Seriously, people are quick to jump on companies that are doing the suing, but the problem at heart is that there needs to be some serious patent reform. Until then, companies will sue for whatever ridiculous reason there might be if it leads to happier shareholders.

are very important. I work in the embedded field, and it can be quite a pain in the ass to throughly test something without having a set of unit tests. It helps to have a mindset of encapsulating modules or groups of work, and abstract out the platform (at build time) if possible. Then have a set of unit tests that exercise the code that can run on your desktop machine. Doing this lends well to code responsible for doing calculations, that is often bug ridden if not unit tested.

is probably the portion of the large sum of taxes I've paid this year that the US Government will claim to go towards helping others. Realistically, and sadly probably only $1K of that is going to reach people who need it.

Sometimes I wonder how much better off this country will be if there was more transparency about where tax money was going. I know Obama claims to be working towards this, but I think it's still the same cronies in charge.

but it generates page hits, thus ore ad revenue, thus more money for slashdot :)

It's the same reason why you see so many Apple related posts on Engadget.

I think it's kind of interesting how the economics of this work. The supply of scientists and engineers is steady, but it seems like there are fewer who are good in the market. What this means is that if you are good and in the field, you are in extremely high demand and thus salaries can be lucrative for you. So, the field may only attract those who have a genuine interest and more likely to innovate.
Then again, money is a strong factor and may siphon away people. I work in the embedded software field, and I get paid fairly well for someone only a couple of years out of college. However, I often think how nice it would be nice to be making well into 7 figures and have a nice home and possibly a Lamborghini (I love cars) after going into lawschool instead of "just" 6 figures and trying to cobble together a 20% down payment for a decent home in Northern California.

used abuse to invade poland. Stupid Nazis.

Seriously, you may be a geek, but that doesn't mean your life is limited to doing only geeky things. Go for a run on some trails, go to a bookstore and try reading some literature. Most universities have free talks and lectures that are open to the public. Through this, you meet tons of people. You could also, you know, talk to people at work about non-work related things.

I used to sit at home and do only geeky things, and frankly I wasn't happy. It was only when I started learning to cook, paint, running and seeing a live performance at a theatre that I became happier person. In addition, my GF and I got to know each other at work by talking about what we did for fun outside of work.

Just because you might spend your work days working with computers doesn't mean the rest of your life is limited to that, there is more to life than numbers and code.

CS452 at the University of Waterloo
Write a fully featured RTOS in 2 months, throw in HW accelerated graphics, sound, networking, a window manager from scratch, a model train tracking system service for a system with finicky switches in another 2 months. My team got very little sleep during that course, but it helped me learn to be independent and learn how to figure things out on my own (like the wonderful x86 architecture).

the banks make their profits off of knowing everything about the people they lend to

Hahaha, oh wait you're serious. Didn't we just throw several hundred billion towards banks that had lent money to people who couldn't pay it back? Granted, the bailout helped the banks out a bit, but I would say that most probably worse off than if they would have been if they had known a little more about what people could afford.

Isn't the whole point of open source that you volunteer to contribute work? That's what makes open source great, and actually helps with a quality. Public radio is another good example as it seems to be the only thing worth listening on regular FM radio these days. People might say these are all very fiscally-left organizations, but I would say that these represent some of the ideals of being fiscally-conservative. That is, that volunteer-based things can often thrive and be great based on people making donations.