I think when you add this into the fact that they didn't award Samsung ANYTHING even though Apple has to be using their 3G patents, you see a picture that doesn't bode well for this verdict to stand.

I'm a programmer. Took three semesters of calculus, differential equations. I work at a government civilian engineer agency and I use math all day long and twice on Sunday. When I'm debugging the mass of data I have to use (mostly from computer models), I have to be able to do quick math in my head as well as translate that to something I can check my work with. It's not good enough to just write an algorithm that runs - it has to do exactly what it's supposed to.

I use statistics every day. My knowledge of statistics is hugely valuable when I'm in a discussion with a scientist or engineer and can suggest a different way to get at the data they want with a stats function, or understand why they want the R^2 value in a function.

If you can't do at least some of the math you have to program, you're not as useful as you can be. It's not insurmountable, but the guy that knows it will program circles around you, assuming the same level of programming efficacy.

Look - first off, the idiot screwed up. He never owned the device. Finders are NOT keepers, you deucebag. Be a man and try to find its owner instead of trying to profit.

However.

Realize that had another company done something like this, NO ONE GOES TO JAIL. Thomas Jefferson (who was kind of a big deal) showed quite a bit of distrust and disliking of them: "I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."

Abraham Lincoln too (specific to banks):

"As a result of the war,
corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places
will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong
its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth
is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

So as you're lobbing your scathing remarks at this stupid man, also realize that the company whose interests are being protected by this legal act would itself not be held to these same standards.

This seems to me to be a philosophical question. Indeed, if the uptime and more importantly availability is higher by the purported crash and burn (taking liberties with the slash and burn deforestation technique) method, who is to say it is less useful or less valid? Indeed, to espouse skills over delivering for the client seems to be missing the point. It seems to be standing on some pedagogical imperative that knowledge is somehow of more value in the workplace than delivery.

Now - having said that - don't get me wrong. I have seen entirely too many *nix sysadmins (full disclosure: I got an RHCE in 2003) who don't know where the network config files are because they only know the GUI, and are hired by a team of people who have never logged into a *nix box. However, I think the ill that is most egregious is not that it sets some moral and ethical imperative fo fixing rather than reloading (or in this case, recovering from a VM image) a server, but the fact that it misses the point that there has been a dearth of qualified IT candidates since the dawn of our industry and that the fixes to this don't have to do with how we fix a server, but how we hire and more importantly who we hire. As is everything in IT, garbage in == garbage out.

Finally - I absolutely agree with the Infoworld argument. It assumes an unexpected failure within the server, not some external thing that needs to be diagnosed and fixed. If your app crashes because the SQL table isn't there on the SQL server you don't control, rebooting ain't going to do a hill of beans worth of good.

Users click on "Click here to install Rogue Antivirus for free!" links, children click on flashing boxes regardless of anything, and executives make money off of the backs of much lower paid workers!!!

Shocking.

Bravery in the face of a difficult choice. It's very telling when people who so clearly believe in the project and its open source roots defect in these numbers.

Oracle may yet be the end of Java too. Stay tuned.

BSD's not dead of course - look only to the Mach kernel in OS X for verification.

If you want to see how a desktop UNIX-based os should do it right, look at OS X. Say what you will about Apple - I don't care, only own a mac and an iPod (I have a Droid X for my phone) - but they did the desktop RIGHT. It's easy to use, fairly intuitive (passes the grandma test, for the most part), and is oh so easy to support.

I remember when I got my first macbook a few years back and I had a sprint wireless broadband card for it. I was thinking "you know, I should be able to make my mac a wifi base station and share my wireless". Preferences, sharing, .... oh, that was easy. And it worked.

My problem with the Microsoft Office product line has always been a simple one. I don't want to pay for what they want me to pay for. Let's be honest - office is a VERY mature product line. I.E. there are a very very very tiny set of places that it can be innovated or changed. The recent MS office revisions strike me as revisions to justify the price, rather than revisions people want. The fact of the matter is that MS Office from 8 years ago does exactly what I as a scientific and engineering worker want, and now OO.o does it too - with MS's throwback interface of years ago that I prefer. I still stumble through the stupid ribbons.

TL;DR synopsis: MS changes to justify price. OO.o doesn't have to. Win.

Coincidentally, I unfriended /. on facebook for this very reason.

People still allow .exe files through filters? Helllloooooo mimedefang...

Haha - I love Eureka. Wanted badly to be at comic con where they had re-themed a restaurant (Hard Rock I think?) to be Cafe Diem.

But - I guess it's not state secrets or anything - the organization just doesn't like attention - we get plenty of it - mostly negative.

US Army Corps of Engineers.

I'm going to regret that, probably - to paraphrase Ghost Crawler of WoW fame.

I'm definitely not supposed to. But, there isn't but one Department of Defense Civilian agency that has hardly anything but Engineers working for it. ;)

That I know of, anyway.

I dunno - I'm with the OP here. A big part of why most computing classes suck is that they aren't focusing on the fun and exciting things that can be done with programming.

Example.

I work in a US DoD agency that has a ton of civilian Engineers in it. I work with people who have MS degrees in Engineering, and tens of years of experience. Really. Friggin. Smart. People.

Not a one of them has taken a programming language that's even still used. Not even the newest Engineer, who has his Masters, and is only 26 years old. He didn't even have to TAKE a programming class. All the older engineers of my age (mid 30s) had to at least take a programming class, but it was Pascal (SERIOUSLY????) or FORTRAN.

Now - granted, FORTRAN is still used in a lot of the models we run, but I digress.

None have heard of Python, Groovy, etc. None have ever touched an object oriented language. But every one of them comes to me to write code for them where they could probably do it themselves if they had the training. I'm talking about silly stuff - data manipulation that takes 30-100 lines of code and a half day at most.

Don't get me wrong - I love my job, but ffs. If they had to take an object oriented language - even C++, but better C# or Java, they could much better interact with we programmers writing their apps for them.