If you were to compare the avg. lines of code generated by 100 programmers in age range 21 to 30 versus 100 programmers in age range 42 to 50, which one likely to win? The young ones probably, although their code quality may be inferior to the older group's code.

Programming can be compared to performance sports. You don't see many 50 year old swimmers, soccer players, or 100m sprinters. Programming is just the mental athletics version of these sports. If programmers above 50 years age, are not likely to get a decent job (other than management), they should receive a higher wage in their prime years, just like athletes, models/actors.

Managers and middle managers care a lot about output quantity and throughput for the least amount of dollars. Plus the older programmers are not skilled in the latest development tools/languages which change every 5-10 years. These factors are probably some of the reasons for the discrimination.

Why do researchers have to sacrifice an industry paycheck to do it? In other words, why won't industrial pharma hire more talented scientists. They seem instead to be more interested in hiring salespeople, lawyers and MBAs...

Perhaps, it has something to do with the high failure rate of such research. Would you pay a salary to 1000 employees, of which only one employee gives you solid results and the remaining fail? That's not very business friendly. This type of research is more feasible under govt. grants.

For the same reason gold served as money for thousands of years;

Gold has intrinsic value. Does bitcoin have any? No.

for the same reason you let your employer (via the bank) pay you in 6.25x2.75 strips of colorful paper;

Real money is guaranteed by the govt. If bitcoin can be considered valid currency, anybody else should be able to create their own currency.

or the same reason you carry a credit card;

Credit card companies don't manufacture currency, they just transfer it. Bitcoins are manufactured in transactions.

We are talking about software. And software is not the computer.

Yes, software is not the computer, but software is a part of the computer. When you see some output on the screen, do you (or a common consumer) know which part of that output is generated by hardware and which part by software? Obviously not.

Software is a number to be given the computer as input. Very different things.

Not all that different, really. Anything you can do in hardware, you can do in software and vice versa. Suppose you implement a machine X in software using say, Java and C. You can implement the same machine X in hardware using verilog (whose syntax greatly resembles C btw). The hardware solution will be a few orders of magnitude faster than the software version because it runs many things in parallel. But the hardware version will be much harder to create (more effort, time and money) and maintain than the software version. Therefore, most machines are implemented using software, unless the extra expense of creating the machine in hardware is really worth it.

An example where it is worth creating a machine in hardware is 3D graphics. 3D graphics can be implemented using pure software. The 3D Wolfenstein game is an example. But software 3D games suffer from poor resolution and frame rates. So they implemented the compute intensive portion of the 3D library in hardware giving an order of magnitude speed improvement in fps and polygons rendered.

The processors are based on ARM.

But won't they get the ARM source code in verilog (or VHDL), so they can spot any backdoors?

Also sign up at Coursera. They have a course titled "Beginning Game Programming with C#" taught by the University of Colorado. The course also teaches basic C# syntax, so it's very beginner friendly. You just have to wait for it to be offered again before signing up.

Many video games also have some sort of gold coins. Can they be considered as money too? Bitcoins are mainly used for transferring money from one location to another using computer networks. So it's just an internet version of a credit card company. If so, why should be worth tens of billions of dollars?

The computer has no semantics, no concepts, it simply accepts numbers as inputs, performs mathematical operations based on that input, and sends numbers as output. Just exactly like the people that used to be employed as computers before someone figured out how to make a machine that could do it faster.

There are plenty of patented electronic (hardware) and mechanical machines that do what humans can do by hand. That doesn't make them unpatentable. Removing a human from a task often saves money, or the human can't do it fast enough. So such a machine benefits the user of the machine, and therefore some of the benefits should trickle up to the person who created said machine.

The point of patents isn't to reward them for inventing a new compression algorithm. They can do that by selling their compression software and keeping the algorithm secret (if they can keep it secret)

No, the point is to reward them, because of the major or minor benefit humanity enjoys because of that invention. It's not a freebie, but rather an exchange of benefits.

If the inventors keep it a secret, they risk being reverse engineered by a competitor, and suffering a minor or major financial loss in the marketplace depending on the marketing/financial power of his competitor. With patents, the secret is exposed, but competitors, who did not put any effort in creating the invention, don't get the right to sell it, and don't get to unjustly profit for someone else's work.

Inventions of all kinds occurred before the patent system was created.

And most of the inventors got squat for all that effort. Do we know who invented the wheel, or bow and arrow?

Additionally, we currently have a free software movement devoid of profit motive

That's debatable. Free software usually clones popular, successful proprietary software. So, by creating a free software clone, the users of the clone enjoy the same benefits of the proprietary software without paying anything. In essence, they enjoy the same benefits as people pirating the proprietary software, except cloning using open source is legal.

"why should they be able to patent it."

Because if the can't, then they likely won't bother investing the time, energy and money needed to create the new compression algorithm. There's nothing for them except some temporary fame for being published in some scientific paper. As a result, humanity will have have to use the less efficient compression algorithm it already uses.

Good news! Programs are theorems.

So a program that "prints recipes stored on disk onto a printer" is a theorem of what mathematical concept?

If I invent a machine with 100 switches, and I have designed what each of those switches do, I should be able to patent this machine.

Exactly, at a very low level of abstraction, software is a bunch of simple operations and switches (things that decide which simple operations to execute and which to avoid). At this level, software resembles a very simple machine, which is patentable, as you have stated. Software is not math, in that, it does invent new concepts of mathematics. Rather, software just uses existing mathematical methods, to build machines, same as every other field of engineering does.

Electrical engineering is chock full of math, but that does not mean an electronic invention is unpatentable, because it is math.Electronic inventions are not math, they just use (apply) math. The same goes for software inventions.

Use a language that does bounds checking automatically. Its not the 1970s any more.

Suppose your program accesses millions of array elements in performance sensitive areas. Bounds checking would slow down your code by a factor of 2 or more and therefore should be optional (but not non-existent, like in C).

According to this article, lawyers take more or less 25% of the total award. So the lawyers make $81 million, whereas the plaintiffs make $324M x 0.75 / 64,000 = $3800 each, roughly.