MS language is potentially worse than the default. And there is room for litigation to surprise us.

Yes. The last stuff I wrote that I couldn't compile today was in "Promal" or "Paradox". My C and C++ code from 1980 still builds and runs.

All of my web development is on Ruby on Rails. That environment has had a lot of development and I've had to port to new versions. So old code for RoR would not quite run out of the box, but it's close.

Popular computing languages do not in general have only one Open Source implementation, and do not get abandoned.

Clearly I don't understand capitalism.

Clearly. Geoblocking is at least partially about market segmentation. The EU is so large that it has extremely major disparities in wealth between its member nations. Consider the difference between Sweden and Romania. If you have a movie and charge a single price to stream it across the entire EU then:

a) Some people will find it incredibly cheap and others will find it still too expensive, just pushing them back towards piracy.

b) You end up having to deal with the tax systems of every single EU country anyway due to the retarded VAT changes they introduced this year, so it doesn't help simplify your business at all, and you theoretically aren't allowed to opt out of serving particular regions due to their horrible paperwork requirements, so being able to geoblock unprofitably complicated regions whilst claiming you have some other reason is quite attractive.

Development with a proprietary language is ultimately harmful to your own interests, whether you make proprietary software for a profit or Free software.

The one thing every business needs is control. When you make it possible for another company to block your business, you lose control. Your options become limited. Solving business problems potentially becomes very costly, involving a complete rewrite.

The one thing that should be abundantly clear to everyone by now is that making your business dependent on Microsoft anything is ultimately a losing proposition. They have a long history of deprecating their own products after customers have built products upon them.

All Open Source licenses come with an implicit patent grant, it's an exhaustion doctrine in equitable law.

The problem is not patent holders who contribute to the code, you're protected from them. It's trolls who make no contribution and then sue.

Of course these same trolls sue regarding proprietary code as well.

You mean like browsers and Javascript? In that case 99% of the population has lost already. The pwn2own competition results are rather miserable.

I don't think it's so bad. The pwn2own competition is notable primarily for the ridiculous levels of skill required to actually beat modern browser security (note: I do not include the still unsandboxed Firefox in this category).

What's been happening in recent years is that more and more bugs are being found by whitehat hackers first, with the complexity and difficulty of beating them going up radically over time. It used to be that random hackers in their bedrooms could put together browser exploit kits. Nowadays the people being whacked by clicking on "bad links" are mostly people who aren't keeping their software up to date properly or using decent browsers. Remember SQL Slammer and Code Red? It used to be that teenagers could find RCE vulns in Windows. Now it's much harder.

This trend is reflected in the rapidly escalating cost of buying exploits on the black market. There didn't even used to be a market for exploits.

Also look at the escalating difficulty of jailbreaking iPhones and Xboxes. The defenders learn from each successful attack and each time they fall, they get back up stronger than before. And that's despite the fact that there's hardly any money in writing secure software. Many customers will be happy if you simply patch holes that are reported to you, with few people choosing which product to use on the basis of a good security track record.

So it seems like things are getting better and the game is rapidly moving beyond many attackers abilities, the age of the script kiddie is largely coming to an end when it comes to attacking user endpoints. Instead a new game is starting, one where professional teams of government sponsored hackers fight against professional teams of private-sector sponsored defenders. We can claim this isn't progress of a sort, but without the previous hardening efforts, the industry would be tackling both types of attackers at once ...

When your government is full of engineers, not lawyers, and when you can just ignore the flat-earth lobby instead of wasting half your funding fighting their just-because-we-can delays, you can test ideas like this.

Also useful: when your government is full of unelected bureaucrats who aren't held accountable by voters, completely dominate the news media, and stomp on any popular organization or sentiment that they don't control, and thus are free to ignore the interests of their citizens and instead spend money on wasteful, thinly-disguised military projects.

(Except, of course, that's not what's actually happening in this case - the article summary makes it sound like "OMG China will dominate space", because of course that's more interesting than "superannuated Chinese scientist spouts nonsense".)

reasonably lucrative work

I could understand Fiorina just wanting the attention - but dear God, I hope she doesn't need the money. That $20 million severance package would last most ordinary people a lifetime.

I think her target market is Republicans who want a viable female challenger to Hilary. Realistically, she's setting herself up for Sec. of Commerce, or maybe, if she's extremely lucky and does moderately well in the primaries, VP. I am no fan of hers for all of the obvious reasons, but she is a rocket scientist compared to Bachmann and Palin.

Then why is it exclusively conservatives who use the incorrect term?

You say that now, but when someone starts making kits to build trebuchets into the back of pick-up trucks...

(The more I think about this idea, the more ridiculously awesome it sounds.)

inorite? When I think back on it, I'm utterly amazed to have survived childhood.

Incoming legislation in 3... 2... 1...