Sen. Elizabeth Warren wrote a book 10 years ago, before the housing boom and bust, about how education and safety were killing middle America. In a short summary (to a detailed book):

Prior to women entering the workforce, families were more stable, because in surviving off one income, if the breadwinner was sick, mom could get a job, so you lost some income.

After women entered the workforce, family finances became less stable, because now EITHER parent losing the job was a catastrophe. And two jobs might reduce the likelihood that both are unemployed, but drastically increases the likelihood that EITHER becomes unemployed, and that was destabilizing finances.

The main driver of the middle class squeeze has been housing, and housing is driven by safe neighborhoods and good schools. To live in such a neighborhood has required two incomes, because the two income families bid up prices. This has absolutely killed single income families, because they can't compete.

The neighborhood based schooling encourages families to struggle for neighborhoods with good schools, which amps up the arms race for the housing.

Charter Schools aren't something she advocates, but detaching schooling from housing helps put the breaks on the housing run up.

The fact that you can live in a neighborhood you can afford and send to a good school is a HUGE thing. My kids attend a top rated charter in our city, but a few miles from our home. There are students from all sorts of neighborhoods. But the fact that our school competes with schools in millionaire zones has meant that people don't need to take out obscene mortgages they can't afford to educate their children.

The astronomical cost of private education (as a result of education inflation everywhere) has taken away private schooling from the upper middle class with multiple children. The charter schools has allowed us to have a family size we are happy with, a good education for our children, and stay in a house we can afford instead of needing to trade up.

The kicker, our charter school gets 95% of the funding as a traditional school, and our charter rents its building instead of getting it for free. The taxpayers save, the families get a good school, and the housing pressure for elite neighborhoods is lessoned. Now, our charter isn't a great solution for the truly poor. There is a required volunteer/financial contribution (either/or) per family, the school fundraises for stuff that might be provided in a public school, etc., there is no bussing. But if you are working class and willing to make a real sacrifice, or middle class and willing to give up some luxuries, you get a GREAT education.

But things like art classes are gone, and offered as after school programs, etc. But for many of us, an extra $300-$2500/year/student - depending on add-ons chose - is way more affordable than either private schooling ($15k-$20k/student) or fancier housing, $10k-$15k or more per year. I fail to see the downside.

Google dominating for what, 8 years now?

Our young geeks may NOT remember a time before Google, but there was a time where the "hot" search engine changed every two years, and there were new engines launching all the time.

The Wild West phase of the Internet is over, but we're still on the frontier.

A project carrying an "open source" or "free software" license is not necessarily an "open source" project. Plenty of "Cathedral" projects with paid developers with an open source license that may (or may not) get downstream patches kicked up. Those projects are going to look like any other corporate development group. These are really the core projects.

The "open source projects" of people hacking code make up the bulk of developers in open source, and is the hobbyist developers. People that have a lot of time to devote to a hobby are either single, or older empty nesters. Men can hang out in the single realm and start a family @ 40, women cannot. This limits women from engaging in serious time commitments like open source projects.

The pool of women available to do this is pretty small.

That's without dealing with the fact that women tend to have tighter deviations from the norm in various areas, which means that any group that is selected from extreme outliers is going to be disproportionately male. This is true whether you are selecting politicians that reach Federal office, people that are extremely interested in programming to pursue as a hobby, moving to America as a day laboring immigrant, or criminally oriented men to form a gang. The outliers are predominately (but not exclusively) male.

In local politics, where the time commitment is NOT as extreme and the skill set needed to be elected is NOT that extreme, we have a pretty good mix of men and women on city counsels, school boards, mayoral seats, etc. Not 50-50, but a pretty good representation. We have plenty of female mayors, but we've NEVER had a female governor. Outliers in general are predominately male.

At least in this case the innovations/patents are for actual hardware rather than mathematical formulas.

Not necessarily. I would think that Motorola is as capable at filing for bogus patents as other companies, and it would be odd if they had only filed for patents on hardware. Especially if and when they saw significant value in their patent portfolio; why wouldn't you file for easiest ones you can get? Surely they have filed for all kinds of patents, including (but not limited to) hardware ones. It would be nice to get a breakdown of types of patents, as well as years they were applied for; it seems that the trend for bogus patents has been increasing... so older patents may be bit less likely to be bs ones.

I'd just like to point out its not much of a defense if you don't enforce your ownership at some level.

Usually defensive here means using patent lawsuits in defensive way (against other companies suing you); not so much defending patents themselves. There is no need to defend patents, per se, unless someone is specifically trying to get them invalidated. As in not initiating the court process, but responding.

Gosling did a piss poor job on the design and evolution of Java to begin with.

How so? I thought it was generally consider a pretty decent job, and not just due to actual success of the platform and language. While Java has its quirks like any other programming language, it seems pretty well-rounded and practical. Your statement would suggest much more than that, so what exact things back up your statement?

I agree in that Gosling's checking of codebase is probably not all that valuable in itself (as he can't really be external objective third-party here), but I think it can have positive effect for credibility of Google's defense. It's not about trying to prevent Oracle from suing, but rather in improving chances of winning, or limiting damages. Gosling is obviously knowledgeable on Java and history, but also about various litigations related to Java.

Thats because the America Revolution wasn't "domestic terrorism".

Many techniques used were in fact labelled as terrorism even back then. And if one uses current de-facto political definitions (as various governments, including some western ones, do), could be construed to be such: guerilla warfare, vandalism, theft, obstruction of legal system...This does not diminish value or righteousness of revolution, just points out dangers of using a label without context; and especially fallacy of equating current laws with moral.

So: given that american colonies were part of English rule, and many activities were criminal (thanks to malevolent laws etc), yes, much of it was technically domestic terrorism. And no, there was nothing wrong with that; due to corruptness of the (legal, political) system of the time.

And why would an office suite have an email reader? Just because Microsoft thought it a good idea doesn't mean it is...

While it is true that underdogs typically use more of dirty tactics (since they have to, for the most part), how does this absolve either side? Two wrongs do not make right; so as wrong and deplorable as it is to use human shields, it is at least as bad to shoot those children. This is what I do not understand, except maybe as indication of mental maturity level of person arguing the case -- it is a kindergarten kid argument ("but he started it!").

Forget for a moment about the irony of bickering over "ownership" of stolen documents.

"Stolen" should be in quotes -- it may unauthorized copying, but as far as I know, original owners still have said documents and what Wikileaks has are copies.

This may sound like nitpicking but it has real life implications, whatwith MPAA's "pirate" labeling of unauthorized copying and other incidents where owners of "intellectual property" are abusing legal system.

I find Android slow, clunky, and Java-based SDK's (like Eclipse and the Blackberry dev environment) to be the same - where XCode is smoothe and elegant

Really? I have not used XCode heavily, but from my colleagues who have, they all swear XCode is biggest pile of crap they have ever used. I am pretty ok with Eclipse in general, but Android plug-in has always been shaky whenever I have had to use it (to help others work around issue Android platform causes with normally well functioning java libs). So I can see why it might make life bit more difficult.

I suspect there is lots of inertia both ways; those who start with obj-C, XCode find it much more appealing than those going the other way. But still... my impression has been that XCode and obj-C both feel bit antiquated, all things considered, which is in odd contrast with modern sleek design of the phone and hardware itself.

Right, I believe the term used is "fishing expedition".

Right, all I am saying is just that it'd be even lower in most other states. In WA 140k$ would be kind of high, for example. Not that offers in CA might be stellar per se; and from what I have heard, 140k$ does sound bit low And yes, there are tons of unsolicited contacts currently... job market for s/w engineers is rather hot these days. At least experienced ones.

No, definitely not -- Bay Area has relatively hot job market; and while there are more expensive areas (northeast?) most states have much lower salaries. At least my experience between pacific northerwest and CA suggests that latter has significantly higher salaries, and is confirmed by sites that compare cost of living & compensation.