Thanks to the Supreme Court of the United States, one does not have to physically sign any agreement to be bound by it. Use alone, such as putting a commercially-produced DVD in a DVD player, is sufficient for you to have agreed to the terms.

The copyright part of the GPLv2 doesn't allow that remedy, but the GPL isn't just a statement of copyright, but is also a license, and the license part of the GPLv2, which you agree to if you use GPL code, does specify what must happen if GPLv2 code is incorporated.

And if software companies are suddenly saying licenses aren't enforceable, then wow, we've entered a brand new age.

Indeed. I fail to see why GPL software is being picked on here. You lift someone else's copyrighted code without permission and without abiding by any licensing agreements, you are SOL if you get busted.

I have an uncle who is an extremely bright man... and insufferably arrogant and lazy. It's as if he has come to believe his high IQ is an end unto itself, and that somehow the universe was supposed to just bow down and hand him everything on a silver platter. He's an alcoholic who was abusive to his wife and kids (until she finally got up and left). But for years all I'd hear from my aunt was how awfully bright and tortured he was, and if you pointed out he'd barely made a living for years, you got some nonsense about him being a member of Mensa thrown in your face.

I have no idea what my IQ is, never really cared. Good at some things, struggle with others, but the one thing I'm not is a complete dick. I'll take happiness and a measure of success over some number on a piece of paper any day.

Another Shiva Ayyadurai, except with even fewer verifiable accomplishments.

Don't vote for this kind of garbage with your money.

And nobody has...

Whatever happens with the Surface Pro series (and I'd say the odds are stacked against it), RT is dead in the water. It's sitting in the same dark, dank purgatory that the Blackberry Playbook is, and largely for the same reasons.

You do have actual evidence of this, right? I mean, you wouldn't simply be lying to bolster *your* agenda.

Sounds like scientists complaining that they're research has been misused.

And you don't think Microsoft is trying to do the same with cod services being turned on by default in Windows 8?

Dark energy is needed to explain the rapid inflation of the universe. Dark matter is matter we know is out there but can't yet identify because it so weakly interacts with normal matter. One is extremely important to explaining big bang cosmology as we currently understand it. The other in certainly is part of the big bang story, but is as much an interest to particle physicist as cosmologists because it represents the possibility of physics beyond the Standard Model.

First of all, aspects of big bang cosmology were predicted before observation, and second of all, WTF? Theories have to fit observation or they are, by definition, wrong.

H1Bs from New Jersey get a lot of grief.

If someone were to come up with a ARM-based board with at least the capability of three or four NICs and a WiFi access, and could run a decent distro like Debian, even if it cost a couple of hundred bucks, I'd snap up three right now. I've built Linux-based routers/VPN appliances using Debian, iptables and OpenVPN, and I can't complain, but they still suck a lot of electricity, and quite frankly, are rather large. I have three Asus RT-N12 routers with TomatoOS on them, and they work great but I've never been able to get the onboard ethernet switch to reliably work as two routed network segments, and they are getting a bit long in the tooth WiFi-wise.

There's a helluva lot of C code being written and maintained out there, so no, not even C has been replaced.

From an executable (if I can use the word for byte code) point of view, yes Java is the most portable. I compile once, run in many places. That doesn't really apply to Android or iOS, of course, but since I don't write mobile apps, I don't fret. But I do write apps that run on Windows boxes, Macs and *nix machines, and, as I said, as long as I'm careful to keep things version and platform neutral, my jar file can run on all these platforms. Code portability and executable portability are two different things.