The real problem here probably has to do with shared libraries. If you have a function in a shared library with external visibility, the compiler can't remove it, unless it is doing whole program optimizations across all of the programs, and I doubt the LibreOffice builds are doing that.

Given my experiences in Italy, if the neutrinos arrived exactly when they were supposed to, Italians would consider that about 15 minutes too early.

This is one reason there are so many JavaScript (perhaps actually DOM) questions -- where is the documentation to answer questions like "how do I do x, across every major browser versions which didn't really follow standards well"? If I'm programming in, say, Java or C++ with some framework where I control more of the environment, I can go to one place to answer questions, but there's no one definitive source for these cross browser problems.

The phrase "C/C++", that is.

C++, especially modern C++, is such a different language from C, that it makes no sense to talk about them as if they are the same. A decent programmer can learn everything they need to know about C in about two weeks. Modern C++ really takes years to really master. When I interview programmers, I'm immediately skeptical of anyone who claims to know "C/C++". Often, this means the most advanced "C++" feature they use is the // comment.

I always found PostgresQL harder to admin. It needs to be VACUUM'ed periodically. How often? The poor admin is supposed to figure that out themselves. Oh, and don't try to actually use the database during a VACUUM. Even after the autovacuum feature was added, it never seemed to work right, and my databases still needed to be vacuumed by hand, sometimes taking more than a day to run. Even with frequent vacuuming, indexes can get bloated -- I would see indexes with more pages allocated than entries, which needed to be manually reindexed. Worse, you need to tell postgres how much memory to allocate for vacuum'ing, and if you don't get it right, it 'leaks' disk space. None of these sorts of things have ever been a problem for MySQL.

There are many things which are not "being obvious to someone skilled in the field" but which are easy and cheap to duplicate once the original invention has been made and published.

That may be true, but consider that Lodsys hasn't made anything, and I guarantee you the Rovio developers hadn't read the patent before they wrote their games.

Sure about that? Confident that the Overdrive folks didn't hide some watermark of some kind into it? You better be sure, because the evidence is sitting on Amazon's servers...

I couldn't tell you if it is illegal or unethical, but emailing the DRM-stripped files to an amazon-hosted email server seems ... ill-advised.

JDK is so not GPL.

I am so not a lawyer, but TFA claims the basis for the case is a Minnesota state statute, but the case was argued in federal court. How does that work?

If this doesn't stop cell phone theft, nothing will.

What you are describing is basically the situation faced by every conference with more than a few hundred people. Everything is fine when you are in break-out rooms or smaller sessions, but put everyone together in a ballroom, add a boring keynote speaker (probability: high), and wireless becomes unusable. Especially geek conferences when every person in the room has a laptop and a iPhone. Or two. The usual solution is large numbers of WAPs and let the proles self-regulate which WAP they connect to: if they can't get one one, they'll try, try again until the connect.

This reminds me of an episode of Simpsons, where someone asks Homer something like "do you imagine what would be a world without lawyers?", and he starts imagine a green, sunny field, with everyone singing, dancing and very happy. :-)

Thank you for this post. This guy's been making the rounds again, and everytime he's been shown to be a borderline nut and a chronic patent applyer. Getting a patent is simply a matter of money, not ability, talent, or creativity. Apple has patents on sliding your finger across a touch screen and Amazon has its infamous one-click patent. Companies like Tivo find it more profitable to sue over patents than to actually sell a product.

This guy represents nothing but the lax process of getting a patent mixed in with some medical quackery.

The consent degree did not apply to Lucent after it was spun off, and they did even worse. Moreover, lack of commercialization was true at _all_ the privately run labs. How much did Xerox make from PARC's great Computer Science work? IBM from T.J Watson?