I'm sure someone's crunched the numbers and this makes sense on paper, but seriously? Porting to Itanium before x86? I know HP wants to prop up its teensy niche CPU server line, but I just can't see how to justify that. Who's going to migrate software from old VMS systems to a new one on very highly vendor-locked hardware? It seems like anything likely to ever be updated before the heat death of the universe would probably have made the jump to Linux-on-x86 years ago.

Yep. Their Code of Ethics says:

1.5 Honor property rights including copyrights and patent.

Violation of copyrights, patents, trade secrets and the terms of license agreements is prohibited by law in most circumstances. Even when software is not so protected, such violations are contrary to professional behavior. Copies of software should be made only with proper authorization. Unauthorized duplication of materials must not be condoned.

I don't pirate software. I pay for the stuff I use when required. However, I damn sure don't respect software patents or nebulous "terms of license agreement" EULA bullshit. I'll honor them as mandated by law to keep me and my employer out of trouble (although every programmer reading this has probably violated 3 stupid patents today in the course of their job). And while the RIAA doesn't "authorize" me to rip CDs I've bought, I'm legally entitled to do so and will at my convenience.

I think my views are pretty mainstream among programmers. If the ACM wants me to join, they need to remove the requirements for me to worship pro-corporate, anti-citizen, rent-seeking behavior. I can't ethically consent to support their unethical Code of Ethics.

I don't think a EULA - even if found enforceable, which isn't a given - is carte blanche to destroy someone's livelihood.

LinkedIn has a new feature to list your certifications and corresponding badges on your profile page. While checking it out, ACM was listed in the pulldown. I had an ACM membership while in college. I was wondering if becoming a member again and adding ACM to my resume would make a difference.

My wife's a doctor and we recently moved to a new state with very protectionistic licensing policies. For example, you're required to have passed the medical boards within the last ten years. Doesn't matter if you're a professor of medicine at Harvard: you had to have passed the boards recently. You know, the ones new doctors take in their senior year of med school when they've been doing nothing but studying for the last for years straight and it's still fresh in their minds. So my wife, who's owned a successful practice for the last (more than 10) years had to pass the given-every-6-months test that determines whether she gets to keep doing the job that she's an expert at.

I'm writing this in sympathy for your situation, and to let you know that it apparently sucks for lots of professions. Your wife's not in it alone, and as someone who went through your role in the situation: I feel your pain. Best of luck to both of you!

And bugs were literally dead insects.

I don't know about that. Say the average first year lawyer makes $60,000 (pulled directly from my butt; I have no idea what the actual number is and don't care to look). Suppose that 80% of bar takers pass the exam. That means the expected income for the next six months of a random person taking the bar is 60K * .8 * .5 = 24K. This is the number that a good lawyer could convince a judge (who is a lawyer) that these young, brilliant, aspiring lawyers should be compensated by the testing firm (who is not a lawyer).

That's not shabby pay for a fresh graduate sitting around (ahem, studying!, ahem) until the next testing period rolls around.

I'm almost certain that a company which just screwed over a bunch of protolawyers will allow free re-testing for those involved. It would probably turn very, very ugly for them if they didn't. Test takers will have to pay for travel again, which is probably significant for many of them, but they won't have to pay for test prep and fees again.

It's the perfect place to bury Jar Jar and Hayden Christensen in a peat bog.

Amen. When I was at University, I used our library's ACM and IEEE access to get to lots of useful articles, so I know the value of having that access. But once I graduated, up came the paywalls, and up came my revulsion. It's not about the money - I waste more than the ACM membership fees funding offbeat kickstarters. While I'm still tempted every year by those ACM offers. I'm not going to support an organization dedicated to preventing the dissemination of information, not at any price.

There are still some avenues of research I occasionally need, and fortunately many authors retain the rights to self-publish or pre-publish on arXiv, so DuckDuckGo can still deliver them. Most surprisingly, Microsoft Research has made thousands of papers freely available.

Ironically, it's a lot like the old Windows / Linux argument, and Linux has shown that open source doesn't implicitly mean low quality.

... And don't have other options.

In my case, Glypizide, Metformin (pills) and Lantus (injected) was doing a good job. However, there was always the possibility that mealtime insulin (instead of Glypizide) could be better. Alas, it wasn't, but at least none of the problems were catastrophic, and now I know.

I'm not sure how well it worked for her, but I'm glad that my trial's over and I'm back on my old treatment. Not only did I find myself obsessing over how much and when I was eating, I had vastly more hypoglycemic episodes than normal. (Of course, at least half of them had no symptoms other than a low reading, so I can't be sure.) I know that mealtime insulin works for many people; now I know that I'm not one of them.

Shrug! Even if I were part of the control, I'd still be doing something to help.

Name another group of the population willing to be guinea pigs for experimental medication?

People with chronic conditions that might be helped by it. My sister has MS and was part of a clinical study of a new treatment. I have Type II diabetes and just finished a clinical trial of a new form of mealtime insulin. Neither of us is homeless, destitute or mentally ill.