So instead of putting on more buses/trains and improving the transport infrastructure, you just keep raising the fair to reduce patronage. Great idea! If they quadruple the fairs tomorrow, they might even be able to get rid of a few entire routes. Less buses, less employees, and therefore lower payroll costs.

I smell profit here!

More importantly, if you have your own lawyers on your payroll, the cost is negligible. Especially when you consider that those lawyers seemingly only spend 5 minutes on Google doing 'due diligence'. If they spent much longer, then far less obvious/pre-existing patent applications would be made. That, of course, doesn't excuse the patent examiner for rubber stamping it after seemingly spending another 5 minutes Googling the claims.

I'd go as far as saying it should definitely not be patentable. This is the most obvious embodiment of a typical just-in-time manual practice "on a computer".

Any patent awarded should err on the side of invalid until proven valid, not the other way around. Just like proving guilt is required before someone can be deprived of freedom, so should a patent be held to the same standard before it can be used to deprive others of freedom to pedal their wares.

As an embedded systems programmer, I worked on at least 100 different systems between 1995 and 1999. Some problems were just cosmetic, others caused overrun buffers, infinite loops, code paths that would no longer run, and of course the usual date comparison and cosmetic problems.

The 'doom' wasn't so much a single system going down, but a sudden coordinated failure of hundreds or thousands of systems at the same time. At least 1 in 5 of the systems we worked on were 'critical' systems that would very likely have caused serious damage, injury and/or loss of life if they weren't fixed. The company I worked for primarily dealt with equipment used in hospitals, power plants / utilities, and industrial equipment. Other companies would audit a facility (eg. a hospital), and we'd be called whenever they found something that hadn't already been dealt with.

Sometimes we didn't have access to source code, and had to recommend replacements or rewrites.

Is an extra $1k enough to get you to leave one job for another. I don't think so.

You can also tell your new employer that your new position is far more senior/challenging/responsible/etc than your previous position. Your new employer has a baseline number, knows a little of your previous job (from your resume), and will tell you in detail what the new job entails. You on the other hand also have the exact details of your previous job to make the comparison a little more ambiguous.

Worse is if you don't know what anyone else was being paid. Then you end up agreeing to $85k (because you were previously being being paid $80k) when you should have been asking for at least $129k while a few of your colleagues were being paid $128k at your previous place of employ. Remember, you're up against a professional negotiator. Not some guy that does it a few times a decade.

Someone please mod the parent up.

'Success' is far better predicted by cut-throat underhanded behaviour and initial wealth than because someone 'worked hard'. An employee's ability to negotiate better than the next guy is also a huge advantage.

Here's an anecdote that I'm sure is a deja vu moment for many here:

At a company I worked at years ago, one of our best (and hardest working) software developers, was paid far less than one of the worst.

The 'worst guy' surely would have been a sales guy if it meant he could be more lazy. He'd normally just surf the net all day, but every now and then he'd spend a week or two working on what looked like foreign projects. When the big brass walked past, he'd go into 'super busy' mode where he'd frantically shuffle papers, tap keys at crazy speed, and move his head back and forth between paper specs and the monitor. I'm sure he pioneered the use of automated email sending scripts that would send out at 9pm emails drafted in the middle of the day. The guy used to do the bare minimum to fly under the radar, then when panic hit, he'd pull out and submit some work he'd been holding back and look like some sort of genius saviour. He'd even negotiate overtime rates to 'complete' the 'unfinished' work - from home, of course. One day he 'accidentally' walked in on one of the upper management guys (married) 'working overtime with the secretary'. I don't really know what he actually said, but, mysteriously, he got a pay rise - which naturally he told us all about. This guy was expert in the art of telling people just enough to come across as 'lucky' and 'hard working' rather than devious and opportunistic. He had no idea we could see right through his game, but then we weren't really the central part of his game.

That guy used to blow his own trumpet so hard that you'd be blinded in both eyes from all the stray saliva.

Luckily the guy only lasted a year before he moved on to riper pickings at a more gullible company. In fact, productivity (and morale) went up once he was gone. But, even after he'd left, the division manager and the CEO would swear blind that he was one of the most diligent and valuable guys ever to grace the company. I learned a lot from that guy (about how to play the 'system'), and I watch carefully for it in the teams that I manage. Sadly, this type of behaviour seems to be more prevalent the higher you look up in the corporate structure.

The age old idiom that 'shit floats to the top' seems to be well supported.

Individual people are by definition more moral than corporations, mobs, governments and politicians.

And beyond that, it is clear that Snowden is far more moral than the average person. So he doesn't only think he's more morally correct - he actually is.

An ad hominem attack implying he's a mouthpiece for some faceless agenda doesn't change anything either. Anyone going in front of the press should prepare what they are going to say. Running it past someone else in advance is probably a good idea. Calling it coached to turn it into a negative still does not negate the message.

The 'spy' would most likely turn out to be an unidentifiable homeless 'kid' having a bit of b&e 'fun' and then gets killed by your booby trap. Since booby traps are illegal in most jurisdictions, you'll be going down with your own evidence helping to convict you,

So, no, 'rig it blow' is never a good idea.

You're right the XT was definitely an 8088. It wasn't until the PS/2 came out that they used an 8086.

I remember, because I replaced the 8088 in my XT with an NEC V20. The V30 was their 8086 variant.

It would have been even better if they had announced it after the markets had closed for the day.

I made no assertion that the big studio would orchestrate the demise of a work's author. I simply gave two examples of diametrically opposed entities making money.

The big studio could easily profit if it had already released a couple of movies and for years had wanted to further milk the franchise for another one, but couldn't because the author wasn't playing ball. Author dies, studio takes advantage of the situation. The same sort of applies today; if an obstinate copyright holder dies, it is quite possible the newly bequeathed owner would be more amenable to being bought out.

If she was that zealous about her privacy she would have shut down her site long ago, and likely done it far more gracefully. Something clearly happened to prompt this. I highly doubt she just woke up one morning and decided to shut down years of dedicated work on a whim. And so suddenly on an otherwise seemingly ordinary day.

It's a pity they never made sequels to that movie. Maybe they will one day, as that setting is ripe for some brilliant story telling.

The people that commissioned the work, and/or purchased the rights to it?

A big studio that didn't want to pay for the right to produce 'derivative' works?

What this translates to isn't that Groklaw doesn't like what's happening to others and is shutting down out of protest.

It is that it has been served with a demand for information/wire-tapping along with an attached gag order, courtesy of the 'Star Chamber'. The only 'legally' safe way for organisations to tell people that something like this has happened is to shut down their operations.

So, translation of Groklaw's announcement: the NSA/FBI/TLA have copied our hard drives and installed a data logger in our data centre. Oh yeah, and we're not allowed to talk about it.