Actually I take this in a completely different context. For Congress and the White House to talk about the ails of piracy is a situation so loaded with irony it's almost painful. It's like Congress holding a summit on the ails of substance abuse and extramarital affairs.

If anything, Congress and the White House would school the MPAA and RIAA on how to best extract money from future generations (of course unfounded taxation to support a huge freaking bureaucracy isn't piracy - why that's just your gov't at work).

I would love a good alternative personally. All my users do is read the PDFs and we use PDFCreator for merging documents.

Free and you don't even need to install them. Just unpack in a directory:

Foxit Reader Portable

Sumatra PDF Portable

For merge/split: PDFTK Builder Portable

I'm a fan of O'Reilly books. Interestingly enough this doesn't mean that I'll gloss over issues with what they produce. The result is actually the inverse, in that I go into all their titles with a high level of expectation with regards to quality on every level. This may mean that though I strive to be neutral when I look at a book, I'm probably a little tougher on O'Reilly titles. This made my rough start with Android Application Development a bit jarring. The repetition and what felt like sloppy editing are not what I expect. I was quickly given a sense that this book may have been rushed to publication a little sooner than it should have been.

IMO, O'Reilly's once stellar reputation has gone downhill since the days when they only had a handfull of titles. I think these days in the rush to churn out a Learning/Mastering/Pocket Reference/Nutshell book for every language and variant thereof their editors miss quite a bit. Now you have to scrutinize their books just as much as the other publishers (although they haven't quite hit the abomination level that the Whatever-Language "Bible" books are that Wiley publishes).

Yeah desperation for consumer base plainly showing through. I would be surprised if it lasted indefinitely though, I'm sure Palm desires absolute control. Similar moves by Verizon today also, with them announcing they will have android phones now.

How much of that is download time? Microsoft has the fact going for it that if you are upgrading, you already have everything you need locally on the dvd. I would be interested to see what would happen performing an upgrade from a locally mirrored repository on a fast lan or from a cd (not sure if that is even possible with ubuntu).

Perhaps they should try upgrading via carrier pigeon.

We should expect owners of hybrids, electric cars and high efficiency vehicles to pay their fair share if they can't manage to pay their road tax through fuel purchases.

You laugh, but here in Texas I actually got a letter from the Governor's office justifying the need for more toll roads. And what was their reason - because hybrid vehicles were cutting into the the gas tax revenues and they said they needed more toll roads to pay for upkeep and expansion. Yeah seriously. This was a few years ago, probably 2005. I remember showing it to my coworkers, it was just unreal.

Before you even take a job, get clear on how often you'll be expected to work overtime and exactly how you're going to be compensated.

This reminds me of an interview I had back in '99 (right before the dot-com boom). As an EE, the interviews usually last all day, talking to about 8 or 9 people over the course of the day.

So who was the first person I talked to - the HR lady. Practically the first thing out of her mouth was "well here we pretty much work 6 days a week, and we expect people to do that". Well at that point I really didn't need to hear anything else she or anyone else there had to say. Mind you this was in San Jose in '99 when startups were forming everywhere and stock options were all the rage. In some places a 6 day work week was standard operating procedure.

Unfortunately for me, there is no amicable exit from those type interviews even when you know early on it's not going to work out. So I went the whole day, talked to everyone, and eventually even got an offer from them. For the cost of living there, their wage offer was lame, even for a 5day work week, nevermind 6day...

I took a different job in Austin (higher start salary, lower cost of living, and a 5day work week). Have never regretted skipping out on their 6day a week slave job (especially in 2001 when the market crashed and their stock options went to crap before they even vested).

Ah, of course that I am familiar with. I interpreted "contiguous" to refer to the text, not the windows. As in a continuous flow, where the bottom of one column wraps to the top of the next, and scrolling one would scroll all three.

That I have never seen in an editor, although IMO it would be useful which is why I asked (esp. if copy/paste and such would also span the columns).

split your code editor window so that it shows the code as 2 or three contiguous columns

Perhaps I haven't looked in the options enough. Which code editors can automatically span three contiguous columns?

You can of course still use something like wxWidgets with Express, but arguably it's still worse (too MFC'ish for my taste), and you don't get any integrated designers.

For wxWidgets, although not completely integrated but very well done IMO, installing wxPack on a VS install will give you wxFormBuilder (a GUI designer which is also usable/installable standalone). In practice I've found it to be as good as being integrated, and I've done several complex GUIs in a fraction of the time hand coding would have required (and it has a more consistent code style than I do when I manually code the GUI elements).

When it's done, I expect it to run equally well in any environment (that supports Perl & Tk, which is A LOT). Try that with Visual Studio. I bet you can't, because V$ was deliberately engineered to make it as difficult as possible to develop for any non-Imperial target.

Not true. VS is just an IDE, although it is of course strongly geared toward Windows apps, you can do cross platform development in it if you use the right kit. I used to do a lot of Perl/Tk, but now I've completely switched to using the cross platform wxWidgets for all my apps needing a GUI. For using VC with it I highly recommend using wxPack to install (it bundles in the very awesome wxFormBuilder). Now the only time I use Perl/Tk is for those 5-liner type perl programs where I want to throw something into a messagebox.

Well now you can join up and be an Army of One .. the IT guy.

Absolutely. From the TFA:

The city of Morgan Hill and parts of three counties lost 911 service, cellular mobile telephone communications, land-line telephone, DSL internet and private networks, central station fire and burglar alarms, ATMs, credit card terminals, and monitoring of critical utilities.

That's right, for a short time Morgan Hill went silent. You could have called it Silent Hill. And then the fog rolled in and we started hearing ~noises~ ... you don't want to know what happened after that...