I have worked for startups and I think directors either give high hourly (and overtime) pay to contractors or employee pay with a stock-option plan issued every year and awarded on a five year term or something like that to keep you employed there long term. In other words, you are either investing a portion of your time and will share in the success or not. Don't be surprised if they only have those two scenarios available. Don't take this the wrong way but it's worth pointing out that nobody is indispensable. Jobs, Gates, Obama, etc, will all be dispensed one way or another and it won't spell the end of their respective organizations.

Thank you for your kind words. I can tell by the way your thoughts transform into free flowing words and by your condescending tone that you are most likely not an idiot like me and you have probably had an easy life.

I too am bitter for some of the things in this world. For example, patent law and corporate control of government policy, which are not mutually exclusive. I don't take it out on anyone I just throw out assertions on the way I see things on message boards such as this. I take it that you don't agree and that's okay with me, you are allowed your opinion.

I disagree with your argument about applying the law yourself. An independent inventor may not have the desire or the ability to apply law and spend time arguing in a courtroom. He or she may be more interested in building a business around something they invented or inventing other things. He or she may not be capable of decorum required in a court of law because they can't communicate without calling people names like idiot, ignorant or hypocrite. Established businesses, on the other hand, have legal departments that are paid to quash other businesses competing with them or else collect royalty from them. In this scenario, patent law is the instrument to make the rich richer and the keep the emergent down. That's the fundamental thing I don't like which lead me to make my comment.

If and only if you can afford to fight your way there. If not it is what the other guy, with the established business, says it is.

In our economy: Invention is the right to a revenue stream if you can afford patent law litigation.

But if they start making them in cheap labour areas I stop buying them!

With video specs in HTML5 and banishment from iPhone, Adobe is fighting an uphill battle to stay in the mix.

I have an Acer laptop and I have problems going to stand-by and reanimating from stand-by. I need to hard boot and already once it came back up with filesystem errors. Pretty frustrating. I haven't had any of the problems noted above. For now I'll just start up and shut down every time even though it takes way longer.

The new Ubuntu version just came out. I upgraded right away and things are fine.

I would say that it definitely depends what job you want to be working in four years. If you want a public sector full time employment (FTE) job, you pretty much need the paper. Competition for those jobs and even promotion is done so "fairly" that the best people on paper will always get them over better practitioners that don't qualify as much on paper. These are jobs with a lot of down time, red tape, and job security. A lot of people want that. If, on the other hand, you are looking for a more challenging and dynamic programming job at a private company or as a consultant; then experience, know-how, and reputation of those are what keep you in rolling in the dough. As a hiring manager with a FTE staff and that hires consultants, I can tell you that for me, age has nothing to do with it.

Because there's always the risk that a lawyer's advice is biased. They may advise you to fight it out in court if they don't have a busy schedule next month and need the extra money.