The altruistic ideal of giving away one's labor for free appeared credible in the fat summer of the Web 2.0 boom when social-media startups hung from trees, Facebook was valued at $15 billion, and VCs queued up to fund revenue-less "businesses" like Twitter.
At least make up your mind about whom you're knocking. The parent article seems to dislike the ideals behind open-source without bothering to figure out who actually operates on them.
Public outcry, inquiry, and (in some cases) mockery are well and good, and hopefully lead to policy change. However, when it comes time to vote, what's an individual voter to do when faced by an electronic voting machine at the polls? Boycotting doesn't seem like the right course of action here.
With Internet multiplay, multiple models in a product line, and installs for many games, the line between the PC and consoles as a game platform is becoming less distinct with each generation.
As a member of the occasionally rabid fandoms created by good LucasArts games, it's hard (and disappointing) to see a game like Force Unleashed justify a release that doesn't include the PC.
One of the main holdouts of the PC as a platform is a modding culture (and its evil goateed brother, piracy and cracks). Playing with games, instead of merely playing them, is a selling point for many PC diehards.
Some games enjoy tremendous success by catering to this facet of the platform (see Counterstrike, which has gained a life outside the game on which it was originally based), while it's simultaneously a contentious and intimidating element for developers.
This seems, when all is said and done, to simply be taking advantage of the power of large numbers of people on the Internet. Facebook is merely a userbase that happens to have a toolset attached. Admittedly, the userbase is somewhat more suggestible than many others (see the various superhero/pirate/ninja viral games that can be seen cavorting across people's profiles); however, this type of coordination has been done before, albeit usually with participants' knowledge.
Hopefully, we can see this amount of effort on the part of researchers directed toward positive applications. Existing examples include the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), protein folding, and the Mechanical Turk project.
This isn't so much a security issue as an underexploited resource. That said, the API hardly needs to leave its doors open to this sort of thing.
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Ron Paul refuses to accept corporate donations.
unless they're in the form of gold bullion.
Rather than add an extra bit, they should just switch to 2's complement. Who doesn't want the number of defendants to drop to -1?
At least make up your mind about whom you're knocking. The parent article seems to dislike the ideals behind open-source without bothering to figure out who actually operates on them.
Public outcry, inquiry, and (in some cases) mockery are well and good, and hopefully lead to policy change. However, when it comes time to vote, what's an individual voter to do when faced by an electronic voting machine at the polls? Boycotting doesn't seem like the right course of action here.
With Internet multiplay, multiple models in a product line, and installs for many games, the line between the PC and consoles as a game platform is becoming less distinct with each generation. As a member of the occasionally rabid fandoms created by good LucasArts games, it's hard (and disappointing) to see a game like Force Unleashed justify a release that doesn't include the PC. One of the main holdouts of the PC as a platform is a modding culture (and its evil goateed brother, piracy and cracks). Playing with games, instead of merely playing them, is a selling point for many PC diehards. Some games enjoy tremendous success by catering to this facet of the platform (see Counterstrike, which has gained a life outside the game on which it was originally based), while it's simultaneously a contentious and intimidating element for developers.
This seems, when all is said and done, to simply be taking advantage of the power of large numbers of people on the Internet. Facebook is merely a userbase that happens to have a toolset attached. Admittedly, the userbase is somewhat more suggestible than many others (see the various superhero/pirate/ninja viral games that can be seen cavorting across people's profiles); however, this type of coordination has been done before, albeit usually with participants' knowledge.
Hopefully, we can see this amount of effort on the part of researchers directed toward positive applications. Existing examples include the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), protein folding, and the Mechanical Turk project.
This isn't so much a security issue as an underexploited resource. That said, the API hardly needs to leave its doors open to this sort of thing.