I think you should read up what the First To File change actually has to do with. Prior Art is still considered. If I develop and ship a product, then Company B comes around and patents something already in my product (that I didn't patent), their patent can be invalidated by my product as prior art.

What this really is supposed to "fix" is 2 companies that develop the same tech around the same time and file for patents around the same time (lets say within a year of one another), but before either has gone to market. In the system prior to "First to file", a really expensive and long lawsuit would have to occur where each side had to try and prove that they invented the patented idea first. This would involve both sides submitting design documents, emails, and any other forms of recorded communications that could be used to prove they invented it first. This was a timely and expensive battle.

With First to File, whoever filed the patent first (assuming there is no prior art) will win, keeping lawyer fees down. This also puts us in line with the rest of the world as to how to handle similar patents filed near one another.

Apples system is lackluster when it comes to video if I understand it. DRM around the content. Format locked to their devices. Prices near the same as physical media, if not more in some cases.

From what I've heard (I recommend listening to NPR's investigation into IV), the district has become one of the best places for patent litigation as the judges are extremely familiar with the topic.

East Texas started being used as it was one of the few federal districts not backed up with drug related cases. Since then, that courtroom has become one of the defacto places to handle patent lawsuits.

Other important questions (you should be asking yourself these):

d. are you willing to move?
e. does it have to be OSS, or just a more open-minded culture?
f. why is OSS so important to where you work?

Homeschooling is a good option if you have parents that are up for the challenge. My wife plans on homeschooling our kids, as she was home schooled herself (along with her 2 sisters). Homeschooling has gotten a bad rap because it is portraid by either the crazy people or ultra religious people. There are plenty of normal families that homeschool their kids and they turn out just fine, don't be distracted by the crazies.

Dependency injection exists in GWT, see Google Gin, which is a subset of Google Guice. They also hava Google Guava (it's similar to Apache Commons) for GWT.

You are correct that none of the Java Reflection framework is there, but you can work around that most of the time. Google publishes a list of which classes of the JRE they emulate in GWT

I don't have any practical experience with NFC, but couldn't someone put a NFC reader up to unopened game boxes that have DLC codes in them and steal the codes? Is there a cheap and easy way to prevent people from doing something like this?

Google has various types and sizes of ads. You can see most of what they support in their help docs here. Their text ads are obviously from google, the picture ads are less obvious.

I used to run a fan site for an MMO and I used google adsense for my ads (only 1 ad on the page). The graphical ad shown tended to be relative to the content on my site (it would be advertisements for other MMOs like WoW or LotR). There were also text ads for other random junk. The nice thing about how google ads work is that they give you 3 common ad size (and various less-common sizes), and those sizes can fit graphical or text based ads. What is shown will depend on the viewer and the content of your site.

I would recommend against using OpenJDK 6 for anything really. OpenJDK 7 is a bit different though, as it is the official Java SE 7 reference implementation.

I see OpenJDK 6 as their initial "hey, look at what we're working on", as they tried to completely open source the JDK (they had to re-write at least 4% of the Sun JDK when turning it into OpenJDK). With that re-write, lots of things were probably broken, and testing was required to get them working again. Now that OpenJDK 7 is out, Oracle, IBM and other will be putting their efforts into improving it and making it as complete as possible.

I recommend an article that has actual quotes from Darrell Issa (the person who is talking to the press about this). The bill is on hold until the wording is changed in the bill so more people agree with it.

Opening 2 paragraphs from the cnet article: