... Bill Gates' home from the 1990s ... so how'd Apple get that patent, anyway?

Patents last for 20 years. Hence, something patented by Microsoft in 1990 would have expired in 2010.

I worked with a guy who understood pointers. He was a brilliant guy. He was also a terrible programmer.

Being able to understand pointers is orthogonal to being someone who write intelligible code.

I've hired guys to do C, Java, perl, and ruby among others ...

And, for the non-C hires, you probably hired the ones who just so happened to have the right aptitude anyway, i.e., they could do pointers if they did C. The "true" programmers will always filter through to those hiring. His point is that Java schools make the hiring problem harder by not filtering out those without the right aptitude. Hence your examples do nothing to invalidate his point.

I can install a GPS transmitter inside one of my computers or my guitar. As a ham radio operator, I can use APRS which is trackable almost anywhere.

And they've already got it.

Beware anyone quoting from joelonsoftware --- that clown is such a douchey!

Instead of an ad hominem remark, how about refuting his points with an actual argument?

So he starts off with stuff about how he's feeling old and the surest sign of it is bitching about "kids these days".

You need to have read more of Joel's writing. That's just his irreverent style.

Got to that point and decided that it's an obviously unsupportable premise. Read a little bit more, and my takeaway is that Joel doesn't know how to spot a good programmer unless they're working in C.

His premise is that, in order to be a good programmer, you need the right kind of metal aptitude which is a you-either-have-it-or-you-don't thing and not a skill that can be learned. While there may be other ways to test for that aptitude, his claim is that one sure-fire way to test for it is the ability to understand pointers. (He makes that point even more explicit here.) And, among today's languages that are in use, the only one that really requires you to understand pointers is C. (Many years ago, it might have been Pascal, but Pascal is pretty much a dead language.)

And [C] absolutely does not require me to understand how the processor works.

Well then you're not writing that has to run fast. Consider this talk. Yes, it's on C++, but the point is that, at least for code that's used a lot (like the page-display code at Facebook), shaving 1% off the running time saves the company an "engineer's salary for 10 years."

In order to achieve that level of performance, you really do need to understand what's going on at the CPU level.

Apparently people have trouble going from Java to C...

You're not the first to notice this.

San Francisco's housing costs are insane. Pick Seattle unless you've got at least a $100K income.

There needs to be some sort of appeal or review process whereby the public can object to patents like this and many others that have been granted.

There is. Also see this for some more background information.

Tied plans are hiding the true costs of the smartphones Americans...

If carriers sold phones at their true cost -- and therefore very few people bought them -- perhaps it would force the smartphone manufacturers to lower their costs.

[M]any dealers charge $200 dollars to transfer your ownership....

What? But the dealer has no legal role in car ownership after the car is initially purchased. What happens if the new (or old) owner doesn't pay? (I've sold two previous cars and never paid the dealership anything.)

I agree with the annoyance part, but I also find that it's far easier to glance at a watch than pull my phone out. While I don't wear this particular watch, I wear one like it. An additional benefit is that I can be sitting at a table and glance down at my watch more stealthily than looking at my wrist.

If Apple sells an iWatch, I hope it has a detachable band so I can swap the watch into a belt clip like the one shown.

On the other hand replacing private cars with corporate shuttle busses probably reduces general road congestion which also costs the city money.

SF is supposed to be a transit-first city. The goal is to make public transit an attractive-enough option to persuade people to use it rather than private autos. Therefore, anything that hinders public transit is bad.

The congestion in SF would also be less if those who worked in Mountain View also lived in Mountain View (or at least within a 10-mile radius).

Perhaps I have trouble relating because the bus system in my home town has an hour headway.

Headways for popular lines in San Francisco are in the sub-ten-minute range.

Google using a community resource in this way has the side effect of making it convenient for Googlers who would otherwise choose not to live in the city. That bolsters its tax base while contributing to a reduction of traffic and vehicle emissions during the daily rush hours.

Some would say that therefore not having the resource would mean they would leave the city. If they moved closer to work (and Google ran local shuttles) that would also reduce emissions.