particularly bad -- I'm seeing them advertised usually around $45 an hour, which is more than you can make as a highly specialized software engineer at some of the... lower budget... companies around here. They know who they are.
Appropriate FAA NOTAMs filed in advance yadda yadda yadda *handwave*
In that shit sandwich, EA would just be the poo cherry topping.
Admit it, you posted that entire story just for the pun. Didn't you?
This industry can turn on you in an instant (Well a decade-long instant, you really have to not be paying attention.) Look at Sun, no one ever thought anything would take them down. A decade before Sun went under, I attended a Linux con in Denver and had some SGI rep try to convince me that his company was crapping daisies and unicorns. I asked him point blank why I should buy a storage solution from him when I knew for a fact that IBM would be here two decades from now. He then tried to blow some marking smoke up my ass, but their company sank shortly thereafter. I started seeing the same writing on the wall for Sun later on, and they were gone a couple years later. I really feel like these guys believed their marketing and thought nothing could take them down. Well these days Microsoft's competitors are VERY quick on their feet and can take over emerging markets before Microsoft's lumbering behemoth even realizes there's something to take over. So they're coming in against already-established and VERY popular players. So unless Microsoft loses the complacency and learns how to compete in this new era, the gutted remains of their company will join Sun and all the others in the "Also-Ran" bin of history. This is not an anti-Microsoft rant. This is a warning.
My guess is the future will be pretty robust competition between an Android-based Google OS and OSX. Though I'm still not sure about Apple without Steve Jobs' vision to keep them rolling. Plus, once they exhaust the world's supply of brushed aluminum, things will get difficult for them, too.
For a second there I thought they were patenting not being evil as a business process or something and I thought "Damn! Guess I'm just going to have to keep being evil!" But they're really just trying to patent not being caught at it. Not getting caught is actually pretty easy as long as you don't have dumbasses in your company. So maybe Google should invent a technology to jettison the dumbasses in your company into the sun! Except, I suppose that would be pretty evil. Maybe I should patent that! It'd go nicely alongside the death ray patent...
Paul doesn't really seem to do that much to advance the libertarian agenda. I get the feeling he's just another Washington insider, talking the talk enough to retain the branding but otherwise just working the system for his own benefit. I imagine him rather like Barbie's Ken -- nice abs, but lacking where it counts.
We the people must like this state of affairs or something would be done about it. So there's no sense in becoming hysterically angry that someone would make light of the circumstance. If you're an American, why haven't you fixed the problem yet, if you feel that strongly about it? If you're not, why aren't you busy feeling smugly superior that your own culture is better? And, for what it's worth, the only rational explanation I can come up with for our behavior in the USA is that it's all a secret eugenics project to breed children who will always somehow not be where the bullets are. Sure, to make an omelette you have to break a few eggs, but once we have our first generation of kids who can dodge bullets, our military will be able to stalk through the battlefield like some action movie star. Then who'll be laughing? In fact.. someone's coming... THEY KNOW! Oh, false alarm. It was just my pizza.