Whether copyrights should or should not last no more than 10 years is an interesting question but chances are they will always be much longer than that especially as life spans continue to increase. Meanwhile for something more unfailing than Moore's law check out the "how old is Mickey" copyright curve.

Victims of the BOFH

... Is Change and not always for the better

... at the next Occupy Movement sit-in with my new Ecouterre wearable habitat!

oh, I thought it was a feature =)

I hit "overrated" by accident on a decent post and thought the author deserved better treatment than that... afaik that's the only way to "undo"

posting to revert mod mistake

Please mod up! Funny +1

OAuth is ugly to implement, no argument there.

Most of the points made in the article were interesting and seemed valid to me but near the conclusion it felt like the author was reaching bit by ignoring the refresh token concept to make the final point.

The threat of a hacked browser was a bit of an eye opener for me -- never heard that one brought up as a possibility while working on an OAuth implementation for a client.

It is a poor worker who blames his tools. The language is not the problem, it is what you do with it but still...

YOUR PROGRAMMING TASK: To shoot yourself in the foot.

C: You shoot yourself in the foot.

C++: You accidentally create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical assistance is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying, "That's me, over there."

Perl: You grep through a list of your body parts, shooting the bits that look like feet. On the first try, you don't shoot anything, and realize that you're matching hashrefs instead of scalars. On the second try, you shoot off your big toe instead of the whole foot (shouldn't have used greedy matching in the regex). Finally, you shoot yourself in the foot, generalize your code to allow it to shoot anyone anywhere, and post it on CPAN as SUICIDE::LITE.

Python: You want to shoot the toes off your foot. You ask your foot to tell you about all of your toes, but to please pause for a while after each one so you can shoot it. After you shoot, your foot begins where it left off.

FORTRAN: You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue with the attempts to shoot anyways because you have no exception-handling capability.

Pascal: The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot.

Ada: After correctly packing your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream, and shoot yourself in the foot. When you try, however, you discover you can't because your foot is of the wrong type.

COBOL: Using a COLT 45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place ARM.HAND.FINGER on HANDGUN.TRIGGER and SQUEEZE. THEN return HANDGUN to HOLSTER. CHECK whether shoelace needs to be re-tied.

LISP: You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds...

FORTH: Foot in yourself shoot.

BASIC: Shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol. On large systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.

Java: You find that Microsoft and Oracle have released incompatible class libraries both implementing Gun objects. You then find that although there are plenty of feet objects implemented in the past, you cannot get access to one. But seeing as Java is so cool, you don't care and go around shooting anything else you can find.

I have disagree re: 3D printing to die out in a few more years-- we were doing it in the 90's with 10' tall machines making design prototypes. It was prohibitively expensive for anything else. Now it's much cheaper and much more widespread. It reminds me of the computer's transition from mainframe to PC's. I really think it's the future of manufacturing.

It sounds like you've done the right things so far and lawsuits and name & shame are like firing off nukes, you don't want to have to resort to those as long as there are alternatives.

You know the client, your relationship with them and the future of your business better than any of us so you are ultimately always going to be in the best position to know what to do.

My nature is to be gentle but direct when confronted with excuses and would ask "Do you really intend to pay us? When?" Get it in writing or email, then when that date comes round, repeat. That has worked for me several times.

I've also paid a lawyer to just write a letter asking on my behalf about their intentions and what reasons they may have for not paying. Sometimes that's enough,.

They are behaving like weasels though. If you can avoid it, I hope you won't do any more work for them, or at least not without payment up front.

I wrote my first real program on a Sinclair. It was for TV troubleshooting and it took you down to the section. Storage was a cassette tape and the output was composite video for black & white TV.

Then I bought the memory expansion, took it to work and made a program for it to do cost estimate calculations. It was the 2nd computer anywhere in the company. I got promoted from cost estimating to Systems Administrator all in one go. I stayed with that company almost 30 years, then I left to start my own software company.

A few years ago I was telling that story to a client. He pulled a mint condition Sinclair -- still in the original box -- out of his desk and gave it to me. He said it bought it to learn computers and never used it. It was like giving me the keys to my first car.

If the sea level would just rise about 30 more meters or so my house would be on the beach, plus -- and this is a big plus -- no one would ever have to smell New Jersey again.