Apple will be taken down by Samsung due to copyright infringement on round corners, just as Samsung will be taken down by apple.

Seriously, is anyone out there in geek land even considering MySQL for a brand spanking new project with no history attached to MySQL? I don't know of any. It's just a matter of time now for things to swing from MySQL to MariaDB, though I think a lot of geeks will take a good look at other options like PostgreSQL before switching. Unless Oracle does something really interesting with MySQL, it's dead... seriously... no one in the year 2120 will even remember MySQL except for unfortunate geeks working for the government and large banks who will continue doing new projects with MySQL until the end of time.

I'm hoping this is an issue everyone can finally agree on, but you're probably right. Besides, Fox News is only making an issue of this to bash Obama a bit. As soon as it looks like public support starts swinging towards actually ending this invasion of privacy, they'll go on the warpath to defend America against terrorists, and all my conservative friends will forget why they were upset about the program. They'll also deny Google, Microsoft, and friends the right to tell us what unspeakable acts the government forces them to do, and after a while, average Joe will even forget that there is massive government spying on Americans. It is the nature of most of us to want to believe in a higher authority without question, whether God or Country.

Anyone remember Bush selling us torcher? I remember at least 2/3rds of the morons near where I live were convinced. Secret CIA prisons? Yeah, they're all for it. Guantanamo? They made sure to let their congressmen they want to keep our gulag open with the Red White and Blue over it. Remember how a majority of Democrats were against gay marriage 6 months before Obama went on a warpath for gay rights? I happen to be pretty happy about that one, but the insanely rapid shift in public opinion was due to PR. How about the case for a preemptive attack on Iraq? Even I was too dumb to see that mess coming.

I'm thrilled Google, Microsoft, and friends have asked for some sunlight on the way our fundamental right privacy to privacy has been run over rough-shod. At least if we stupid morons are told the whole story, I can blame ourselves for being morons rather than ignorant. I prefer to be a moron. Our tech giants at least have enough spine to ask for a tiny bit of sanity... except of course for Cisco, who is making a killing world wide on government spying and censorship.

The matrix is just part of a bigger matrix.

So you consider the secret password to my hard drive as a secret the government can torcher out of me legally, but my secret off shore account information in my head is protected by the 5th amendment? Somehow, the physical location of the locked away data is what is important to you, rather than the reasons for having the 5th amendment in the first place. I have a secret, and I'm allowed to keep it. That's what they 5th says.

Now, to compare against forced blood draw, the court has to have a court order like they do to search your house. This was determined to be a right to privacy thing, rather than a right to keep a secret. They decided that a 5th amendment protected secret has to be some idea in your brain, and that it doesn't cover taking samples from your body. That's a pretty scary line they crossed, but at least it helps us put away rapists with more confidence that we got the right guy. Now, the fact that our communication, location, phone calls, emails, and internet browsing is mostly available to be data-mined by the NSA without any process at all is new since 9/11. The NSA knows your brand of toilet paper and the last time you slept at your girl friend's apartment, as well as who you had lunch with, and the contents of that last non-encrypted e-mail you sent. They've correlated that with the likelihood that dorks like you and me who post openly on Slashdot are going to do something violent. The right to privacy has been bent over a chair and anal-raped. Hopefully, we're at least a little safer for it. Are we?

Wow... you have a warped sense of self-incrimination. I have a secret in my head and you're asking me to tell you. If I do, I spend years in jail. If I don't tell you, I go free. The 5th amendments stops you from torturing the secret out of me. It really is that simple. They can't ask me for the combination to my safe, either, but they can bust the door off. The only reason the feds are trying to pretend this isn't a 5th amendment violation is they don't currently have a powerful enough blow torch to get through your electronic safe's door. There is simply no difference in asking for my hard-drive password and asking for all of my secret off shore account information. If you allow one, you have to allow the other.

He's not old fashioned. He just dreams of blowing up his worldly possessions and learning how to make soap.

Audible is great for a lot of people, just not people like me. I agree the reading is generally high quality. On Android, the speed-up feature used to totally suck, but lately, they've copied my pitch-synchronous algorithms from libsonic, which I can tell from the new and improved sound quality. It's perfectly legal for them to do that: I give the software away as public domain software.

For around half of blind people, Audible is wonderful. For people like me, Audible is almost useless. First of all, their software only lets me go up to 3X speed up. I listen at about 550 words per minute when listening to fiction (3.5X), and 600 wpm (4X) on my computer. To learn to listen that fast, you have to train your ear to the voice. If the reader on Audible were the same for every book, that would be possible, but unfortunately, it's a different reader more often than not. With a text to speech engine, it's the same voice all the time, making it far easier to train for speed listening. The most popular voice with blind speed listeners is Eloquence on Windows, which is the same as Voxin on Linux. I prefer the Mary TTS artic "rms" voice because it's free software (no connection to RMS... probably). I also read far too many books to afford Audible, and Audible's selection is too weak for me.

However, Audible does rock... except that they are owned by evil Amazon! I've never seen the blind picket any company other than Amazon. It's pretty funny. They can't read the signs they carry! If you remember back when Amazon turned off their crappy built-in text-to-speech feature in Kindle for most e-books, you may recall Amazon claiming that the Author's Guild made them do it. That's total BS. No other e-reader company caved in this way, including Apple and Google. Amazon just used the Author's Guild as an excuse to stop their kindles from competing with their highly profitable audio book products at Audible. Amazon's company motto: Be Evil.

I read an insane number of ebooks each year, just not with my eyes, because my central vision is shot. Instead I pay Bookshare.org $50/year, and read as many ebooks as I like. The funny thing is when I could see properly, I never spent that much money on books. Now that I have to listen to wav files I create using the Mary TTS text to speech system, I listen to books all the time! It's awesome.

So, DRM-ed ebooks are especially evil for people like me. I'll often read the first two books in a trilogy on Bookshare, and the third will only be available on Amazon. Fortunately, you can crack Amazon DRM in Windows, which means I wind up paying them over $50/year for that last freaking volume. It's a huge PITA. not because I have to pay, but it's actually very time consuming to convert DRMed books to plain text for my text-to-speech engine. I'd much prefer to buy from any company other than Amazon, but because they're the biggest, they have the most cracked software. There's actually a law that makes it legal for me to crack it, because I can't read the God Damed Fucking DRM-ed Amazon Kindles!

Code architecture is key, as is a common coding methodology among the team. Brilliant coders often are loners, and if you put them on a team, each may do what they normally do and do their own thing. You'll have a program written in several different languages, and an integration nightmare.

Here's an integration nightmare that continues to this day, thanks to lame computer language design. To reduce integration problems, a common architecture in EDA is to read a design into a common set of in-memory data structures, and to split up the extensive process of automating design implementation into several "tools". Each tool runs in sequence, moving the process forward, for example we run digital high level synthesis, then lower level technology mapping, placement, and then routing. They read from those common data structures, and write back to them. I have never seen a group succeed who did not use this architecture. The problem is how do you extend the objects in the common data structures so your tool can manipulate them? In C++, we use inheritance to extend the functionality of a class, but these shared common objects have already been instantiated by the time your tool runs, and they don't have your extensions. You can still inherit from there classes, but you'll have to copy all the objects to new objects of your subclasses to be able to use them, doubling the memory required. Alternatively, you could have a void pointer on each object in memory and use run-time hacks to cross-link them to your new extension objects, and throughout your code you wind up going back and forth through the void pointer. Various better systems are often employed, but they're all hacks to work around limitations in languages like C++, Java, D, and C#. If a team doesn't agree beforehand just how they are going to share objects and extend them, the effort is doomed before it begins.

If you're doing quants work, or business intelligence, data mining etc, sure. Hardcore math is a must. If you're developing business software or something like that, it's more important to know Djikstra, the gang of four and closures.

Fight for robot rights! (Before they do)

Yes, PETA - Recycle your pets.

I completely agree. I should have left off the gratuitous bashing of the GOP, but I was responding to some gratuitous bashing of DEMs. If either had a clue in this area, we'd be all over it. The one thing I think everyone agrees on is the government is massively inept at investing in pretty much everything. You get guys with a track record and a plan, although risky, like Tesla, and we decide to fund them. Good deal. Then we get Solyndra and Fisker and God knows who else and every stupid representative of any town that will benefit crying that their favorite doomed company needs an equal share of the government's money. The "every opportunity needs equal funding" crowed shows up and it's the end of intelligent investment.

I don't mean to say that all government investment is bad. I don't know how we'd make progress in most science without it, but even there, there's a 10-to-1 stupidity factor. Do we really want to spend another 10 billion on donut-shaped magnet fusion when we all know it wont work? Why not throw a tiny bit at molten salt reactors, which we proved work well in the 60's? We're in this weird place where we require government involvement to advance many critical fields of basic science, yet we know the money will be spent stupidly. At the same time, a half billion loan to a company like Tesla made all the difference. Where do you go from here?