You can download them as a Microsoft document. If the formatting is off, then just blame it on being a different version of Office. Everyone in business knows Microsoft Office is only partially compatible across product generations. In fact, I've wasted over 12 hours because an important Excel function stopped working correctly in 2013 (or possibly earlier), and I still have no fix.

Apparently the DMV missed the report that the only accident ever caused by one of Google's self driving car was due to human error while a person was controlling it. Actually, I'm hoping the requirement is for cases like one way streets or bicycle only paths that the car decides to drive down incorrectly. However, all you would need is a break pedal (because that's what panicking are used to) and some sort of correction interface (e.g. a couple of buttons on the UI).

Dora the Explorer's chant of "Swiper no swiping" doesn't work in the real world where evils actually exist. We do our best to raise people into good citizens, and it seems to be helping (rape peaked in 1992). However, I don't expect the world to ever stop having horrible people in it. Some places are always going to be safer than others (e.g. church singles mixer vs wild frat party). When I would visit my grandparents in small-town Mississippi a few years ago, we never locked the door because no one even knew where a key was, but it was never once robbed. If I go to someplace dangerous like Baghdad, Iraq; Mogadishu, Somalia; or Kabul, Afghanistan, then I would be quite foolish not to take extra precautions and expect things still may go badly.

I find it amazing that a group of men worked together to find a way for women to help protect themselves, and women get upset about it. *sigh* I would never blame the victim, but I miss the days when we read children stories about little pigs that got eaten because they were too lazy to protect themselves against any old wolf.

Apparently not... According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2008, there were 3,188,620 cases of household burglaries, another 13+ million cases of theft and 203,830 cases of rape/attempted rape/sexual assault. (www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cvus08.pdf) You have a study that cites 1.3 million women, which is MUCH higher (and I'm not disputing it), but still well below the number of burglaries. I'm aware that crime rates have been falling, but not by that much between 2008 and 2010.

Actually, one of the top hits is for this article. Apparently, it's mentioned in the comments.

I should point out that on multicore x86 machines Oracle counts 1 processor license needed per 2 processing cores. You're probably looking at 4-6+ CPU licenses for a dual processor system.

What about MySQL/MariaDB? Facebook doesn't even need a full time person for their production MySQL database cluster. It doesn't use shared storage, but if a shared storage system handles your workload, you're not all that big anymore.

How big is big enough that nothing but Oracle will do? Facebook is on MySQL, Wikipedia is on MariaDB and Google is using Bigtable.

I want a steady job instead of opening a business because I want to spend my time writing software instead of engaging in government bureaucracy, handling the first tier of customer support and marketing things to customers.

Hope you weren't planning on downloading much of anything with that mobile access to your laptop/desktop/console. With 20-40+ GB game downloads and 1+ GB/hr movies, even the largest 12 GB/month plans go REALLY quickly. Even the 250 GB/month of U-verse is easy for me to blow through with a family and working from home.

Currently, I pay Time Warner $42/month for 15 Mbps Earthlink service. My other "option" is to pay AT&T $95/month (introductory price w/ overage fees) for 18 Mbps U-verse and get slower service where it matter most to me (ping times). Not much of a competition.

It also boasts a worst in class standards support. When building advanced web services, Chrome's lack of support is a big enough pain. IE 11 is still about 3x as bad, but it is getting better. IE 10, in particular, was a huge improvement, but I often wonder why they still bother trying to build a browser from scratch.

I wrote a more extensive post on this earlier. While some teachers clearly go above and beyond what their peers do, teachers average 3 fewer hours per work week vs other professionals (without counting a teacher's extra vacation), and if they use all of their leave, will only work 171.5 days/yr on average instead of the 220 typical for a professional with 10 years of experience. Incidentally, the median experience for teachers is about 3 years, so a comperable a professional would be working even more days a year. To cap it off, teachers are paid 11% higher than other professionals. What this means is that the average professional is working >1/3 more hours for 10% less pay compared to a teacher, and that the teacher is earning 50% more per hour. If you want more details or sources, see my previous post on the issue.

I'm not sure I understand your point in your analogy to programming. I usually do just "type it once and run the program." Sometimes I'll get fancy, and type it 3 times in 3 different ways to make them race against each other. (It's kind of like battle bots but nerdier.) Then again, I've known brilliant, practiced teachers, who could pick up chalk and go.

The local high school here only has 4 classes during a day, and I'm pretty sure the teachers get a free class period. They at least got them when I attended. The teachers I know are some of the few great teachers you don't want to miss out on having. Such employees are almost always underpaid.

Lets stop talking about anecdotes, and look at some hard facts. The median compensation package for public teachers is $75k/yr (source) and they have a median of around 3 (maybe 4) years of experience (source). The BLS states that teachers are paid 11% higher than other professionals (source). At 53 hours/wk (source, it sounds like a lot of work, but it is 3 hours fewer than most professionals, even without considering vacation time (source). Considering vacation time, teachers who use all of their days of leave work an average of 171.5 days/yr vs 220 days/yr for private sector professionals with 10 years of experience (source), which isn't quite a fair comparison because professionals with 10 years of experience get more vacation than people with 3-4 years of experience.

If you multiply this out, most professionals are working over 1/3 more hours than teachers for 10% less pay. They generally get off of work early enough to make a dentist appointment, avoiding the need to shift hours around like other professionals, and their extra hours outside of the school day are free for scheduling as they see fit. Really good teachers might be working long hours for their money. However, when they're getting paid 50% more per hr, it's clear that most are not.

If you want to argue the difficulty and stress of a job, then that would be a different matter than I've discussed. It won't be fixed by reducing hours or increasing pay, but fixing polity.

I think the reason for copying Java's API was to have something that developers already knew. I would be surprised if the decision was made after Google acquired the OS, and assume it was made by Android Inc. before the buyout.

Google did use a clean-room implementation. The judge did rule that Oracle now owns exclusive rights to how some 6,000 function calls are defined and organized for the next 80-100+ years (depending how much Congress extends copyright in the next century) because the rights improve progress (the only grounds for granting copyrights or patents).

This means that any implementation of C or C++ probably violates the copyright on the respective language's standard library. Google can be sued again for offering a copy of gcc as part of the Android toolchain, along with any Linux distribution that makes a compiler available. Furthermore, the file and edit menus could be considered as much of an API as any programming language, as you're running the algorithm to tell another piece of code to open a file or whatever. It actually was a substantial work to first write something so elegant, so does the original inventor get to sue everyone who writes a program that has Edit->Copy in the menu in the year 2040?

Where can the madness end? What makes an API fall under copyright, and not a protocol? HTTP is copyrighted. Does Tim Berners-Lee get to sue every web server, every web browser, and every use of a REST API?