My manager at Apple had two such plaques on the wall of his office at Apple. The first page of each of his two patents were attractively engraved in bronze then mounted on I think walnut.

I expect he got some manner of bonus, but it was Apple who got the royalties on his contributions towards wireless network encryption.

I'll be damned if I ever sign away the rights to any of my inventions ever again. I've made a whole bunch of merely well-off people spectacularly wealthy, but all I've ever gotten is shafted. That's why I'm self-employed despite the incredible difficulty of it.

I don't recall who invented it but I think it was someone at Stanford rather than at Xerox PARC.

I expect that at the time they would have used it to drive glass TTYs. That's not as dumb as you think; one of the original Bell Labs UNIX developers created a purely textual mouse and keyboard driven GUI that was incredibly lightweight compared to today's graphics-heavy desktops.

The Republicans damn well knew that subprime loans were being repackaged into derivatives, but did nothing to stop that nonsense because the big investment firms were making money hand over fist as a result.

Do you have any concept of how many suicides have resulted directly from the subprime meltdown, or how many have died from exposure or from inadequately treated illnesses after having lost their jobs and homes?

If I were to knock over a liquor store for a couple hundred dollars, I'd be spending time behind bars and because of the popularity of background checks today, I would forever find it difficult to get any sort of decent paying work or housing.

But the people who caused the subprime crisis are still running the big investment firms. How many of them have been prosecuted? The closest one I can think of is Bernie Madoff, but that was for running a Ponzi Scheme, not for defrauding investors.

Her very first impression of the United States upon her very first visit here was the appalling condition of our roads. I was surprised at this, as I had always figured our roads were just fine, but upon my next visit to her home in Nova Scotia, I just had to agree. I later lived in Canada for several years and just had to agree that the roads everywhere I went were in immaculate condition.

Contrast this to the United States: in the October 1989 Loma Prieta quake, the top deck of the two-deck portion of Interstate 880 through Oakland collapsed onto the bottom deck, killing I think sixty-nine people. Some poor woman had her legs pinned under many tons of concrete. The only hope of saving her life was to use a power saw to cut both her legs off without the use of any anesthesia of any sort.

More recently the bridge on an Interstate highway between Minneapolis and St. Paul in Minnesota collapsed, killing I think eleven people in an incredibly cruel way by dropping their cars from a great height into a deep river.

The authorized widely broadcast requests that anyone that had ever taken photos of that bridge turn them into the civil engineering authorities for their post-mortem. Careful examination found that some of the bolts in that bridge had been stretched noticably out of place as long as five years before!

I mentioned this to a friend who is a Professional Engineer - that's the proper term for a Civil Engineer. The fact that people get killed when people like him screw up is the reason that it would be a criminal expense for him to even claim to be a Professional Engineer without the proper license.

"That's impossible," he said. "Every bridge is inspected every two years."

I don't doubt that bridge was inspected every two years, but nevertheless it did fall down and kill a bunch of people.

If America were willing to tax itself enough to properly maintain its infrastructure, all those deaths and permanently crippling injuries just never would have happened.

I vastly preferred living in Canada for the specific reason that the Canadians are only too happy to tax themselves to provide for the common good. I always told people that Canada was the way America should be, and could be, but isn't.

I lost my immigration when Bonita divorced me. For quite a long time I wanted to return, and there are other ways I could still become a Canadian Landed Immigrant, and eventually a Canadian citizen.

One reason I don't, and chose eventually to remain in the United States, is so that I could work towards someday putting a stop to damnfool ignorant people such as yourself who are driving my Mother Country into the ground.

I remember like it was yesterday when I saw one demonstrated at a computer store. But because I was but a starving student, and the Lisa had a whole megabyte of memory and what for the day was quite a large, bright monochrome graphics display, I knew that I wouldn't have the ten grand to actually buy one any time soon.

The original Macintosh was a largely successful attempt to fix the problem of the Lisa's exhorbitant retail price. The "1984 Superbowl Ad" Macintosh just had 128 kb of RAM and a 512 by 342 monochrome display. The model I eventually bought used had just a single-sided 400 KB floppy and no hard drive.

It was not possible to develop real software on the original Macintosh. Instead developers used cross-compilers with Lisas as the host.

Not at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, but in Pasadena. He was a fellow Caltech student.

They had a color photocopier under development that printed on paper the size of an unfolded newspaper.

Now of course he wasn't supposed to, but just for grins he photocopied one side of a twenty dollar bill. He showed me both the original and the photocopy. I was completely unable to tell the difference between the two.

Now this was in 1984. How many of you are old enough to recall what photocopiers were like in 1984? I don't think color copiers even existed outside the laboratory.

Xerox could be bigger and richer than Microsoft, Intel and Apple all put together if they had ever gotten products like that into the market.

When was Xerox PARC founded? In the 1960s? And only just now they're thinking they should make a profit with it?

Apple's ATG - Advanced Technology Group - was well-known for just the same kind of nonsense. They were always showing off incredible new products at developer conferences, such as tablet computers with handwriting recognition, but they were reknowned for never actually bringing any of those companies to market.

Contrast this with Bell Labs that among many other valuable, money-making products, invented the Transistor.

I don't know how it compares to Visual Studio but they complete builds quicker and generates faster machine code than does GCC.

The CLang command-line is mostly GCC compatible. The parser is larger Visual Studio-compatible.

It is also Open Source under a BSD-style license.

A friend gave a talk at Microsoft one day. Upon his return he told me why Windows was so slow. It turns out that all the OEMs - Dell, Gateway, HP and the like - donate hardware to Microsoft's coders so they can be certain that the next version of Windows will run cleanly on them.

To encourage these coders to actually use the donated machines, they donate the very fastest hardware they make.

I'm very strongly of the opinion that coders should use, as their regular desktop machine, the very slowest hardware that can possibly get the job done. To this day I write most of my code on an Early 2006 MacBook Pro. It has a Core Duo, not a Core 2 Duo, and so is not even 64-bit. It only has two gig of RAM and a tiny cache compared to the MacBook Pros that are available today.

This has the effect on me that I can easily tell when my own code is slow. I don't need to use a profiler to know that.

My degree is in Physics, but the two very most useful courses I studied during my University days were Anthropology of Religion as well as Social Psychology, both at UC Santa Cruz.

The text for the Social Psych class was called The Social Animal. I recommend it to every man, woman and child, because it will enable you to better understand how people actually work and think.

One point that was taught during the class is that the most effective way to persuade anyone of anything is to have someone they know personally relate their own experience. Thus one might totally ignore the fact that Consumer Reports says that a particular model of car is unsafe and is expensive to maintain, but purchase it anyway because your cousing has that same car and thinks its just dandy.

There's no point to making fun of people for being that way. It's one of the fundamental factors that makes us humans the way we are.

If you want to be effective working for or against a particular candidate, volunteer for their campaign, then speak personally to your friends and relatives about your candidate, or why you are voting against the opposing candidate. The only way we will ever get the money and television advertising out of politics will be if regular people such as you and I actually get involved.

Just the owners of registered trademarks.

Do you know what Corporate Welfare is?

The Republicans are all for Big Government provided it benefit the rich.

Unlike water cooling, you don't need to isolate it from the circuitry, you could just immerse your whole PC in a tank of it, say a fish tank.

It's also quite an effective feline laxative. That is, if you catch my drift.

Sorry, it has been a long time. I don't have a link.

You would probably gripe at the fact that I prefer top-posting over bottom posting, as it lets me read the latest contribution to the thread.

I also like to Capitalize Some but not all words for emphasis. I also use Bold Face and italics for the same reason.

• If I want to drive home a particular point, I create a bulleted list with just one entry

Or Maybe I Use A Blockquote In Which All The Words Are Capitalized.

For some reason that completely escapes me, my colleagues at Kuro5hin all regard my writing style as some manner of symptom of mental illness. While I am without a doubt mentally ill, that's not reflected in my writing style. That has more to do with having read a lot of archaic writing during my education, and having come to the conclusion at all the text decoration is more expressive than the dull tedium that passes for typography these days.

I Am Absolutely Serious.

Shortly before a San Francisco Mayoral election a friend by the name of Andy Hasse registered the .coms of all of the expected candidates. One such candidate, upon finding that his domain was cyberly squatted upon, asked what he could do about it. Andy pitched his web consulting services then was hired by that candidate to do his site.

Andy was at the time a recent graduate of UC Santa Cruz and was living the Bohemian lifestyle in The Mission District. He was just starting out. Imagine his great surprise - and mine as well - when Andy made the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle when the Willie Brown campaign discovered that willybrown.com was owned by one of the staff for a competing campaign.

That was a long time ago; I'm not sure that the article would still be online. Let me check... Ah! Here We Go!

Willie Brown is to San Frasncisco politics as the Kennedys were once to American politics. While Willie has many supporters in San Francisco, it's quite definitely old-skool big-city machine politices.

I suggested that Andy take advantage of his fifteen minutes by offering him some free hosting. The Willie Brown website is no longer online, with the registrant being hidden by a private registration service. But based on the creation date, that domain just has to still owned by Andy.

Let's ask The Wayback Machine... Service With A Smile.

Sometime later an incredibly right-wing guy by the name of Dan Lungren was running for California State Attorney General. "Did you register Dan Lundgren's domain?" I asked Andy.

"Yup," he replied. "Com, Net and Org."

For no reason I can fathom Apple's iOS UI designers had the idea that it would be cool to just blindly replace words with it's very first guess.

This has the effect of rendering entire paragraphs into complete gibberish. I can fix that by backspacing and retyping but it is a huge PITA.

I did try disabling autocorrect completely but that was actually worse.

but then I actually read your post.

The modern concept of Civil Disobedience originated with Mohandas K. Gandhi's work to free India from British Colonial Rule. As part of his protest he violated British Law by making salt from seawater. The franchise for the production of India's salt had been granted to a British company by the king of England.

Did Gandhi break the law by going to the sea to make salt? the British Crown claimed he did but the Indian people hastened to disagree.

Reverend King personally spent a lot of time in the slammer during the Civil Rights movement for doing all kinds of things that would be rightly regarded as hooliganism were he and his people not working for peaceful political change.