...but that's just me. It's easier for me to tune out office background noise than music, since I like music.

The important point is that your boss is being an idiot and you need to walk in there and tell him he's being an idiot. And if you're afraid to do that it means you need a different job because you ABSOLUTELY NEED to be able to do that.

I'll admit to having only skimmed the FTC posting, but I didn't see anything saying that could be construed as "virtual worlds are bad for minors." They said that minors have ACCESS to virtual worlds, but any conclusion of harm is based on prior assumptions, with which many of us would disagree.

Either they did fix it or migrating settings skips over it. It was Smart Folders (which I swear I disabled on the setup tab) making it appear as if it had happened.

...wherein when you set up a new IMAP account it purges all the messages you had marked-as-deleted without asking you. Or in this case does it when migrating settings from version 2, again without asking you.

I actually had a developer try to argue this wasn't a bug. Are you fucking serious, guys? Permanently deleting 10,000+ messages with no confirmation is a FEATURE?

I also like how it had to re-download all my folders for no good reason.

Pretty close to re-installing 2.x at this point.

You're too quick with that "False." there. Two other obvious possibilities exist:
1. Google hasn't found out about it.
2. These sites have An Arrangement with Google that bends the rules.

As dependent as my company is on Google traffic, I can assure you that Anonymous Coward's statement is broadly true. Unless you are special, if Google discovers their bot sees different content than real users you get the boot.

If there's no principled difference between hardware and software, that doesn't imply that software should be patentable, it implies that hardware SHOULDN'T be patentable.

If that seems a little extreme in the opposite direction it's probably because there IS a principled difference.

Theoretical arguments aside, empirically software patents are unnecessary. The software industry innovates at a faster pace than any other on the planet. Most of what we create is never patented and doesn't need to be in order to be useful. The only people in the software business who need patent protection are professional litigators. If software patents disappeared tomorrow, innovation would INCREASE because we would no longer be working under the constant threat of a lawsuit.