For every patent invalidated, a hundred more take its place.

This complaint is illogical. I estimate a 99.9732156% chance that it will be ignored.

So that's why they skipped Windows 9 -- they wanted to keep up that pattern of "every other version is crap", but they wrote two crap ones in a row so they had to skip a version number.

Looks like what you're talking about is the "winner edit".

I demand equal life expectancy for equal fitness!

I'm confused: do you believe in rule of law (the Constitution), or do you believe in the various branches of government taking the law into their own hands? Are you OK with the NSA treating the Constitution as optional, the judicial system treating the Constitution as optional by deciding not to prosecute them, Congress treating the Constitution as optional by passing laws that the Constitution forbids? Remember, the Constitution is the highest law of the land, also the closest to the will of the people, and what people like Snowden have sworn to protect from enemies both internal and external.

creating code that doesn't need to be refactored is the key to maintainable code.

In a shocking development, the answer to the question posed by the headline is once again "no".

That may be so, but for now at least it takes significant effort and expense to track cash like that, which means that they don't unless they have a significant special interest in you already. Whereas with electronic payments they note your exact purchases, at the exact time and place, with your name, and send it to the store, bank, advertisers, and NSA, every single time.

I know it doesn't look that way, but technically the American public is not an enemy of the USA.

Could have sworn most of the criminals involved in the Snowden revelations, are not only in the US but could be easily gathered from their cushy government offices to stand trial. It's only fair to go after the worst criminals first, before going after the people who reported them.

I believe the phrase is "Ignorance of the law is no excuse, unless you're a cop, a politician, a CEO, the NSA..." It means that if you're one of the little people, you're totally screwed because you didn't spend double your lifetime reading the thousands of laws that you're supposed to follow. But if you're, say, a cop, when it turns out that you've been violating the 4th Amendment by using a Stingray device, then commit perjury/parallel construction in court to hide it, then you get to say "oops, we didn't know there was anything wrong with that, besides the politicians said we could, and no you can't prosecute them either".

C++ is a language that is very good for generic programming. It doesn't really meet Alan Kay's definition of OO

To be fair, there aren't very many that do!

Did they come to that conclusion from looking at their own tax returns or Amazon's?

What did you think I meant by mostly anonymous? If someone takes your cash, you can't really call an authority and cancel their value, and you can't track what they do with it... but that means that someone else can't cancel your cash either, and they can't track you. There are serial numbers, so it's not perfectly anonymous, but few enough people look at them that it mostly doesn't matter.