Who says you have to be looking for survivors? Finding bodies in a life raft or even the schooner itself would bring closure to the families. Not knowing what's happened to a loved one can be worse than finding them dead.

Adder would be a more appropriate substitution, surely.

Yes, I've worked with people who are great at pair programming and those who are not so good. I find that when working with someone who really gets PP you end up with two programmers (or more!) working together, both of them on the same page, catching mistakes and improving how the code is written.
When working with someone who just starts coding and expects their partner to magically understand what they've decided to do then it can be impossible to keep up or figure out what on earth they're doing. At that point you have a programmer programming and another programmer wasting their time scratching their head.

PP works wonderfully when you pair people up correctly and train everyone involved how to effectively work like that, but if you don't then you waste resources and frustrate your coders.

Er, I don't think Europe actually has that kind of attitude. I work in the UK and have never come across a company (white collar or otherwise) where colleagues don't socialise.

I'm another who would keep on working if I won the lottery. It not that I have no imagination, I just honestly like what I do. I like the people I work with (they also happen to be friends), I like the work (most of the time) and I would be doing something similar at home as a hobby if I wasn't doing it professionally. Though doing stuff at home by yourself when you could be working with other like-minded people is not nearly as fun.

That said, I'd definitely have more exciting weekends and holidays :)

If you ever find work that you love doing then I would think you'd change your mind about the whole having no imagination thing.

+1 for pythonanywhere.com . Not only a good solution but some great folks run the site.

Mint is probably the closest to Kubuntu you'll get.

That's certainly a possibility. I would prefer the occasional unjust (unjust IMHO anyway) outcome that sets nasty men free provided it also allows outcomes that allows good men from having their lives destroyed :)

My final year project for my CS degree was pretty much doing what this patent describes, and it was submitted in 2008, two years ahead of this patent being filed. I even have a conference paper (published with my project supervisor) published in the same year, so there's lots of hard evidence. I also know that there's a few other projects that could claim prior art to this patent, and precedes my own work. I'm pretty sure there's more than enough prior art in the world to blow this out of the water should it be challenged in court. Heck, I'm surprised the USPTO had the gall to allow this one through at all.

IMHO you should change that to just "Do something on the side to improve your skills and experience in the area you want to be in." :)
Even if it's the area you currently work in. If you don't love the thing you're either already working in or want to work in enough to do so, then it's the wrong thing for you.

Don't forget to add in the European laws to that. Even if the UK decided to recognise US patents, developers could still get rulings overturned in European courts.

You're mixing your Gods and throwing in a titan or two by the looks of it... :)

I'm sure they can claim that the IP agreement was just for the W7 app and these new ports are exempt from the agreement. So now they own the IP for your ports and still get 30% from the revenue of the original W7 app. They most likely also charge a 30% fee for the apps listing.

Of course, you could always use the W7 app as a litmus test for popularity and if you then think you can make some real cash, leave you MS job and then write the ports.