Encrypt my email?!? Hell, I encrypt my slashdot posts.

this one is encrypted with a simple rot-26 algorithm.

This is trivial to get around. You incorporate, file the patent as owned by the incorporated entity, then sell the incorporated entity to the person who wants to buy the patent. The patent is still owned by the original owner, but the original owner is now owned by the megacorp.

what makes you think the engineer would do it for free?

well, technically Doohan is a has-been considering he's dead. That shouldn't take anything away from the quality of work he did when he was alive or the impact it had on anyone's life.

On topic though, I don't get why it would be a problem that a person who played an iconic character in popular culture that relates to space exploration did this. It would certainly make less sense for someone who is currently popular but has no relationship to the subject matter to have been selected.

Programmers without marketing produce work which languishes in obscurity until the company goes bankrupt. For people to become aware that your software exists, someone needs to let them know. That someone is doing marketing, even if it's the programmers themselves pimping their work on blogs or slashdot. Someone is doing marketing.

What reputation? Awesomesoft and their new Awesomizer application have no reputation until people discover that Awesomizer really is awesome and buy it in droves. Then their new Fabulosity Engine can be sold on the reputation they built. Until they've built that reputation, how do they get people to buy Awesomizer without someone advertising its existence?

Well.....that's not true across the board. The financial industry proved you can succeed for a long time without something to sell.

Seriously though, marketing is a support structure for the company, like IT. And like IT, the company could survive without that department, but it'd be a miserable pain in the ass and make everything harder for everyone.

The real problem is that groups like IT are viewed as cost centers because the costs of the department are tangible and the benefits tend to be abstract, so they don't get as much respect from upper management as they should.
Marketing produces exposure which drives sales. Generating correlations between good marketing projects and increases in revenue are fairly easy, so upper management views them as profit drivers and they get disproportionate credit.

Marketing is valuable, but not moreso than the rest of the support infrastructure of a company.

it is available. i own the box set.

The Avogadro project (the thing in your link) has been going on since 2007.

The NIST (the U.S. measurements standards body) provided an implementation of another possible solution to the problem in April of 2007.

To say that the U.S. is just now objecting is inaccurate.

To say that the U.S. is late in its objection ignores the fact that the U.S. has been working on the problem with international standards bodies for many years.

What (unsurprisingly) the Fox News article gets wrong is that the NIST is not submitting a formal objection.
The Consultative Committee for Units (one of the advisory groups for CIPM), of which the NIST is a member, has submitted a formal resolution to change the definition to the CIPM. The CIPM is about to submit that resolution to the CGPM, which is the international body that regulates these definitions.

Metallica encouraged tape trading of their shows and their demo tapes. Between songs during their sets, they told audiences to share their music. That is exactly how they got their record deal. They really didn't start giving a crap about people sharing their music until the whole napster thing. Even then, I think it's just Lars. I'm not convinced the rest care.

Lars was always kind of an ass. He's a crafty business man, though.

It's a terrible analogy as evidenced by the fact that nobody in your target audience accepts its premise. Analogies exist to compare like objects. If nobody accepts that they are like objects, the analogy is useless.

that is nothing like an entity that exists in time recording an event and watching it later.

To be honest, i don't know why you are bothering with the analogy in the first place. You could simply say that if one is willing to accept the paradox of an omniscient being that exists outside of time, there is no reason to not also accept the paradox that human beings have free will in spite of the existence of an omniscient being that already knows what they are going to do.

Magic makes anything possible.

you don't know what he'll do. you know what he'll want to do.