How about I choose women to have personal responsibility? Why does them having sex instantly mean I have a bill to pay?

The hard reality is that it's never going to be 100%. So what do you do? Let the kids starve to death? Or force the mother into doing crimes or prostitution just to feed her kids?

(your name) > Options > Exclusions. You should see something like this.

Then why don't you just set your /. preferences so you don't get Apple stories and be done with it? Why are you telling us? Learn how to use your account preferences.

Yes, there's an iOS version, but it's only for the iPhone. An app that displays books that doesn't work on an iPad whose larger screen size if so much better for reading books? Seriously?

Can you legally be detained without being placed under arrest?

Care don't have to be on it constantly. Once the glass breaks, it's stays broken. Debris will scratch the glass making it more translucent rather than transparent reducing its effectiveness. Roadways don't track the sun making solar cells much less efficient. LEDs aren't visible in direct sunlight especially at shallow angles. The glare from any reflected light will blind drivers. As he rightly points out, putting the solar cells NEXT TO the road works much better. There's simply no reason to put them IN THE road even if it did work.

And the idea of putting it in parking lots is even dumber. Yeah, parking lots where cars are parked on it during the day (this blocking the sun) and empty at night (where there's no sun).

But if you want to donate money, go right ahead.

Huge different between a solar WALKway (foot traffic) and ROADway (auto traffic). Thunderf00t,, the creator of all the videos, is a pretty sharp guy. Watch and you might learn something. It's not my job to force-educate you. If you don't want to watch, don't. I don't care.

Hey, at least [solar roadways are] technologically feasible.

Oh, they are so not.

As it was explained to me by a patent attorney, what is colloquially known as a "software patent" really isn't. Rather, it's a patent on the resulting machine that software transforms a general purpose machine (computer) into.

If I had a black box wherein you fed in paper tape encoding data on one end and different paper tape with the data compressed came out the other end (thus taking less tape), that would be a data compression machine. Certainly, if the black box had no software at all but was instead a bunch of gears and such, i.e., totally mechanical, you'd have to agree that the machine would be patentable.

But it's still the type of machine that's being patented (a data compression machine). The preferred embodiment as described in the patent is just one way to do it. Now if instead of gears you had a computer running software, well that doesn't change the functioning of the machine -- the tape output is the same for a given input. Therefore, the fact that a particular embodiment just might happen to use a computer and software rather than gears is irrelevant.

I can understand the NIH process taking 9 months, but you'd think Bill's foundation would be a lot quicker. A malaria vaccine is probably in the top 5 things to solve. You'd think Bill would take notice and write the check himself.

I would have thought that one of the US Military (to protect service personnel), Bill Gates (isn't his foundation working on a malaria vaccine too?), or governments in malaria regions would fund this. The desired $250K is nothing for such sources.

... 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?