1: luxury means very different things to different people. Not everyone prefers opulence.
2: electricity prices aren't homogenous in Europe at all. In the north (Norway/Sweden/Finland) electricity is cheap and generally generated in ways that have a very small environmental impact (arguably possibly in the case of nuclear power stations but still, Sweden for example get 95+ percent from hydro and nuclear).

1: There is a ton of prior art in general
2: There is a ton of prior art for Excel specifically

Exhibit a) Microcharts from Bonavista Systems, released in 2006 or even earlier (http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/microcharts-a-different-take-on-excel-charting/)
Exhibit b) EVERY OTHER BI TOOL IN THE UNIVERSE

How incredibly incompetent are the people at the Patent Office? There is a mandated discovery process after all. What the hell is going on?

Been reading for years, commenting only very rarely but this site and its contributors have entertained, enlightened and enraged me and keeps being relevant even after 15 years. Well done and a big heartfelt thanks from one of the old beards.

Correlation != causality.

How hard is this to remember when you hear talking points like this one?

Listen. I've spent far too many of my working years dealing with companies that have caught religion of some sort. It doesn't matter which one it is, be it ISO, CMMI, Six Sigma or some virulent form of agile (yes SCRUM people, I'm talking to you); its a religion. Instead of focusing on the business and developing sound processes that fit the business model and the company culture these companies put in place this huge infrastructure hoping that this will make them automatically successful.

It doesn't.

It does kill whatever passion there is though. Yes that goes for agile too but in other parts of the company than the one you might be sitting in.

These days I have a good rule that works - when a company tries to sell me services based on being CMMI level 5 I tell them to far, far away and preferably perform some acts that are illegal in several states. After having dealt with a couple of them I have realized that the only genuine thing generated is a huge paper trail and innovation is dead or dying.

As to your question - I don't know and I don't care. I can only make the friendly suggestion that you look for work in a place that doesn't focus on religious adherence to principles defined elsewhere. I promise you that it'll be more fun, challenging and ultimately interesting.

Hundreds of millions of monkeys are watching other monkeys chasing a ball on TV. And deriving pleasure from it presumably.

once someone has bothered jailbreaking it. Prior to that - no chance of me spending my cash on it as my interest in feeding Mr Murdoch and his ideas is exactly zero.

It's an interesting step. I think we will see devices down the line (add cameras, eye tracking and general inventiveness) that come close to a cut down version of Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age" ideas. But right now it's nowhere near that. Just an interesting piece of hardware that I can use as a glorified screen/reader/remote. Which is pretty much what I will do. If someone hacks the damn thing.

I absolutely see where this would be useful but it's just another concept that can alleviate some of the burdens of certain parts of our (?) work. For coding, all out, no-holds-barred, i-need-to-get-this-out-of-head coding you need something that is structured around packages and classes/interfaces. Whether you have to create it yourself or you started with UML (you fancy person you) or a whiteboard doesn't matter. You want to write the code, test cases and move on. I am a believer in making mistakes and correcting them rather than overanalyzing at the beginning and that has worked well in all sorts of environments, whether it has been carrier grade telecom stuff or enterprise widget work. Doesn't matter. Get an initial design, hammer in the functionality and iterate. However, in that type of scenario Code Bubbles doesn't really help. Where it does help is in debugging and documenting, I can certainly see how this would be enormously useful in that situation. The problem is that you don't normally shift between IDEs that way. Some do, I don't and even though I don't necessarily kill the people working for me if they do it, it adds a lot of maintenance overhead to deal with dual project structures.

Anyway, if this ever gets into IntelliJ I'll be happy clam I think.

Why? To reduce cost and stay competetive in a highly price sensitive market? I'm pretty sure they knew exactly why they did it.

Your point being that you have a problem with software versions above 10 or?

Oh no. Poor dead author and his unknowable intentions.

Why is this important? Come on. If the books are crap then don't read them. They won't be chasing you
home from the store.

Nontroversy.