just totally personally annoying and just my read on it, but, the patent was clearly edited to get around the "radio beaconing location" aspects from this paper:

Composable Ad hoc Mobile Services for Universal Interaction
T. D. Hodes, R. H. Katz, E. Servan-Schreiber, L. A. Rowe
Proceedings of The 3rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Mobile Computing (MobiCom '97)
Budapest, Hungary, September 1997, pp. 1-12.
(disclosure: I'm the author)

but then the addendum slips the claim back in 11 years later:

    ".Iadd.29. The method of claim 24, where the beacon is a radio frequency beacon..Iaddend."

You can tell this this is the case because the examiner forced a citation of an article in the exact same proceedings as (theoretically) non-competing prior art ("Location-Aware Mobile Applications based on Directory Services," MOBICOM 97, 1997, Budapest, Hungary, pp. 23-33.), yet conspicuously allowed the above to be left out, almost certainly after a bunch of claims editing.

This is also why there is so much work done in the abstract & write up to trip over itself to focus on "GPS" and "coordinates" as the location technology -- any post-1997 beacon-based location was (and still should be) unpatentable.

sorry, this just bugs me. i've worked with coders from asia, europe, and all over the states. from open source zealot hackers in the bay, to buttoned-up microsofties in Seattle, IBM, health care software in Atlanta, Film/TV/games in Northern Virginia, telecom software integration in Madrid, Spain. Worked with remote people in Montreal, and remote people in various places in India. While I haven't haven't worked in NYC, where you are, I know people at Google Manhattan, and a couple quants there, one of whom is an MIT+Berkeley PhD old friend, fellow grad student, and fellow coworker.

and, dude, sorry, but...

NO ONE CALLS THEM "ALGOS"

It's like going to silicon valley and calling SF "San Fran". ugh. just uncomfortable for everyone in earshot.

you sound like an idiot, full of piss and vinegar. How in the hell is VHDL relevant given you don't build hardware? superscalar is ancient, basic technology, if you care about hand-optimized assembly on current architectures, you should be addressing vector, multicore, and GPUs. you mention threads in combination with usec timing requires, which seems bizarre, given the thread scheduler has timeslice quanta orders of magnitude beyond that. for real-time trading, i'd expect event-based programming (full scheduling control) not threads, like even simple high-performance HTTP servers. you're proud of working 100 hour weeks? how about work smarter dude, that's simply not necessary at sustained rates, for anything, period. lack of sleep + poorly-tested changes = bugs. I could go on. I am a programmer who grew to hire and lead programmers for a living (which is actually way harder than simply writing the software yourself.. it becomes all about architecture), and, I assure you, you sound nothing like a top-of-breed programmer. go get a PhD and learn what you don't know. you quants in NY live in a bubble of big money and shitty software. take away the money, and you got shit.

fail.

(*) I'm sure you can clarify many of these things to us, I'm sure you do indeed write working software -- but, that you can so poorly explain it speaks volumes.

I usually don't have to add comments to items on /., as usually the right answer or comment is already there. But, in this case, it's not.

I am one of the decision-makers on hiring at my company, as VC-funded startup. (If you like, come interview; we're profitable and hiring). Having a publication is a very good thing for *your entire life*, and it's often something you only get a chance to do young. Yes, when you're young, the cost seems high. But, relative to your future income, it is a drop in the bucket. Lost weekend, $500 flight, $300 hotel... Borrow it from a 30- or 40- something who trusts you, and pay it back over a year.

Why is it such a good thing? It's irrelevant who you meet there. Maybe you'll get lucky, but, it's not likely. The value is in company you share by being a published author. Software company decision-makers often went to CS grad school, and like to hire people who they can relate to! They will have pubs, you will have a pub. Simple as that.

note: this ranking is biased by instant viewing.

"instant view" titles are those you watch on your computer (or roku or xbox or whatever). they are "second tier" movies only. but, because they are convenient, they got a TON more views than movies you have to actually get the CD mailed to you for.

so, what you're seeing here is a hybrid list, with "top tier" movies vote counts watered down by over-counts of instant-play-ables.

fwiw.