Even MPEG-LA acknowledges that there may be patents on h.264 that they do not hold and that paying them does not protect you from these possible patent claims.

How else do you explain that I will be fined $950 because I exercised a Pro-Choice decision not to have hospital insurance

Calm down. You're not being "fined". Your taxes are going up.

Your taxes are higher if you rent rather than own your home; your taxes are higher if you don't have kids; your taxes are higher if you purchase one sort of vehicle over another; your taxes are higher if you don't sock money away in a retirement fund. You still have the choices, and these are not fines or "oppression", and it's ridiculous to label them as such.

Neither are you being fined for making the (stupid) choice to fail to carry health insurance. If you are seriously injured or fall gravely ill, you will not be able to "pay cash directly to the doctor", that's the whole point of insurance. Tax policy is giving you an incentive to behave more intelligently, and is making you pay your share of the costs for a public good, but you still have the choice.

COM has nothing to do with RPC. Where did you get that idea?

DCOM uses RPC, COM does not.

thats bullshit. Programmers spend a good amount of their time writing code that is the first do something in a specific area. Because if someone else had already done it before then we'd just use the software someone else already wrote for that task.

Have you never heard of Not invented here syndrome? It's chronic in software developers. The reasons are many, but often the reasoning is "Well, that other version doesn't do what I need in exactly the way I need it" or "I don't want to pay a royalty for that" or "I can do it better/faster/cheaper".

Is he seriously implying that current curricula was set with political blinders on. Not that I agree with the slant Texas has put on history, but to imply that the current histories taught do not have one is disingenuous.

TvTorrents is your friend then. They've got it there.

There are plenty of systems I work on and develop for wherein I depend on the domain knowledge of others to help me along. I normally learn just enough of the systems to get the requested functionality to work. They tell me how to do things legally (as the time constraints don't permit me enough time to research all the statutes, nor am I a lawyer to trust my parsing of the requisite statutes). I can easily envision a scenario wherein the coders did break the law, but didn't know that the specific situation was unlawful.

Granted, the details will probably come out in the trial, but if they're innocent (or innocent enough not to go to pound me in the ass prison), I hope they can afford to defend themselves. I know ignorance of the law isn't an escuse, but I hope that the ones who designed the system are the ones to get punished.

To use a car analogy, who would you rather have sent to jail, the man who designed the Slim Jim used to break into your car, or the person that procured said Slim Jim, used it to overcome the locks in your car, and drove away with it while getting you to fork out for the loss of the vehicle.

I work in the US Health Care Industry, principally making tools for hospitals to use a patients electronic health record. The majority of our clients are forced into using IE6 by their IT departments.
There's a reason I use my HIPPA rights to make sure my records only live on paper.

A robot that would be use in any random setting or handling various chores would probably be best designed as a humanoid. The tools it would use while preforming the tasks are already designed for us to use. If I want to have a robot to do my chores, I'd rather not have to buy all new tools as well to enable it to do them. And even if I did get specialized accessories to enable the robot to work for me, How the hll am I going to use the lawn mover designed for the spider bot with 4 arms when it breaks?