I just donated again. Thanks for the reminder.

Are they really remembering?
Or are they just making the same choice twice?

Some of the most useful programming books I've owned were from Wrox, especially on C++. Their extra effort to address programming in practice can be very helpful to someone who needs to get stuff done. (If I needed a regurgitation of the spec, I'd just read the spec.)

I rarely avoid books based on their publisher. Instead I look for books that are reviewed favorably by many people. And I look for reviews that tend to indicate that the book is the style and level that I'm looking for. Of course there are other criteria like date of publish, etc. Sometimes I don't even realize the publisher of a book until after I'm done with the book. :)

Basically I think pre-filtering based on publisher isn't a very useful way to locate the best book for a given scenario. Hypothetically if I found a Wrox book and an O'Reilly book that were seemingly very equal, I'd choose O'Reilly. But such a situation rarely happens -- I almost always have some other substantive reason to choose one book over another.

Filing a patent requires a lot of expensive lawyer time; a company like Apple typically will not file one that it cannot defend.

It's not true. Tech companies spam the USPTO with patent applications, taking the shotgun approach of hoping something, anything will stick. It is not terribly expensive to file patents, especially when compared with the amount of money that Apple can throw around.

I have worked at 3 software companies in Colorado, and all 3 companies named their servers after mountains: fourteeners first, then thirteeners. With VM technology making server instances so cheap these days, I wouldn't be surprised if I started seeing the names of some tall foothills showing up in the directory.

Maybe I'm daft, but what does Facebook making an App Store have to do with the security of iOS?

Marking otherwise legitimate emails as spam has a potential downside: if your spam blocker is stochastic / bayesian / learning, you will be teaching it that legitimate email patterns are "spamlike." I prefer to just blacklist the sender's address in types of cases.

It's not "some link I found." It's EVERY link I found. If you don't think that carries serious weight, then we have a philosophical difference of opinion about finding reliable information on the internet, not about prepositions. :)

It is not incorrect to end a sentence with a preposition. Citation: every single link on the first page of search results:

http://www.google.com/m?q=ending+sentence+with+preposition

I subscribed to Experts Exchange for 12 months once. I did find probably 4 useful answers there during that time (that weren't obvious available anywhere else), and I felt like I got my money's worth. Since StackOverflow and StackExchange came to prominence, I think Experts Exchange is no longer worth the money, and the quality of its content has declined dramatically. It's no longer worth my money. (If you're going to reply and say: "it was never worth your money," please save yourself the trouble.) Yes, I know there are ways to get at the Experts Exchange answers without paying; and yes I know their gaming of the Google spider and search results provides a strong argument for justifying circumventing their payment system, but when I am collecting information for my professional obligations, I'd rather go through the proper channel. Has paying your way and acting in earnest really lost all respect as a valid choice? :-)

I don't really curse at my computer. I've cursed while using it, but it was not directed at the computer itself. I may have also had a few choice words directed at Western Digital the company in an recent extremely unlucky multi-drive failure (primary and backup) and subsequent data loss.

No offense, but if you want a good traffic prediction algorithm, please offer more than my shitty quarterly salary.

Wishing for +10 Insightful to parent poster.

You mean "speech to text," not "text to speech." There's a difference.

If you don't want to reinstall (you really should) then at least run Malware Bytes in addition to a full system scan with your usual A-V software.