You have to sell yourself through your projects.

Not really. They interview me BECAUSE of my tools and development. They see what I am developing and thats the main reason they want to interview me. I remember Apples excuse was that they didn't even fully support REST yet. Amazon interviewed me 3 different times, were completely confused and in the end , rejected because I don't have a degree... regardless of the fact I'm a founding team member. PayPal just couldn't find a team to put me on. As the saying goes, it would be a comedy it it wasn't a tragedy :)

I created API I/O Abstraction, APIObject and API Chaining, show them working in Grails API Toolkit, am developing them out in spring-boot and have been interviewed by Amazon, Apple, Paypal, Netflix, Comcast... literally everyone but Google. But have yet to land a job. Mainly because from what I am told, my work is great but too cutting edge, just what they need but would require a rewrite, fantastic but not in the tools they want, etc etc. I'm finding you can create tools that will change the world but even if everyone agrees that they would and that they need them, they may not be ready.

I gave up on spelling corrections some time ago. I was staying at a hotel and went down the hall to get a coke. The machine had a sticker on it that read "This machine does not except cash. Credit cards only!"

The war on spelling is lost, except it! :P

Yeh and real tech cities like the Bay Area don't use .Net either though. Oracle, Pivotal, Sun, Spring, Groov, Grails... they all dominate here.

The head of my Warcraft guild says the same thing.

And how many times has the traffic stop been bogus?

Your tail light is out... (It was not out and I had the wiring checked)

You were swerving in your lane... (Louisiana used this one while the state had forfeiture laws. That was until they pulled over a reporter from a Dallas TV station)

I have been stopped for doing 56 in a 55. Think about that, speedometers are not even that accurate.

I friend of mine that is a cop once told me that he could pull anyone over at any time. Why? Because there are 1000's of traffic laws and you are breaking one every time you drive. When I asked which one I was breaking as we were driving down the street he responded "You are not preceded by a man caring a red flag." Seems the law was and may still be on the books from the early 1900's.

I wish I had mod points, I would mod this up!

The more they try the more money they spend. The more they take away from their primary product development. The more money they loose when they fail.

Eventually they will run out of money and go out of business.

Which will be followed by "The year of the Linux Desktop" :P

In Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International the US Supreme Court ruled:

Recently, after its SCO fiasco, Microsoft's biggest gun in its ceaseless war on Linux and all things FOSS has been patent extortion. IIRC, Microsoft makes a sizable chuck of change from Android devices due to the licenses for a fuzzy bunch of patents that have never been tested for validity in a court of law.

At some point, someone with deep enough pockets to risk a spin on the roulette wheel that is the US court system in regard to patents will take on Microsoft and see if the Emperor is wearing clothes or not. Microsoft owns some very smart lawyers. The lawyers know such a challenge is inevitable. They also know there is a good chance Microsoft will lose and will have to shut down its patent extortion racket. At that point they will need a plan B. This is their baby steps towards a plan B which is way too little, way too late.

This happened during the formation of ICANN. They wet with "the majority".

It's over 50% for a reason.

Anon can't really do much about this I'm afraid.

Really? If you don't believe in god then you have to at least admit that your mom created you and thus endowed you with rights as a human being.

I haven't canceled hundreds of orders on Amazon but I have canceled a handful. There has never been a fee or a penalty although I did have to fill in a small form explaining why I canceled.

If you did this maliciously with a bunch of items just to be a PITA then they would probably respond accordingly and cancel your account.

OTOH, I have had a seller raise the price of an item after I made an inquiry about it. That really pissed me off. I complained to Amazon but they said it was within their rules. The end result is it is stupid to make polite inquires about products (for example, asking if a used book listed as hardcover really is hardcover). You are better off just placing the order and then returning the item for a full refund if it does not match the description.

They have the loss of teeth and the development of the beak, but where did the gizzard develop? They would not have been able to loose their teeth and develop a beak without one, and birds are the only animal (That I know of) that has one.

Plus gizzards are great when fried. ;)

Here is a better analogy:

A: If you don't pay us a bunch of money we are going to shoot ourselves in the foot!

B: That's a ridiculous business proposition. We aren't going to pay you anything. Shoot yourselves if you feel you must but we don't recommend it.

A: Wah! You are such a big baby! Why won't you at least negotiate or compromise?