The great thing about such a project is they can do it any language they please, and I think comparison between different languages' solutions would be an interesting part of it.

You're focusing on the least important bit of the suggestion. I'm more interested in "real project" than specifically "real job".

A brilliant idea. Gotta make sure though that it's laid out enough beforehand that it doesn't end up being nothing but planning stages and no actual results by the end. Like any such event, preplanning is key. Involve the participants in the planning of course, but the event should be about getting those plans accomplished.

I think the problem is that a bunch of people coding their own projects for this kind of event is like everyone sitting in a room reading different books. Figure out something a large number of coders will find interesting and make a project of it. Otherwise it turns out like the NaNoWriMo crowd, where people sit around and do a lot of writing but it has nothing to do with anyone else and they may as well have holed up in their room and done it alone.

I agree, but I'm not so sure the guy you voted for being voted into office is really "winning" when you voted for what you perceived to be the lesser of two evils. Voting for evils is always a loss.

Years ago, I took the attitude of "vote out the people you don't like", but came to the realization that if you do that by electing the other party, you just have to vote him back out in the next election. That's why I have almost exclusively come to exclude Democrats and Republicans from my voting selections. Every so often, an individual candidate changes my mind, but only a solid track record is sufficient for me to do it.

I have a problem with your apples and oranges comparison, if that's what you're asking.

I want to know exactly what idiot gave Microsoft the authority to create a law enforcement unit other than their jackbooted licensing audit thugs from the Business Software Alliance.

That's a common problem in the opensource world, unfortunately. There are projects who handle it better than others, but they're in the minority.

Won't be too long before they try to ban 3d printing at this point...

I've personally found gnumeric does everything I need. Makes it hard to take the "need" for commercial spreadsheet programs a little less convincing.

Seems like the only way to make copyright law do what it was meant to (at least in America): advance the useful arts and sciences. Of course, you'd have to find ways around conflicts of interest in the cases of products which have been superceded but in the same line. I.e. Microsoft Office 2000 vs the current product.

So you're making the moral argument for taxation? That's kind of an absurdist world view, don't you think?
 
In order for it to be an acceptable argument, you must also make the argument that everything governments do with your tax money is morally acceptable, and reasonable as well. Good luck with that one.
 
  For one thing, the fundamental mechanics at play here are important. No major corporation is only one entity. Everyone always thinks of this as Apple saving billions on taxes, but it's not Apple saving anything. Apple is a group of entities in multiple jurisdictions that are paying what they're obligated to. Nobody's actually "saving" anything on taxes.

If any of this is a real issue, maybe we should examine our free market principles, and make the US tax code more reasonable to individuals and corporations alike. If you change these rules and supposed "loopholes" that Apple and others are using, then we all suffer.This needs to be left alone.

When I saw that change, with it's sites ending with a missing e before an r and enough large words modified the same way, I instantly believed they were about to try to get some kind of linking between Tumblr and Flickr to face off somehow against Instagram and other such services.