"Are you wanting to argue that a specific arrangement of gears designed to perform a specific task can never be a patentable invention?"

As open ended as you just put it I would not make that argument.
However, I'm imagining if people had big peg boards for placing gears on in their homes like people have computers now.
And what if they somehow performed different tasks by placing their gears on the pegs in different configurations.

Now what if someone told you you couldn't put your gears on your peg board in a specific configuration that you wanted to use to solve your task because someone else did it first and they own the patent on it.

Seems kind of silly doesn't it!

I'm not from there but I supposed something had to inspire him to write it.....

Bitcoin and the others aren't anonymous. Not when everyone has access to the record of every transaction. Just because they don't have names on them doesn't mean anything. All law enforcement has to do is figure out the people involved in one transaction and they can start tracking their way back through all of them.. unlike normal cash.

With the amount of information that DHS has on all of us they should have no problems doing this. Makes me kind of wonder about the identiy of Satoshi Nakomoto.

Idiot Senator, as the power hungry pro government anti-freedom a$$hole that all of our politicians are he should be praising Bitcoin!

I hated Microsoft pretty hard. Now... McComputer sounds about right. Good Call!

I mostly use Windows at work (because that's what my work uses) and just about entirely Linux at home (that's what I choose). This hasn't changed.

I don't think I have changed. Microsoft has changed and so has the market. I just don't see Windows computers crashing like they used to. Quality has improved Perhaps this was in part due to the threat of competition from oss? Note that I said threat of, not actual competition. We all know Linux didn't take off on the desktop but there certainly was enough hype about the possiblity!

Also, you can actually do something in Windows without having a corporate sized budget. Want to be an amateur programmer? It used to be all Windows had was a BASIC interpereter. To get an actual compiler (any language) was 100s of dollars. Apparently you had to pay for the privilege of creating software for Windows. Even though more software existing for Windows just makes Windows more desirable... explain that one. Now Micorosoft releases free versions of their development environments which are cut down enough to give companies a reason to buy the real thing but not so much as to prevent one from compiling a useful application.

Besides what Microsoft offers, now there is all sorts of free oss available for Windows. You can develop for Windows in gcc! Can't afford Photoshop? Gimp runs on Windows now. How about web serving. Microsoft used to charge big bucks for different levels of licensing on their web server. They limited how many people could connect at a time. I thought that was a very assinine money grab. It's not like Microsoft programmers put in more hours every time your server serves 100 copies of your web page vs 5! Do they still do that? I don't know. Who cares?!? I can always run Apache on Windows or any one of a million other free programs.

In the early days Microsoft plus IBM were the PC. The PC was awesome for hackers, makers and all kinds of geeks. Before that everything was pretty much proprietary. Now you could mix and match hardware pieces as you please. Also, I could run the same program on my Tandy as my friend ran on his Dell even though it was written on a computer made by IBM!

Later Microsoft became evil in part becasue the kind of compatiblity the PC gave us was expected. We didn't need Microsoft to help us get that anymore. But.. Microsoft was pushing things the other way, embracing standards just to change them a bit once they had a market share so that people would be locked in to using their product.

Now.. Microsoft is losing that monopoly power. They can't do as much damage as before. But.. mobile devices are the big thing, not Desktops. And with our phones and tablets we are back to the bad old pre-pc days where everything is proprietary. I'm not saying that Microsoft is doing anything to try to change this but at least they aren't the driving force behind it. That title is shared by Apple and the cellphone carriers.

So.. Microsoft is a de-fanged wannabe villian who occasionally does nice things. Apple and the Telecoms, they are where the real evil lives today.

"a clueless fuck whose degree is in Education"

Yeah, I remember those back in high school. I didn't meet any in college. Where did you go (if you went) so the rest of us can avoid it?

At least those languages have all been around for a long time. My favorite is those job ads demanding 5+ years experience in something that has only existed for 2. Don't they know that those workers are going to come in hung over from all those time traveler parties?!?!

It's not just the software industry it's the hardware one too.

In the PC market open standards beat out closed propriety hardware a long time ago. With the Desktop PC we enjoyed the ability to connect nearly any peripheral regardless of the manufacturer of the device or the PC. Hardware was modular and pieces could be upgraded or replaced with ones from just about any other manufacturer. Because of standards across the hardware alternative software could be installed other than what the manufacturer originally included.

I realize that much of this modularity would be difficult or impossible to implement in a cellphone-sized device. However, Imagine switching between Android, Maemo or Windows8 as easily as you can switch between Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, etc... on a desktop! Proprietary chips and locked bootloaders make this pretty much impossible. How about being able to plug just any USB (or similar bus) device into your phone and actually expect it to work?

I doubt they are that old. Maybe 30s, probably 20s.

Generally, older generations understood that we work to live. We can't live without food and shelter is pretty important too.

Once you get beyond that... all those fun, fulfilling ways to spend the limited time you are alive, few if any get you paid and most cost money. So.. you work for it. Then you take the money and do something that actually has meaning to you. If your job is paying you well and it isn't killing you then you are half way there! Now use your nights, weekends and vacation time to go out and LIVE!!!

The current generation seems to have it backwards. They live to work. So... they NEED a job that fulfills them. The problem is jobs don't do that. Working sucks. That's why someone is willing to pay you to do it!

If you have good pay AND good benefit time then you have something worth holding on to. Keep earning that money. Put some away for retirement. Take the rest out with you during that benefit time and enjoy it!

Well. you should keep in mind this is THEIR world. The various flavors of religious folk do outnumber us all across the planet. Maybe we should be grateful that at least they still let us live here. Well.. most of them do.. for now anyway...

Where do you think the raw materials for their projects come from????

Just pick the lowest version you care to support. Target it. Backwards compatibility does the rest. It's not that hard.

I'm pretty sure the process of getting that digital key identifies you, or at least identifies the owner of the car. This isn't a way to anonymously get deliveries.

Really? As a confirmed Apple hater I would love to believe this but... to develop for Apple I would have to buy a Mac. Then I would have to pay what is it... $100/year the last I checked to get the development environment. (chump change I guess after buying a Mac) Then.. the only way the app could ever get on to more than a fraction of a percent of people's devices is to get it approved by the Apple store which everyone I have talked to claims is a real pain in the ass.

To develop for Android just download the development environment for your favorite of Linux/Windows/Mac OS for free and start coding. It seems to me that Google is trying a lot harder to get developers than Apple is.

What I think is the real issue is that a lot of developers don't want to deal with the variety of screen sizes one finds on Android. They like Apple's closed little world. HTML was supposed to free us of this issue. With sizes being defined in percents, data inside of elements that describe what the data is, not how to display it, etc... devices were supposed to determine how to display things best based on their own unique hardware profiles. That was html documents but by now applications should work that way too.

But... thest f@!#ng graphics designers and marketers had to mess that all up. Instead everything is defined down to how it will look pixel per pixel. So of course... supporting many different sizes and shapes of devices means making sure your pixel by pixel design looks good on them all. So.. the lazy fckrs only want to support iOS because it is easier to design that way in a limited environment.

If I want to record you candidly I'm not going to use Glass. Everybody seems to expect Glass users to be so interested in violating their privacy. The poor people are probably just checking their text messages!

If I want to record you and I don't want you to know about it I am going to be sneakier than that. It isn't going to be a camera that is out front on the side of my head for you to see. Probably I will put my cellphone in a holster and put a little hole where the camera is. You will never see me coming.

Or.. for a pointless challenge, maybe I will get a bit hackier with it. How about a Raspberry Pi in a mint tin in my pocket. I can run a wire up my shirt from the Raspi to a tiny camrea module. Why does that one button on my shirt look a little different than the others? Better put on your tinfoil hat! The whole setup would probably cost me less than $50 off of Deal Extreme or Ebay.

But I am not going to do this. And that guy with Glass over there probably isn't recording you either. Why? You aren't that interesting. You are just a mama's basement living technophobe mouthing off about somebody else's toy. Probably because you can't have one yourself. Get over it!

I suspect that only people who live in an area with fiber would say that a LOT of places have fiber.