The real irony is not what Zynga is doing -- because they're *not* breaking the law, even if they're being unethical.

The real hypocricy is the whining on Slashdot about it. If Zynga copies a two man developer, people get all up in arms about stealing their idea, or their IP. But when the word patent shows up in an article, or copyright on music or movies, people all of a sudden get up in arms.

I suspect the common denominator is that people are hiding behind a veil of righteousness, but their motivations are entirely selfish. IP is bad when it means its not safe to steal other people's work and ideas for their gain, but its good when it prevents someone else from doing it.

There's lots written up about it, in fact I'd bet Wikipedia has it.

In a very brief nutshell, your optic nerve isn't a VGA cable -- you don't have RGB nerves. The cells just signal differently, and its the differences in the signaling that the brain learns to associate with specific colors. (This is unlike your ears, which have a range of nerves stimulated by specific (small) ranges in frequency.)

Yup, which is why you don't see that happening with MSFT, and why you don't see Android licensing patents between MSFT and the companies that also sell PCs *and* have IP MSFT needs -- because they agreements are already there. Its just the newcomers that needed them. And like any patent licensing agreement, the dollar price is usually directly proportional to the IP imbalance between the two parties. I'd bet AAPL and MSFT very nearly wipe their hands in that arena.

That's your opinion. Mine is that not one iota of my labor goes to subsidize the choices you or anyone else makes. Simple as that.

I think its an age and exposure thing. When I was in school (before a lot of /.ers were born, sadly... ugh, old), a particularly powerful example of the difference in how mainframes are thought about was when I was being shown a large VAX cluster. There were probably 2000 active terminal sessions on each of 3-4 VAXen. To make a point about the difference between the mainframe hardware and the Sun servers/workstations we also were running, the sysadmin grabbed the 3-phase power cord going into one of the VAX servers, gave it a little twist and unplugged it.

Without a hiccup, 2000 user sessions were migrated to the other servers mid-keystroke and the users in question never knew anything happened. We'd swap out hardware all the time. CPU being flaky? Pull the board out and replace it.

This is hardware designed for massive throughput, not massive performance. And 5 9's reliability would be considered a failure by any of the people running the systems. Anything less than 100% would be considered a failure.

I hate to harp on the age thing (get off my lawn!) but I think a big part of it is that kids today (and ten years ago!) don't have the opportunity to be exposed to "real" enterprise computing. The sort of computing that can singularly keep a company with 150,000 people running. Today, its all about acceptable downtime, virtualization for high availability, etc. Its okay if you have to restart your outlook because a server glitched. Its okay if connectivity drops -- you're not actively using the corporate systems most of the time. They're just there as resources to your workstation. People don't get fired when e-mail goes down for five minutes.

Its just a very different world now, and the things that made mainframes important are just not seen as important anymore. (And, IMO, that isn't because the environment for corporate IT has changed, but the new-guard running it doesn't prioritize things the same way *and* there's a lot more IT around... a 3000 person company isn't likely to have that kind of infrastructure, even if it was necessary.)

If you are using "theory" in the same sense that there's a theory of natural selection, or a theory that the Earth is round, then yes, it is. If you're suggesting that the statement isn't 100% factual, you're absolutely incorrect, as anyone who was involved with the process at the state level or within Verizon can tell you.

Helping? If someone choses to live in farm country in a $75k house, I have absolutely no issue with making them pay $300 a month for their high-speed internet, if they want it that badly. Thats the trade off to not paying $400k for a house where people want to live. And if they're not happy about it, they can choose to go without, they can use a mobile solution, or they can move. But not one penny of anyone else's money should go to support them for the choices they made.

Infrastructure run to rural locations *never* pays off later. It never has, and it never will. The only reason rural places even have phone service is because the government taxes everyone else and pays the telcos to provide it. For some strange reason in the US, we believe that you have a right to infrastructure no matter where you live. You can pay 1/10th the cost of living of being in a city, and make the people in the city pay for your subsidized access.

Verizon was smart in New Hampshire when the state pulled that BS on them. The state said "if you run FTTH in any town in NH, you have to run it to EVERY town in NH". The problem with that? Northern NH is very rural and very poor -- a combination that means the cost for running fiber is astronomical and very few people would even buy the service. Verizon told the state to screw, and sold everything to Fairpoint and pulled out entirely. The end result? Not a single new town in the state has fiber service, everyone who had it has dramatically lower quality service, and Verizon avoids a money pit. Everyone loses except Verizon.

I find it strange that you're advocating forcing corporations to subsidize people who don't want to take the responsibility of the choices for where they live, and you've got a Ron Paul sig. Very strange, that.

That depends entirely on the company. Some of the big software companies, like Microsoft as an example, pay equivalent salaries to people who are SDE or SDET at any given level, and its fairly common for people to move back and forth over the course of their career. (Microsoft, to use the example again, has both SDET -- software development engineer/test -- and a very small number of STEs -- software test engineers. The latter are basically click testers, the former are software engineers.)

A lot of it comes down to what testers are doing at a given company. A good engineering firm, the difference is someone who writes code for customers versus writes code for internal quality uses. The skill, education and experience bars are the same between the two. Often times the actual engineering is more complicated, more interesting and less driven by customer BS doing SDET work.

Most people who can afford a $90k car:

a) have a garage
b) have more than one car, including a winter beater
c) probably can afford a $90k car because of some intrinsic level of intelligence sufficient to suggest they brush the car off before opening the doors.