I think the answer is in there somewhere. At one time, the answer to your question was YES! 1000 times YES! Those two lines make the difference between the program fitting in memory and completing by the deadline and failure. At that time, the bar to successful programming was much higher than now. There may have been merely average programmers but their programs didn't fit into RAM. Besides that, the machines were very expensive and so was runtime on them. Much too expensive to burn on a merely average program.

No. It came out earlier that their "evidence" was nowhere near sufficient to show infringement. It was a straight up extortion play.

Because the likely embarrassing nature of the titles is in itself a further extortion.

Lawyers can't use being hired help as a defense. They are officers of the court first, so it is their duty to refuse to behave unethically no matter who pays how much. Vigorous representation does not include illegal acts.

Considering that the company listed an unwilling and unassociated person as an officer, it may well not even exist legally. No company, no protection. Beyond that, the corporate veil isn't quite blanket immunity, particularly when the company is small enough that the officers can't claim to not know about the illegal activity. There is no reason at all to not expect personal criminal liability to attach.

If you can't understand what he said, even if you have never seen nor heard of Star Trek in any form, you are not an English speaker at all.

As for the judge, it's called being a human being. We could use more of that throughout the judicial system.

The circuits that generate the sine wave from the clock already exist. That's what an inverter is. The ability to invert DC off grid really is just a matter of adding an internal clock to replace referencing the grid and a relay to disconnect the grid for safety reasons.

There is additional logic and circuitry to do battery management and charging, of course. It is expected to be more expensive, but there is no technical reason it should be 4x more expensive.

No. A theism means without a belief in a god. That doesn't exclude other myths an atheist might believe in.

Even where the intent is to believe no falsehoods, cultural myths are everywhere and often taught as fast. They're insidious. Some are harmless. Others actually helpful if only to provide cohesiveness to the culture. Some are actually harmful, intended to preserve power structures unworthy of preservation.

Hear! Hear!

That is exactly the problem with modern web design.

I used GWBASIC a few times. It was a good BASIC interpreter but it didn't really stand out against others. By the time GWBASIC came out, the micro world was moving to C. Very soon after, Turbo C bacame the compiler of choice.

A real innovation (for micros) was Desqview. It brought quality muntitasking and even IPC to the DOS world. That was quite a feat considering that DOS was very much designed and programmed as a single threaded "OS". All on a CPU that was only mostly suitable for multitasking.

Bad designers think their design is far far more important than the information they are supposed to present, so they get fanatic about preventing even a single pixel being displaced, especially at the explicit request of the unsophisticated swine reading the page.

If you didn't do the math, I was doing Fortran on a mainframe at 10 years old. I did grow up with computers.Ben-Yehuda was already grown up when he got into Hebrew and Knuth was grown up when he got into algorithms.

Without Gates, Tiny BASIC would have ruled the day on micros instead. The rest would have unfolded in a similar way except people wouldn't have mental scars from dealing with Plug-n-Pray. IF anything, MS held the industry back.

Following the last link in TFS, and its link, We get a retraction of the story that is highly suspicious to say the least. Looking at "the investigation", we find a report that basically validates within reason all of the other stories by the author, leaving only the two on Carly but trying to spin the story as a complete failure to validate anything. The 'investigation' of those two seems to consist only of talking to a PR person at HP that denies the stories (yeah, big surprise, many buyers like to rationalize away and otherwise deny remorse) and "can't find" the person quoted in the company.

Retracting the article based only on that seems a bit extreme.

So how much could a clock cost?

It is a difference, but shouldn't be an expensive difference at non-ripoff rates.

Oh, they're all for it, just as Tepples said. As long as they don't have to think too hard about it or spend money on it. That's why they do nothing about the scenario you mention.