Standards?

1 watch newspapers for high profile deaths
2 show up at funeral
3 stage shockingly objectionable protest
4 be assaulted and/or insulted
5 file suit against grieving relatives for violation of civil rights

It's hard to see that WBC has any standards, or that those nonexistent standards might be any higher than the Prenda lawyers. I'd like to see someone like Judge Wright get hold of the WBC bunch.

When I used the word 'conservative', I was describing their reaction, not their political views. Conservative, as in excercising an abundance of caution, not conservative as in prudish.

The whole point of a turing complete machine (within the limits of finite amounts of memory) is that it isn't a different machine for a different program. The appeal is that one machine can run a variety of different programs; in theory, perform any calculation for which it has enough memory.

So no, no matter what software you have loaded, you haven't made it a different machine. Not even if you load different microcode. Only if you are burning fuses or proms (real proms, or at least some kind you can't erase for one reason or another) are you making it something in particular.

Wild snails are dirty. That's why you feed them corn meal for a while until you eat them. I don't know how you can tell when they're done, but I've never really given too much thought to inspecting snail shit.

Not if his mucus has anything to say about it.

Okay, first, the Judge who originally told Prenda to shove it has come under fire for pornography downloads. So we have a company who makes a living off getting people's internet download history now trying to weasel out of it, and coincidentally the Judge behind it finds his download history being made public. How coincidentally is left as an excercise for the reader to determine.

So, because the judiciary is very conservative, his appointment is being suspended until the allegations are cleared. Now here's the kicker -- moral "turpitude" isn't a crime, but it is a reason to deny a judge an appointment. Out of an abundance of caution, the judge is also being asked to drop some cases from his roster where the involved parties are obviously looking for appeals and dragging out the legal process and they don't want the judge's "moral turpitude" to come under fire in those select cases as a reason to further either parties' political or legal maneuvering. That's fair.

It's especially fair when you consider Prenda tried exploiting this very thing in their own litigation. Obviously, the appeals court saw right through this and said not just no, but "Hell no." So they've managed to make the judge's life difficult by trafficking in sleeze. But what do you expect from a business that depends on sleeze for its profits?

There are no "good" companies out there; that's the thing you don't seem to understand. There aren't any companies which are going to give you a generous raise each year (at least enough to match what you'd make at another job elsewhere, i.e., keeping up with the "market rate"); that's just not the way companies work any more. Companies treat workers like dirt because they're shortsighted, and because a fair number of employees (like you, it seems) put up with it because they're afraid of losing their jobs, and are willing to work 60-hour weeks for years on end just so they can be seen as "loyal", even though company management doesn't give a shit and will sack you as soon as it helps them make this quarter's financials look better.

A killer stereo and huge TV don't cost anything, BTW. You can get a huge TV now for under $1000; to someone making 6 figures, that's really not a lot of money. Nice stereos cost quite a bit less than that these days. And it's not like you're going to buy a new one of these every year. If you want to point at things which Americans usually waste a lot of money on, it's 1) car (with giant car payments), 2) cable/satellite TV (worse if you get the stupid sports packages), 3) alcohol (not really expensive from a store, but at bars and restaurants it's insanely overpriced). Living in a "ritzy" area is not a waste of money, because the alternative is living in a ghetto and getting shot at or robbed on a regular basis. Thanks to the housing boom, a decent house still costs $250k-500k in many cities, even after the housing bust (prices went down, but not that much) (yes, decent houses are much cheaper in other places, but these are generally non-tech cities where Slashdotters are not going to have an abundance of jobs to choose from, and consequently salaries are far, far less, even less than half as much).

As for your cousin, what was his field and his specialty, and where did he live? He was doing something seriously wrong if it took him 10 years to find steady work again. Was he one of those people who became a "web developer" in the dot-com days, with no degree or credentials whatsoever? If so, well no wonder he couldn't find any work after the bubble popped. People with degrees and real credentials and experience haven't had that problem. Moreover, was he one of those people who absolutely refused to move from whatever little city they (and their extended family) have lived in their whole lives? That's a career-killer too. You can't be a professional and be unwilling to move to where the work is, and do well. If you're dead-set on living in a certain place, then you need to forgo education altogether, and just get a job out of high school doing something that's in high demand in your local area (like working as a grocery cashier for minimum wage), or perhaps get an education in something that there's plenty of jobs in your area for (like medical technicians; every little city has several hospitals and lots of medical clinics). Don't bother getting a college degree if you don't want to move to where the work is.

Anyway, sorry about the asides, but the point is, if you have a good education and experience in the software field, and you're willing to move to where the work is, there's plenty of jobs open for software developers, regardless of the economy. I got laid off in 2009 when the economy sucked (along with my entire team; company decided to toss out the whole department because it didn't think its profit margin was high enough, even though it had customers lined up with guaranteed high volumes for years), and I had another job in a month at a 20% increase in salary. Combined with the 4-month-equivalent severance package, it was a pretty sweet deal. And I'm no rock-star performer either. All that stuff you read about high unemployment and no jobs doesn't apply to software people.

Wanted attention.

A ship changes with hardware changes, and with crew changes. Removing as few as one crew members can change the character of a ship drastically. Likewise, the addition of one or more crew members. You may change a lot of minor physical parts of the ship, and not notice any real change. But changing a major structural member is almost certain to change her handling characteristics. You cannot duplicate a ship's keel precisely, no matter how hard you try.

Automobiles are mass produced, and you might think that two identical cars coming off the same assembly line on the same day would be indistinguishable. But - try to find two identical cars whose handling and performance characteristics are identical. It's not likely to happen.

The input/output from the antenna is patentable, and presumably it was patented. The bus that transfers the i/o from the antenna to the processor is patentable, and again, it was patented.

The software that manipulates those i/o numbers is the algorithm under discussion - and should not be patentable.

Let's suppose that loading a machine with a different set of softwares actually did "create" a new machine.

In that case, each new implementation would be the user's creation. That's right - it's the end user's unique creation, not that of some programmer halfway around the world who coded the individual program.

Or, if not the end user (in a corporate setting) then it would be the creation of the corporation's IT department. Copyrightable and patentable, I would guess. Set the machine up to your very precise specifications, register your creation, and NO ONE can use that same setup unless they license it from you!

Or, we could all fall back twenty and punt, with the admission that this "new machine" business is absurd.

Dont forget second order effects:

http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/11/great-scott-over-35-hours-of-video.html

Unfortunately (?) d^3/dt^3 showing acceleration in upload rate videos is flat

You can't get that OTC, can you? I've seen Triclosan toothpaste but it was prescribed.

Not unless tumblr lets you create communities around particular subjects. I haven't used the thing but from what I was told it was more like Twitter than Geocities. With Geocities say you liked "Buffy TVS" you could then go to a Buffy site and it would have links on the left to all the other affiliated Buffy sites and then that would be broken down to various actors,spinoffs, future and past story arcs, you could land on a single page and from there find out pretty much everything there was to know about a subject with no more than 3 clicks.

But isn't that true of ANY language? I mean you name the language and I could find bad examples of code done in it, again its not the language's fault, its the coder. I have seen beautiful VB and I've seen piss awful C++, doesn't make one better than another, just meant the one writing in VB was better than the coder writing in C++.

But again it all comes down to using the right tool for the job, Java seems to work well on server backends, COBOL works well on mainframes, VB was good for GUIs for local DBs, as long as you don't try to force it to do a job its not good at I really don't see the problem.