Hi, I am an engineer not a lawyer. I find the increasing number of "free software" licenses completely overwhelming. There have been times where it has been easier for me to tell the team, "Since we can't tell whether or not this license works for us, let's just write it ourselves." Legal complexities have definitely stifled our innovation. Any thoughts on the implications of rampant growth in YAFSL (yet another free software license)? Thanks.

I've been reading /. for over a decade. I've been a Mormon longer than that.

I get your Meh point and should probably just go back to coding, but I want to say that rejecting Linux over this would be like getting angry at the Hierarchy because Chomsky is a political personality: Sheer stupidity. Chomsky and Linus are complex and interesting people. Most Mormons are the same way. However, I worry that Romeny doesn't normalize Mormonism, but rather reinforces a very specific stereotype around Mormons and business.

I have worked in both a female dominated field (child psychology) and a male dominated field (software engineering). Teams are always better with a touch of gender balance. Every single time.

I wish they just cut the crap. Verizon has built a system where they can sell your listing for a profit. Some of that money is used to offset the cost of maintaining your line. Without that revenue stream they need to add a fee in order for you to be a profitable customer.

It reminds of the situation with desktops and Windows. Because of licensing arrangements, it is cheaper to buy a Windows prefab than to buy a machine with no os. Crazy but true.

Without certain features some products are not as profitable for vendors, so it is discouraging, but not surprising, that they would pass on the offset costs to the end-user.

As an IT researcher, one would think living where ever you want, working from home, and telecommuting would be the ideal for family life. Let me put it another way. There is a telecommuting homomorphism between the set of the best places to live and the set of best place to live for an IT researcher.

Mod up parent. The main reason I moved to Lion was to FINALLY be able to resize windows by selecting anywhere on the frames. This was an obvious and long overdue feature, but they changed many things that didn't need changing. I can think of no reasons to stay on Lion as the grass certainly looks greener on the Mountain, but maybe that's just because my boots are covered in mud.

Disregard the hype. I am decidedly unimpressed with Steam's (or anyone else's) offerings for Mac. The available titles are good games, but many other good games that I want to play are unavailable: Skyrim, Bioshock Infinite, Mass Effect 3, Guild Wars, SWTOR, Call of Duty, and many, many others. If I can't get developers to support Mac--a widely available hardware model with a good distribution channel, a few graphics cards, and a few major OS versions--why on earth should I be more optimistic about gaming on linux where there is no driver support, limited willingness to pay for software, and infinite variation in OS versions? My team maintains roughly a million lines of multi-platform code, supporting linux, windows, mac, and others. Believe me, It is a major pain to keep current on all the OS versions. People are drastically underestimating the amount of developer resources it takes to maintain a multi-platform source tree. This is why only the Valves and Blizzards of the world do it.

The great thing about coding is you can create your own experience. I would find an open source project and contribute, and start building ups portfolio of published code.

I bet it only recognizes nouns, which for a large set is impressive in its own right, but to be able to create ways for all the nouns to interact...that would be the really amazing part. To have a system, where you can put any two or three objects together and get some meaningful interaction is mind-boggling. Sure we all know what Shark + Laser should be, but what about Jello + Harley, Yarn + Glass, DS + PS3, in principle the possibilities are quite literally endless. The funny thing is I now want to buy the game just to see what Jello+Harley does.

If you have so much trouble with customs that you wish you had encrypted your whole hard disk, you are already in a load of trouble. And by the time they get around to browsing your personal pics on your lap top, you will already have done so much wrong in customs, that encryption or no, you might want a good lawyer. Unless you are stupid enough to try to physically smuggle illegal pics (terrorist propaganda, kiddie porn), I think it not worth your time to worry about encryption just for the sake of customs.