Yeah, but when your "users" are more properly called "customers" -- or even more important, "potential customers" -- then some web dev's desire to preach the gospel must take a back seat to doing the job the way it needs to be done, rightly or wrongly.

It's fine to push for strict browser standards when the only people who will ever see your web applications are within your own organization. Public-facing sites are a different matter.

you must consult with Imagination before you change it.

Yes. And what happens then?

I haven't in general met many professors (or EEs) who understand much about intellectual property.

OK. Can we see your agreements, please? Because that did sound very much like trolling for additional intellectual property to add to your portfolio.

People who read this article have pointed out three open CPU designs in addition to the one that I remembered.

While your product might be "production ready", please keep in mind that open projects are very often written to a higher standard than commercial ones, and the researchers involved are no less professional than your own developers. And their projects come with fewer intellectual property issues than yours.

It's only "free" for academia.

Not even them. This is a lure for universities to create tech that they are not allowed to produce in hardware, but the company that provided the original tech can monetize.

The patent terms are whatever they want them to be. In general "reasonable" and "patent" don't happen together much. And "tiny", well I really doubt it.

Having a company provide funds for a research grant and then reap the patent royalties isn't in general a good thing for society. The student researchers get paid like slave labor (if they get paid at all) and put what may be the best idea of their lives in some company's pockets.

It's very common these days for companies to allow universities to use their technology at the cost of tying the company into the university's patent revenue. And of course this is often publicly-funded research, so not only is the taxpayer paying for the development of patents used to sue that same taxpayer, the patents go directly to a company from academia.

The net effect is to feed intellectual property centered companies at the expense of the technology sector in general and small technology companies in particular.

You know, if I had all the FICA money that went to the Feds on my account over the years, either with interest applied or inflation-adjusted with a reasonable real interest rate added, my personal savings would be even healthier than they are. The reason people like me don't want to have Social Security and Medicare stripped is that we have been forced to pay for these all of our working lives, and we think we deserve at least something of what we paid for.

Sorry, but you were robbed. You didn't "pay in" to anything - you money was taken and given to your grandparents (as well as being spent by politicians to buy votes).

You can justly complain all you want about how unfair this is, and you can try to take up the issue with the people who actually robbed you, but you have no right whatsoever to inflict the same robbery on your descendants. They aren't the ones who robbed you, so they aren't responsible for it.

You also had your entire life to prepare for retirement, and at ample warning going all the way back to the 1980s about how the system was financially unsustainable, so if you didn't heed the warnings and aren't prepared now, that's also not your descendants' fault.

Sure, if you want to kill someone, you're right. I think the argument against drones is that if you push a button and someone dies on the other side of the Earth and you didn't have to go to war to do that ... well, fast forward two years and you're just sitting there hitting that button all day long. "The quarter solution" or whatever you want to call it is still resulting in deaths and, as we can see here, we're not 100% sure whose deaths that button is causing. Even if we study the targets really really hard.

No, no we don't. You might say "Al Queda hit us now we must hunt them to the ends of the Earth" but it doesn't mean that diplomacy and sovereignty just get flushed down the toilet. Those country borders will still persist despite all your shiny new self-appointed world police officer badges. Let me see if I can explain this to you: If David Koresh had set off bombs in a Beijing subway and then drones lit up Waco like the fourth of July and most of the deaths were Branch Davidians, how would you personally feel about that? Likewise, if Al Queda is our problem and we do that, we start to get more problems. Now, that said, it's completely true that Pakistan's leadership has privately condoned these strikes while publicly lambasting the US but that's a whole different problem.

Yep, think of the children -- that's why we should use drone strikes, right? Look, war means death. Death doesn't discriminate and neither does war. If you're hung up on it being okay to take a life the second that male turns 18, you're pretty much morally helpless anyway. War is bad. Drone strikes are bad. There's enough bad in there for them both to be bad. This isn't some false dichotomy where it's one or the other. It's only one or the other if you're hellbent on killing people.

News flash: you can argue against drone strikes and also be opposed to war at the same time. It does not logically follow that since you're against drone strikes, you're pro war and pro killing children. That's the most unsound and absurd flow of logic I've seen in quite some time.

Funny how they've have forgotten they will get old one day too, and get screwed over by their own policies.

The will rediscover the value of personal savings, and won't rely on a Ponzi scheme for their retirement plan.

The generation who doesn't vote is busy building technology which renders the politicians' mandates increasingly-impossible to enforce.

By the time that generation is done, it won't matter what the politicians say anymore because math will trump force.

That's the possibility that should really terrify the Boomers and make them clamour for increased surveillance - the possibility that their grandchildren might have both the means and the desire to avoid paying the payroll taxes which keep the Boomers' monthly checks flowing.

and from recently released documents he was 100% correct

It's shocking exactly how easy it is to verify this fact and how little difference that has made to the narrative.

Clearly the people who continue to verbally attack McCarthy aren't attacking him for being incorrect - they're attacking him for being right.

So you're saying everyone knew she was lying about her charity donations as well? Or was it only the charities that knew that? From the article:

So you're saying the 300,000 downloads are by people that knew they were downloading the app architected by a liar? And they were paying $3.79 to Apple and this liar for a recipe app that contain recipes that someone lied about helping her cure cancer? And you're saying that everyone at Apple that featured her app on the Apple Watch knew they were showing a snake oil app on their brand new shiny device? And that the people at Penguin did all their fact checking on any additional information this cookbook might contain about Belle Gibson's alleged cancer survival? And that everybody involved in these events know society's been parading around a fucking liar and rewarding her with cash money while she basically capitalizes on a horrendous disease that afflicts millions of people worldwide ... that she never had?

No, this is not the same as "water is wet" and it needs to be shown that holistic medicine is temporarily propped up on a bed of anecdotal lies ... anybody who accepts it as the sole cure for their ailment is putting their health in the hands of such charlatans and quacks.