tomjen

Thomas Jefferson is allowed to boast, but Franklin didn't build his own house.

Simple: They forgot to invest in people who can lobby their side in Washington. Microsoft had the same problem in the 90'ies. If you aren't spending 20% of your income on lobbism as a big company, you are a sitting duck. A startup don't have to, since they are mostly invisible anyway.

Yes, this sucks and I would love a world in which it was not. Being realistic, however this is the way out of it.

I don't run antivirus, instead I configured a secondary account and then removed the admin privileges on my primary one. This has the added effect of preventing Skype from installing annoying browser toolbars.

Chickens are better for that purposes, since their excrements are some of the best fertilizer around. They also smell better than the goat.

My guess is that it is actually illegal.

He wrote it in 1948, which is post Mickey so it is still under copyright.

Not that it matters, as you pointed out.

I don't mind what you do - nor do I think the parent does - but techchrunch is not a porn site, and it is not a blog about porn, when they write about porn it annoys those who come there to read tech news.

May he rot and burn in hell, and may all the world forget he ever lived.

Not really, as inflation is properly damaging more than this negative interest.

You get a job because you want to make money. Whether you write Java stuff for bigcorp a or bigcorp b doesn't matter, they are going to require the same skills so they are "commodity" work places. You get a job there because you love to code and would like to make money. In short, you love to work.

Now, there are a few exceptions, of course, such as Frog Creek or your dream job, where you get a job because you love to work there.

You might get that if you worked at some place I wanted to work more than the average place, but for the average firm, why bother?

Find a convenient tin-pot dictator and make sure to give him a good amount of money to keep out of your affairs.

That is a good one, though I fancy this more:

"Good friend for Jesus' sake forbear To dig the dust enclosed here: Blest be the man that spares these stones, And curst be he that moves my bones. Epitaph on his tomb, probably self composed" -- Shakespeare

I have long wanted a "ban Scribd" option for my google resposes. It used to crash my firefox whenever I left their site too.

My mother is better than your mother then, she had the good sense to use a throw away email account.

Agreed. You are already paying for bandwidth (which is _inside_ the datastore, and so should be free). Additional limitations are simply stupid.

>Why make a pit-stop at C?

Optimizing C compilers and platform independence properly. There have been a lot of research involved in making C compilers very fast, so you get to copy that for free.

People often come up with water as an example, but it fails on many levels:

In many cities the "native" water is full of chlorine If you travel to a foreign country, you may not be able to drink the native water at all If you are not at home, getting water may not be possible unless you by it in bottles. Bottles enable you to carry around water, which is useful for car trips, etc.

It doesn't reflect the value of a wordpress plugin, since the value of an item is the most the market will pay for it before going for an alternative.

The only thing this price means is that it is difficult to make money by giving away stuff for free.

Yeah, right. Operation Market Garden, anyone?

Take out the nukes and then demand the hostages handed over unharmed. If they as much as flinch you nuke the country.

The only way you can deal with that guy is to play hardball and be very predictable.

The problem is that they were captured on the border - which could very well mean that they weren't even in NK.

Well that figures. We can't have a big corporation that actually makes money with out government help. That would just make Obama look stupid.

And this is why it should be legal to shot bureaucrats on sight. How petty do you have to be to prevent a homeless man from bettering himself?

Depends - I hate having to keep track of a thousand different usernames, so I think it makes sense to stick to one.

Except that the primary users of FB are twenty somethings who generally aren't that willing to spend money on stuff online.

Besides the biggest customer of any micro-payment system is going to be the newspapers (that may or may not work for them, but they will try it), but how many old people are on facebook?

NO. The poster is an idiot, but there is no excuse for using that thoughtless form letter.

Now we only need one that go the other way so I don't have to use git to clone stuff from github.

I think the mandatory showering was a joke. (Three times a day is insane anyway)

If a lion is to beat a crocodile, it must stay out of the water.

In this case they did the right thing. You comply with the governments legal request, then dig through their trash and find ugly stuff you can throw at them.

Then with that info, you go to a friendly journalist and cry censorship and talk about how evil the politicians are. Then you put the content back up again and wait for the next sucker - they will stop trying pretty quickly.

It continues to annoy me how many people who try to play it clean with the politicians. The reason you have to shower is that the real world is dirty; pretending otherwise will mean you end up being the one who stinks.