I agree - ethical, legal, or not, they'll find a way to get rid of you. Or at least make working there so intolerable you quit (better for them, btw, so I'd expect this). So secure another job or be ready to tough it out until you do.

But yes, as much as I hate them, it's time to document, document, document and then call the BSA. Your business is blatantly violating licensing terms. Declaring compliance by fiat - aka, "we don't pirate software, therefore violating the license terms isn't piracy" - is somewhat like trying to declare yourself a virgin when you're already pregnant.

Hold on a sec: There's at least one counterexample for your line of reasoning: people other than Mormons still live in Utah. Case closed. There, FTFY.

Actually I only drive mine about 6,000mi per year. The rest of the miles are soaked up by what I deem "disposable" cars - used Civics and the like that I can buy for cheap, rack up a ton of commuter miles, and then either sell for close to what I bought them for or haul them down to the junkyard.

Likewise for those who want my cats. I like them far more than I've ever liked 99.99999% of humanity. No sarcasm intended.

A couple problems with your theory:

    - A large portion of the energy dissipated in modern ICs involves leakage through increasingly small insulating layers, in addition to energy already dissipated through capacitive effects (energy stored on FET gates being dumped). Superconductive materials do very little to help this, as the losses aren't resistive in nature. What you really need are superinsulators that have desirable electric field properties to deal with this... Look up high k dielectrics.
  - The physics and industrial processes of manufacturing ICs from the usual suspects (Si, SiGe, GaAs, etc...) is very well understood. While I know superconductive transistors have been developed, actually figuring out how to build them and all of the supporting structures in a size process similar to silicon may not work.

Within the US, MTR mining is almost entirely an eastern thing, and for the most part, eastern coal has nastily higher sulfur levels than western coal.

Almost everything out west is either underground mines (as is true for the mine that feeds the Cameo plant in the article) or strip mines out in the middle of flat boring nowhere Wyoming. Compared with the destruction caused by MTR mining, neither of these is particularly objectionable.

Better yet, pursue the prototype where each tab/window is its own process. Then when one crashes, it doesn't take everything with it. For that matter, it's usually not FF that I blame, it's usually the @#$%ing plugins in linux (particularly flash).

Wish I had mod points, because you've hit it on the head. Seriously, what's the current obsession with getting rid of a simple UI metaphor that's worked very well for several decades, and replacing it with shiny, yet less consistent things?

I will accept the argument that netbooks have less vertical space, so this allows the use as much of it for productive stuff as possible. But still, it'd be nice if it was an option.

Seriously, depending on where you work and what you want to do, you don't have to keep on top of every new fad. I'm a few years younger than you, but have largely considered most of the recent trends to be fads, or niche things. I'm a happily employed electrical engineer who does C, Forth, and 68k ASM programming and embedded work, and I've crafted my position to be as much business analysis as technical. I'm lucky enough to work for a department where I could basically morph my job duties to fit my talents. I considered management for a while for many of the same reasons that other posts suggest - that it has a further career track, and that I wouldn't be outpaced by the younger people coming in. In the end, I realized that there will always (or at least for the foreseeable future) be a place for programmers who have a greater understanding of the business their code supports, and have the skills to maintain and upgrade legacy systems. C isn't going anywhere for a few decades at least - it's still by far the most portable thing on the planet. I also realized that while I'm good at motivating and organizing good people, I suck horribly at dealing with the problem ones and therefore, I'm not management material.

Don't give up the technical side just because you're afraid of learning new fad X, Y, or Z. If you're a technical type where software is not the end product but supporting a larger business, the ability to understand and solve business problems in a consistent, efficient, and rational manner is much more important that whatever the hell trend Infoweek is pushing this week. Give up the technical side because you honestly think you'd make a better contribution as a manager. In the end, doing what you enjoy and providing real value to the company will likely make you happy.

Actually it wasn't a failed pump, but a pile-driving operation that got a little too close to one of the old service railway tunnels under the Chicago River.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Flood

Fun place, filled with fascinating history if you're an industry and railway dork like myself (oh, and an engineer). A friend of mine is an engineer with the City, and got me down there in the late 1990s to have a look around at what was left.

I've seen it with several of my friends' divorces, where things just turned ugly and vengeful. Net result - neither wound up with anything, because the lawyers got it all.

My ex and I decided that no matter how bad things got, there would be no lawyers or lawsuits involved. Things actually never got that bad, and we split reasonably amicably after 18 years together (10 married). We still go to lunch about twice a month, and some of her crap is still stored in my garage, but otherwise it's been said and done for about three years now.

Sure, I've seen Amtrak prices massively out of whack with their market segment (on par or even 2-4x airfare), but often as the parent poster points out, they're cheaper. It's just a question of time.

I regularly take the Southwest Chief home from Colorado to my family in Iowa. It's basically an overnight trip for me, and I can typically find a coach seat for just over $100 round trip during the off season. (Summer tends to throw that off - they raise prices to over $100 each way, at which point I'd rather take my car.)

Basically, flying is a necessity sometimes, but the rest of the time I have such a hatred of their stupid baggage charges, security theater, general overbooking, and micro-mini-jets (CRJs, ERJs, etc.) these days that I do everything I can to avoid flying.

This assumes the goal is domination, not destruction. Domination of a resistant planet is likely very, very hard. Destruction on a planetary scale is likely pretty easy, and could be fitted into the cargo hold of a large interstellar ship with a hundred or so large fusion bombs. Or just find a few local asteroids and toss them our way - don't even carry the munitions with you.

I really doubt that many civilizations enlightened and advanced enough to go exploring through space would be initially hostile. That doesn't mean that humanity's stupidity wouldn't provoke them, however.

If life gives you lemons, you should make... ...a lemon gun, of course. Like a potato gun, but uses lemons, since life didn't give you a bag of spuds.

Well said - this is not a feature I think we'd ever see in Linux, so finally it's an MS patent that's of absolutely no threat to us.