I can comment a bit at this. I used to play in chess tournaments in my state some years ago. I was at a very low level in most of them. To put it in simple terms, I was about as far away in talent from the best players in my state (not my country or the world, but just my state) as I could be. I gave up playing chess because bluntly put, computers ruined it. You are right that players memorize openings. The list of known openings and known variations of those openings is staggering. Honestly, it's more than most people can memorize. Back in the 1990s when I played, it was unusual for a known opening to go beyond maybe 7 or so moves before you "got out of book" as they put it and responses started to deviate from known ones. Keep in mind that while you could always deviate very early from known responses, the odds of such being successful were quite low as if the move was really any good, it would already be known. Now add to this the knowledge that since white moves first, he controls the game. So if I as a player think "I'm really hoping white opens with e4 as I've been dying to try out the black side of this variation of the Ruy Lopez", white may open with d4, destroying my chance to defend an e4 opening. Even if white opens with e4 as I hope, on his 2nd move he may prevent the Ruy Lopez variation that I wanted to play. So you can see that what you have to learn is quite enormous because when you play black,you have to be prepared for all kinds of openings that you may not ever play when you have the white pieces.

Computer analysis took to openings to deeper levels of known good responses. So an opening that used to be maybe 7 moves long before you got out of book was now 13-14 moves long. At some point it just becomes impossible to keep up. To be honest with you, I put a lot of time into trying to improve and I really didn't make much progress. It was already tough enough for me to keep up before computers got involved and I just gave up as I felt like I was getting left further and further behind. To be honest with you, a lot of the tournaments weren't much fun. A lot of the guys who showed up to them were really weird. It made me question whether I really wanted to spend a lot of time getting better at something that attracted defective people to it. It's not unheard of for guys to be exceptionally good at chess and be homeless because they can't keep a job. Fischer himself was a genius player but if there was ever a crazier World Champion than him, I don't know who that would be.

In general this is true, but the ones who just stupidly stumbled into wealth seem to buy professional sports teams in the USA. Each of the four major sports leagues (MLB, NFL, NBA and NHL) has owners who make you scratch your head and ask "How on earth could somebody that stupid be so rich?" In some cases it's simply that dad was a genius and rich and junior just inherited his money.

Swartz decided that the JSTOR information should be free. They charged for access to it. His copying of the articles violated their terms of service (they don't even let paying customers do what he did in terms of downloading that volume of articles). He used MIT's paid for access to JSTOR to vilated JSTOR's terms of service. He put JSTOR's business at risk by downloading large amounts of articles that could be freely distributed. Basically he had a philosophical disagreement with JSTOR and decided that he was a one man army who could secretly destroy their business and get away with it. He hid his face with a bicycle helmet when accessing the closet (it's my understanding that legally this shows he knew what he was doing was wrong) and continued to attempt to access the data, even when JSTOR fought back by limiting MIT access. His downloads were large enough to disrupt other users of JSTOR. All of this is in the criminal complaint. Look, there are plenty of companies that I don't like or disagree with and I don't buy their products. But trying to drive someone out of business and tampering with their income got the US government interested and perhaps (it's arguable) led to overzealousness in the prosecution, but that's why he faced serious charges. Whether you like what JSTOR does or not, there is nothing illegal in the USA about their business and trying to destroy that business via unauthorized access isn't legal.

As pointed out, Saipan is US territory but it has special visa rules. Basically it's easier for Asian people to get visas to go there and a few other US territories in Asia than the US mainland. Also, those Pacific US territories have sketchy reputations and there have been allegations of slave labor factories operating there, so I'm sure he thought nothing of being asked to go there. I'm sure that those who approved his visa did so under orders from their superiors. I have a lot of personal issues with how the US government operates its visa policy and how sometimes even family members of legal immigrants can't get visas to visit here, but I don't see any crime being done here by approving a visa application - as long as the approver wasn't paid by the applicant to do so. Finally, your assumption that no US law was broken is likely false. I'm sure that he had US customers. Anytime some one gets rich off piracy, Uncle Sam gets really interested in that person.

Less you be too sanctimonious, please understand that many EU countries prosecute supposed "violations" of their laws that don't even take place on their own territory. France threatened to close down Ebay because (gasp) it's legal for people in the US to sell Nazi memorabilia from World War II and they made Ebay provide filters so French people can't see such items. The sellers in question were not even marketing their items to French citizens and in fact probably expected only US buyers to purchase them.

As someone who worked for the US federal government in my first job after graduating from college, I'm pretty sure the USPTO is not sincere at all in holding this conference and wanting to "fix" things. Oh some well connected rich company may have reached some upper level USPTO exec and maybe got that person on board with this, but nothing will ever happen in reality. Fixing the system would lead to fewer patents. Fewer patents would lead to fewer employees over time. Fewer employees leads to fewer managers. I am sure that all the managers are looking out for each other just like they did where I worked. And with fewer employees and fewer managers, a smaller budget will follow. Plus, by basically just approving darn near every application that comes their way, they generate a lot of money and Uncle Sam likes making money. I'm sure those who go will get a warm fuzzy that things will change and maybe even some of the USPTO people will really be sincere about wanting to make things better, but I bet it never happens.

Actually the "why" is known. Hubris. Schilling has an ego the size of Texas. Think Rush Limbaugh who happens to pitch major league baseball and you've got an idea. Schilling was very good at his sport and is on the bubble for the Hall of Fame, meaning you can make a case both for and against him going into the Hall. But you have to be really good to even be on the bubble.

Schilling's arrogance made him a great pitcher but in real life he sees everything in black and white. There are no gray areas to him. People that agree with him are smart. Everyone that disagrees with him, he thinks is an idiot. And he'll tell them to their faces. Basically he realized that a lot of money could still be made via role playing games. Since he concluded that he was a genius and there was a business opportunity in front of him, there was simply no way the combination could fail to work because him being a genius would overcome any limitations or lack of experience he personally had. Not to digress, but honestly, if you see some smart ass punk kid like Zuckerberg drop out of college and become a billionaire, I do kind of understand how a guy with a big ego might think "I can do that too!". So since he has self-confidence to a level almost bordering on delusion he found the one sucker who would give him the money he needed without any strings attached.

In the USA, I'm not sure I can agree with the original post saying that it's "without any major advertising campaign". I've seen ads on TV for it. I guess it depends on what the OP means by the term. If you want to argue that Google hasn't run their ads into the ground like Samsung does for its phones where they will sometimes show the exact same ad twice during the same 2-4 minute commercial break and show it at least once in all 3 breaks during a 30 minute segment, then yes, I agree with that. Google runs enough ads to get it noticed without making you hate the product like Samsung does.

I really don't know about how many people want to spend $1000 for a "gaming supercomputer" as you call it. A significant portion of game players are teenagers and younger and it is simply not realistic to expect parents to willing cough up that much money. It's one thing to be an adult and be willing to spend this kind of money and it's something else to expect average parents to do it.

I understand why you asked for advice, but I think your reasoning is flawed (ie. your assumption that Slashdotters would know technical stuff about typing). As an IT worker who can type at a good (for an IT guy) rate, my observation is that I am lots faster than most IT people and I am not even close to being fast enough to do secretarial work. Most IT people are terrible at typing. It's not that uncommon to find 2 finger typists in IT. Since a lot of Slashdotters are IT geeks, you're asking the wrong folks to begin with. I'm sure we'll get a few people to post who are the exception to the rule, but again, they are the exceptions.

Dvorak has its detractors and fans. You'll likely get some who swear that only by using it can you achieve your goal and they will possibly cite some studies to back this up. Then others will cite their own studies that show that QWERTY is even faster than Dvorak. I've seen QWERTY vs. Dvorak religious wars here and I doubt that you'll come away convinced of anything.

I have studied other languages. I've got a talent for it. I'm just going to be honest with you, which is better than some of unrealistic answers you've been given so far.

The problem with Chinese is the tones. Depending on your genetic material, as an adult you may find it very difficult to come to grips with them. Or it could be easy for you. But I can promise you that for every person for whom it is easy, there are tons of native English speakers who will never be able to deal with it successfully. The grammar in Chinese is pretty easy for the most part, which is good, but the tones are the killer. I am always amazed at how people suggest learning Mandarin or Cantonese without any regard to the difficulty that speakers of non-tonal languages will have. And you need to understand that as an adult unless you want to devote the next decades of your life to constant work at it, you will never learn Chinese characters. Yes, you could learn pinyin but that's not really all that practical honestly. So for all practical purposes you will be illiterate in Chinese, even if you learn to speak it well. Yes, you can use programs to translate your pinyin into the characters and vice-versa, but how practical is that on the streets of Beijing?

Yes, if you want to engage in questionable activities then Russian would be a good choice, but I can tell you that most native English speakers fail at their attempts to learn it. I'm one of the exceptions. Russian grammar is quite complex. It is an inflected language and that's the complexity. What this means to people not familiar with linguistic terms is that Russian nouns and adjectives change their spelling depending on how they are used in a sentence. Russian adjectives have up to 24 forms - 6 cases X 4 forms per case (singular masculine, singular feminine, singular neuter, plural). The good news is that some of the forms overlap so in reality there are usually "only" 19 or so forms to learn. Ha ha. Nouns have singular and plural forms to learn. Given how in the USA most English grammar instruction is over forever in public schools after 8th grade, you really have no idea how challenging it is for someone who doesn't even know what an indirect object is in English to try to understand something like the dative or genitive case. Without a proper understanding of the cases in Russian and memorization of the various forms of nouns and adjectives under them, you'll never make any progress at learning it. Outside of the ex-USSR it's generally pretty useless. I get some kicks out the "wow" factor of being able to impress people that I can speak it and I've done some traveling in the ex-USSR where I used it every day, but in the IT world it's been almost useless. Then again, I'm not a leet haxor. I can tell you that learning Cyrillic is very easy and that will absolutely not be the problem in learning Russian, but the grammar will separate the men from the boys. If you can believe this, from a grammatical standpoint most of the Slavic based languages are actually harder to learn than Russian, with Bulgarian/Macedonian being an exception.

English is really the most useful language to know. If I had to recommend another language, Spanish is generally the easiest one for English speakers to learn. Portuguese is not bad either. French would be next, followed by Italian and German and then pretty much everything else. The further English speakers get from Western Europe in the languages they want to learn, the more difficult it will be. I've found that the older you are, the harder you have to work at learning another language and most adults aren't willing to do the hard work necessary to succeed. Unless you are some language learning genius (unlikely), you will need to do about an hour a day, 5 days a week for about a year to achieve any kind of reasonable proficiency. And it's like climbing a hill. Once you get to the top, it's much easier to get down, but many give up on the way to the top because progress is so slow that they decide it's not for them. It could be many months of hard and constant work before you start to make any real progress. Most people give up before they get over the top and it starts to get easier. Unless you are going to work for a foreign company that uses the language you learn or in a country that speaks it, there's not a lot to be gained by learning it. I do some foreign travel so being able to speak more than English is useful to me.

Your story was very good. It reminded me of something I did to a co-worker about 20 years ago. I was working for the federal government at a military base in the US. I was in an IT department but we had a small number of senior level paper pushers who didn't do any programming. One of them was a lady who was barely computer literate. I wrote a DOS batch script that called a C program I wrote and installed both on her PC. When the PC got powered up, the batch script called my C program. The program grabbed any keyboard input, shifted it into the ASCII range for Greek letters and echoed it back in Greek with a message that the command was not understood. After doing that 3 times, the program would say that it was doing a "DOS memory dump - do not abort!" and printed lines of dots below ii, opened a new file and deleted it to make the disk active (these old PCs were noisy when you did that) after printing each dot and waited until a counter was reached (about1 minute on average), whereupon the program terminated and normal control returned to the PC. It had been some time since I installed it and myself and another guy (he knew about it) were the guys who got notified about PC problems and she never said anything. So one day I just went into her office and asked her about it. I told her it was a joke. She told me that when she saw it, she just turned the PC off and never used it again! I didn't expect that. It really spoke volumes about the quality of "work" that Uncle Sam was getting out of her.

Only about 31% of US federal workers are unionized. The majority of these are in blue collar jobs. I used to work for the federal government as a computer programmer and none of my fellow IT workers were in a union. Given how it's against the law for federal employees to strike (look up what President Reagan did to the air traffic controllers if you don't know), most federal workers view union membership as a waste of money. I can tell you from what I saw at my job that the only thing the union could do if you were going to be laid off or fired for just cause was to delay the inevitable. You would still lose your job, but they might delay it for a year if they fought against the action. The post by Shivetya is just another example, at least in the USA, of people having big misconceptions about federal jobs.

Ossetia and Abkhazia have always been part of Georgia, but in the days of the USSR, it didn't matter who they belonged to as long as they were in the USSR. With independence, the regions are majority ethnic Russian and they didn't like being joined to an ethnic group (Georgian) who they regard as being something equivalent to rednecks or hillbillies in the USA. So they kicked all the ethnic Georgians out or killed them and proclaimed independence. Being on the border with Russia, Russia sent troops in officially as "peacekeepers" but in reality to prevent a weak Georgian military from re-taking them. But they belong to Georgia. Recognizing their independence is just a sham to justify the illegal action of basically stealing the territories from Georgia.

Kosovo is somewhat different in that genocidal warfare basically made many countries argue for independence as the only way to protect the citizens. There's nothing really analogous to this in Georgia as in Ossetia and Abkhazia they kicked out the non-Russians and the Russians were never in any real danger to begin with, although they like to claim that they were to justify kicking out the Georgians.

That's not correct. T-Mobile uses the 1900 band in the USA and all the iPhones support that fine. It's trivial to find accounts of people with unlocked iPhones who currently use them on T-Mobile in the USA. T-Mobile doesn't have the iPhone in the USA because they were basically unwilling and perhaps unable to pay Apple's exorbitant prices to get permissions to sell it.

I'm something of a student of human nature and I'm really good at observing people and understanding their motivations and often making accurate predictions on what I see. I believe that about 10% or so of human beings are just like RMS. I don't like to use the term "fanatic" because while technically correct, I think it's too limiting. You see, people like RMS don't just see software in those terms or one thing in life in a fanatical way, they see everything in life in narrow terms. I call them "people who see everything in black and white". These people do not agonize over any day to day decisions like which model of car should I buy. Everything to them is crystal clear - good - bad, right - wrong, great - terrible, etc. Everything to them is quite clear and there's no areas of gray or ambiguity.

One of the things about these people is that they tend to be very religious. Now that does not mean that all religious people are like that, despite what many Slashdotters would love to believe, but it does mean that these people do tend to gravitate towards religion. For example, I believe that most of Al Queda's membership is made up of these people. This is why they are willing to commit suicide - the evil in non-believers is so apparent that it's repulsive to them. People who see the world in black and white will sometimes change their minds on something and they will go from opposing it to promoting it or from loving it to hating it. But they don't go back and forth. If they change their minds, that change is probably permanent. And they tend to be completely obsessed with following the "rules", which at times may be religious teachings, and punishing those who do not obey those same rules. They're the kind of people who want severe punishments for minor infractions, like wanting to put someone in jail for a year for running a stop sign. I served on a jury 7 years ago with a guy like this and it was not pleasant as it took some incredible work by our foreman to get him to agree to a guilty verdict on 2 of 3 counts we had to decide on when 11 of us felt strongly that he was innocent on one count and this one guy threatened to hang the jury unless we voted guilty on all 3 counts.

The most frustrating thing about people like this is that they do not get at all that they are the weird ones. They mistakenly believe that everybody sees the world in the same clear cut way that they do. So this is why you are almost always wasting your time in trying to reason with them and get them to see another point of view. To them any other point of view is irrational and they believe that anyone who holds another point of view is insane because they think that no rational person could ever believe something different from them. So this is why when people rail against RMS and point out inconsistencies or fallacies with his arguments that he digs in. He's truly incapable of seeing any other point of view because he views such as irrational and illogical. At least, that's my guess.