Good points. I think the key concept is called Wing Loading which is the ratio of mass to wing area. For example:

IOW, what matters is the ratio of the mass to the wing area and not just the mass (weight) with no context. For example, if you have two round rocks of roughly the same mass and tie a very light wing to one of them (which makes the masses equal). The one with the wing will be more affected by gusts even though the masses are the same.

Versata chose to steal the code instead of licensing it under the commercial license or the GPL. Just because the GPL allowed the thieves to legally look at the code or use it unmodified does not magically transform this into a nightmare scenario. They are not being forced to either abandon their project or release their own code. They could just buy the commercial license like any responsible grownup would do.

The claim that this is a GPL nightmare scenario is just a stupid lawyer trick to try to fool people into blaming the victim instead of the unscrupulous bastards who stole the code and who still refuse to pay for it even after they were caught red-handed.

Think for a moment what would happen if the unscrupulous bastards prevail. The implications go far beyond the GPL. Imagine you let me see your commercial code without authorizing me to use it or copy it, perhaps through an NDA. Then I steal your code and put it in my products which I sell to a bunch of people. I get caught red handed and I still refuse to pay. Instead I hire a sleaze-ball lawyer who claims this is a nightmare scenario for commercial software licenses and NDAs. If the UBs win here, my lawyer's job becomes much easier because she can use this case as precedent. ISTM a win by the UBs would create a world where simply letting someone see your code dissolves any rights you have to that code.

In addition to what DamnOregonian said, there is another problem with this quest to know what is ACTUALLY happening. For almost all people who voice this desire, "what is ACTUALLY happening" means a model That matches their intuition based on the non-relativistic 3+1 dimensional, classical world of their senses. This ain't gonna happen.

Maybe you misunderstand what the models in theoretical physics actually do. You say we will never understand the models well enough to make accurate predictions. While this may be true of some string theories, but that is a recent phenomenon and a strong deviation from the past. In general physics theories must make disprovable predictions or they are not taken seriously -- they are not physics, just metaphysics.

Whether you like it or not, the underlying theories of the Universe do not match our classical, non-relativistic intuition. But we can still model what happens and make predictions with these models. And people do develop intuitions based on these extremely non-classical models. Almost all progress in physics and math is based on a combination of intuition and turning a crank on complicated mathematical formalisms. Intuition is used for leaping ahead to a possible conclusion which is followed by the grunt work of turning the crank to make sure the intuitive leap was correct. Intuitive leaps are not always correct.

ISTM your question is meaningless. The best we have to offer on what the electron is ACTUALLY doing is with mathematics that correlates highly with what we see. I don't know what it means for there to be an actuality beyond that.

Even your question/remarks on the "correct conceptual framework" seems to miss the mark. The best we have there is the simplest mathematics that correlates highly with what we see.

Actually, a very big part of the theory is predicting new and unexpected results that have not been seen in the lab yet. Another big part is when the same mathematics can describe different phenomenon that were previously thought to be unrelated. Lee Smolin provides an excellent description of how this all works in his book The Trouble with Physics. I highly recommend it.

They tested 16 developers and gave statistics with four significant figures. I think you would need to test at least 100,000,000 developers to get such precise measurements. Who do they think they are? Dr. Spock on Star Trek?

So true.

You mean when he personally visited the riot-prone areas to stop the massacres:

Read the reasons given for his assassination:

If Gandhi had been ordering murders in addition to his fasts and prayers and actions to stop them, I would imagine this would have been added to the list of reasons given for his assassination.

That is an inherent feature of feudalism. The result has nothing to do with justice or fairness, just who is stronger and it makes no difference what happens to peasants caught in the crossfire.

Are you suggesting they sue the court? Good luck with that. ISTM the fundamental problem is that the US courts have become the corporations bitches. Who are you going to sue and where are you going to sue them?

The book Econned explains how people with a far right economic agenda have been stacking the US courts for years. The result is what you see, basically a feudal systems where corporations are treated like lords and everyone else is a serf.

What the large print giveth, the small print taketh away.

That argument is obvious nonsense. The problem is that the same software can run on lots of different hardware. Are you suggesting someone would need a separate patent for each possible hardware the software could run on? I don't think so. You want one patent to cover all possible hardware implementions. That is clearly patenting an idea, not a device/implementation.

Those are not good reasons for granting patents. A lot of effort goes into making many useful things but the effort and the usefulness do not make those things patent-eligible.

For example, in the fine article you linked to, Gene Quinn says:

This is BS. Software that can run on different architectures cannot be described in terms of the physical hardware the software runs on. At best the patent that resulted would only be valid on the specific hardware that was described. I grant you, Microsoft (IIRC) did argue this nonsense successfully in a courtroom once but just because they were able to buffalo some lawyers and judges, that doesn't make it true.

Gene Quinn? Yes, an excellent reminder of how much we need PJ to cut through the BS for us. Thank you.

We need someone who is familiar with the law to explain this to us techies. PJ we need you!

It is normal for it to be "unlikely to find a tenure-track job". It would be extremely unusual for it to be otherwise unless students in general embarked on a policy of assassinating at least one professor after getting their doctorate.