You should never short-change your emergency fund, and at 200K+ a year, sorry, I don't care where you live. I and my friends have lived on a lot less in various portions of the country that you're naming. Granted, it's not always where you *want* to live, but it is way way way beneath the means of someone earning 6 figures. Otherwise waitresses, busboys, doormen and fast food workers would all be earning well into 6 figures. He's living far beyond his means if his stated circumstances are true. And the old quote "just because you can, doesn't mean you should" holds here too. Live like you earn 100K in his case, and his finances will be fine in short order.

And that is a large part of the problem. The "music industry" has a lock on all marketing avenues that matter, if you don't sign with the gatekeeper, you will 99.999% of the time fail. Even if you discover an indie band that you like, if they don't sign, they'll most likely fail.

Yeah, I'm sorry, no pity here - you're making over 210K / year, and you don't have at least 2 years run rate and a hefty retirement savings account you can fall back on? Sounds like you majorly failed at money management 101 - spend less than you earn and put at least 20% away in savings. BTW, that 20% is for people at an average salary, in your case, no matter where you live, you should be dropping at least 40% into savings, and likely more.

One of the most highly productive companies I worked for in the past had individual near sound-proofed offices for all their developers. The least productive companies all had one thing in common - chairs attached to common tables as desks, the epitome of the cheap open office concept.

If you want to reduce your productivity as much as possible, spend as little on productivity enhancements as possible. Voila - open office floor plans. Great for 1 way seminars, terrible for actually getting work done that does require some communication and collaboration.

Substitute "Agile" for "Open Office" and "open floor" and it applies equally well.

What access? Tech minded individuals don't see anything they don't want to see on something as malleable as HTML.

If they have discovered a treatment/cure and they're working with the Forest Service, then they've already engaged government and have effectively come up with a way to save bats. All without lobbying.

and another instance of "dark matter" will be born.... (there will be no red giant, a sufficiently advanced race that can build a dyson sphere won't waste that much energy)

Funny enough, it is the lack of proper abstraction that causes the kind of code bloat you're describing. If you're cutting and pasting boilerplate code and doing a search/replace within your "new" files, that is a clear warning flag of bad software architecture.

You must live just outside Seattle.

I'd have to look up some of that shareware I still have, as I haven't read one in a really long time. And yes, I've sat through more contracts with lawyers than I wanted to. it's brain deadening. I do recall the time limitation usually applied to the amount of time you could install and trial the software, not the distribution thereof. So if you distributed a wrapped, self-installing version of the shareware with the shareware in its original form, you'd still be adhering to the license, as it wouldn't be installed until the user ran the VM for the first time. At that point the user is the one subject to the license, not you. And you can get around 99.999% of the cost issues by just making that VM downloadable online via a torrent. If you're truly not looking to make money, you've just side-stepped the entire license debacle.

Actually, the manufacturer has done an EXCELLENT job of building the "networking" part of this. Hacking into this remote is going to be very problematic! Think of the built in security! Maintaining it, however, is a different story.

I'm in the process of cleaning out the old software box in the closet. I'll send what I haven't already thrown out (unfortunately there were a few things that were probably somewhat rare).

This is why you follow the license on the shareware, and what you did was essentially allow the copyright holders to restrict you retroactively. Most shareware, IIRC, had something along the lines of distribution was fine, you had essentially a "trial" free version, and payment to unlock the entire thing. Abide by those rules, and you should be fine. IANAL....

I'll agree with this. Personally, I feel the following should happen

• 1) bring back the register the work with the Library of Congress portion within a year of publishing. This will ensure the work remains available even if the publisher goes away.
• 2) make the copyright term truly limited. Since the average life expectancy for men in the US is 74 and you cannot realistically recall most things until you're at least 10, that means the max would have to be less than 64 years to effectively be limited. I would argue 32, rounded down to 30, which is darn close to the original copyright terms. I also am fine with the original clause that required re-registering the copyright halfway through.
• 3) putting something in "the vault" (a la Disney) automatically puts it in the public domain. (the anti-Disney greedy money grubbing clause)
• 4) copyrights are non-transferrable and distribution agreements cannot extend beyond half the copyright term. (guarantees that the copyright creators maintain ownership)