It's cheaper for the IRS to pay the dime to continue to make patches so that they will be available to countless others who are caught with their pants down, [...]
What makes you think these patches will be made available for these countless others? Microsoft will bill very single entity out there for the very same patches, that's quite certain.
They don't care about the country, they care more about their own selfishness than anything else. Ending the embargo wouldn't make that go away, Cuba would still be a shit hole because its leaders are utterly selfish pricks who use the country for their own benefit and NOTHING else.
Selfish pricks who set a state policy that makes it possible to provide free education and free health care for everyone that is. Cubans have a life expectancy of 79.4 years (USA 79.8) according to WHO estimates and the infant mortality in Cuba is 4.76, (US 5.2) according to CIA estimates. I have been to Cuba a few times, last time was 2006, and I can say they are certainly not rich, most are rather poor when considering "western" standards, but Cuba is certainly not a shit hole.
Control flow based on indentation is a novel idea, but doesn't really make sense to most users.
It makes a lot of sense for people who start to learn programming, because this way they will learn to format their code in a readable manner.
... and commercial Linux distro support, bug and security fixes for their 2.4.0 kernel based releases.
The difference is, that the source code for the 2.4.0 Linux kernel is freely available, so anybody can hire a developer to fix security problems and hardware incompatibilities. With MS Windows and Mac OS there is only one vendor for each who has access to the source code and the permission to change it and fix things. If they don't want to do it, you're lost.
Yes, they will. And if you have a patent, then you have a legal right to make them pay you for your idea.
... and you will fail because you don't have the funds to win the patent case, and after the battle is over you will be broke.
Besides, if your innovation was in software, you will probably have to pay off a number of patent trolls the moment you become big enough to be milked and will also go broke, or work most of the time to pay someone else.
Software patents are a lose-lose for the small guy. Without them, the small guy can continue innovating and stay ahead of the big shots.
When processing microarray data sets, we recently noticed that some gene names were being changed inadvertently to non-gene names A little detective work traced the problem to default date format conversions and floating-point format conversions in the very useful Excel program package. The date conversions affect at least 30 gene names; the floating-point conversions affect at least 2,000 if Riken identifiers are included. These conversions are irreversible; the original gene names cannot be recovered
Both sides are relentlessly comparing each other to Nazi Germany. The Russians claim that Nazi-like fascist radicals led the coup and the Ukrainians claim that the Russians are behaving like Nazi Germany at the outset of World War II. It's like a bad internet argument.
Only that even the BBC now shows that here are indeed Nazi-like fascist radicals in charge now in Ukraine (especially see the two MP from Svoboda showing the numbers 14/88 at 5:00).
Without patent protection, a lot of software won't enter the market because copycats who haven't done any R&D to create an innovative product will have the same access/edge as people who created the product.
If this assumption were true, then wine should be able to run every piece of software published for MS Windows = Win7 flawlessly by now.
DavidHumus notes: Maybe the bigger question is why is CEO pay so entirely disconnected from company performance?
In other words: There is also the possibility that not employing that bigshot VP would mean the company performs better and those burger flippers would make more money.
Two can Live as Cheaply as One for Half as Long. -- Howard Kandel
