The way I see it, Adobe is taking a cue from Sony and trying to supplant a perfectly usable and cost-effective technology (e.g. HTML, CD-Audio, HD-DVD) with a perfectly moronic proprietary cost-prohibitive overlicensed substitute (e.g. PDF, MiniDisc, BluRay).
They probably figured Acrobat would replace Internet Explorer at some point, you know, because HTML sucks in their mind. Why else would they embed code and video into something that started life as a (shudder) "Portable Document Format" ? The whole point of PDF was to have a faithful, device-independent representation of a print-ready document - PostScript to go! How they fucked it up is just classic Adobe narcissism.
1. Displayport is a pain in the ass, with its use of active vs passive adapters, both of which are still hard to find and confusing to the average consumer. Few displays ship with Displayport, and of those few, hardly any ship with a suitable cable, instead relying on HDMI or DVI. The cable isn't cheap.
2. Why did they spread to a 3rd slot ? Couldn't they have placed all 12 connectors in a single row, rotated 90 degrees ? Or at least split them off to a breakout cable. Motherboards are designed for double-wide cards, as they usually gap the two PCI-E 16x slots with a relatively puny 4x slot. A 3-slot card means no SLI/Crossfire in all but the most ridiculous boards e.g. Asus P6T6.
3. Everyone talks about LCD bezels getting thinner, but the average monitor is still a big clunky mess. Considering the exorbitant costs involved, and the fact that you still have bezels at least 1/2", I think the typical spendy gamer would be better served by a large LCD or Plasma TV. Sure, you will get better resolution out of 6 displays, but is 5760x2160 really worth the extra $3000 it will cost to pull off ?
4. Generally, the people who actually need (not just want) display matrices are those who couldn't care less about gaming performance. This is where Matrox comes in, because their GPUs suck but they are firmly entrenched in the pro multi-display market. Their M9188 card supports 8 displays on a single-slot card. Sure, it costs something like $2000, but if you're in the type of work that requires 8 displays (or 16), money is no object.
5. At some point, you need to consider the ratio of CPU/GPU to displays. At one point I had 7 displays, but they were fed via 3 PCs, linked together using Synergy. As a coder, it's really no big issue to have my IDE on one machine, my browser on a second, and a test environment (read: pr0n) on another. It's not like I'm going to maximize one window across 7 screens (not even pr0n).
So yeah, I think this product is a dead-end promo gimmick, as is most of the stuff at Computex. Just a bunch of tech firms showing off for bragging rights.
"People must rely on properly configured OS-level permissions for securing against untrusted developers"
People must rely on a size 13 boot to the head for securing against untrusted developers.
I mean really, if you don't trust your developer, fire the incompetent lying sack of shit. I don't consider myself a super coder (anymore), but it's not exactly rocket science to secure the average PHP script. Sanitize the inputs, escape any SQL parameters (or use prepared statements), and if your app needs to do stuff like "exec('sudo rm -rf/')", you just might want to rethink what it is you're trying to do for your lusers.
The reason PHP takes so much flak is because it's a very popular, rather easy, and embarrassingly sloppy hodge-podge of diverse functionality. By that virtue, it attracts a larger-than-usual share of troublesome coders and users. Nobody's ever really heard of vulnerabilities in, say, A+, because there's only about 3 people who use that language.
What really pisses me off is they get away with that sort of condescending bullshit because they know these transgressions are too cheap to litigate. You're not going to sue a police officer (and the administrator) over anything less than a couple thousand, and we all know judges have a natural lenience for cops - unless you stumble upon a cop who's pissed that judge off in the past.
Like everything else in this nickel-and-dime world, justice is a business. People get in that business to get a paycheck, fuck heroism and fair trial.
They monitor us, we monitor them. That's fair. They monitor us, we can't monitor them. That's unfair. They don't monitor us, we monitor them. That would also be fair, because WE PAY THEIR FUCKING SALARIES.
If they don't like it, they're more than welcome to forgo their special extra-legal privileges in exchange for less surveillance.
The same Rampart division responsible for the most publicized police corruption scandal of the 20th century ?
I haven't seen the show, but unless it revolves around cops taking bribes from inferior hip-hop magnates and staging street violence for profit, I'd have to call shenanigans on the whole "based off of the real life" part.
I have been subjected to very little redneck/inbred/swine-glamorizing/idiocratic/chia-pet-IQ programming since I started downloading what I explicitly wanted to see, and NOTHING ELSE.
A single episode of CSI makes gives me a painful eye-roll twitch already. if I had to channel-surf through Cops and that stupid-spoiled-teenage-garbage-eater-party crap, I guarantee you I would become the next David Koresh.
I don't think I've ever seen a garbage disposal my whole life. Seems like a very "American thing", the rest of the world is perfectly capable of throwing waste in the GARBAGE before doing their dishes:/
DHS : "We have intercepted unpatriotic broadcasts from this IP address. We should brute-force our way in and terminate the offending process, while installing our own rootkit for future monitoring."
BOFH : "Yes. Or I could just kill the switch port and go back to farming motes on my DK. And while I'm in there, I'll disable YOUR port too."
It amazes me that the DHS continues to exist, after nearly a decade of blissfully ignoring the constitution and systematically wasting public funds with their half-baked scare tactics and military-grade solutions "Fuck thinking, let's blow things up the hard way". Seems I could replace the entire Cybersecurity wing with, you know, just me and a laptop running Linux.
Pretend for the sake of argument that today's money is NOT imaginary... a stretch, I know, but work with me here.
If someone breaches your bank account, takes out your money, they have money. They can use that money to buy stuff.
If someone takes your virtual furniture, they have virtual furniture. You can't do shit with virtual furniture unless you find another cretin to buy your virtual couches in exchange for MONEY. There's a big difference.
If I go get obscenely drunk tonight and invent "virtual bear hugs" and a web site where they can be traded, and someone "steals" a bunch of virtual bear hugs, it's still just mass hysteria built atop a pile of bullshit. The fact that there are some seriously deranged people willing to pay for this bullshit, does not mean it should be a matter of public interest worthy of police oversight. At the heart of it all, these people are arguing over nothing.
Ultimately, if anyone can do something about the "theft", it's the sysadmins of Habbo Hotel. Check the logs, find out who "stole" the shit, and return it. Maybe ban the user if this is considered grief-play. If we let this kind of thing get out of hand, next time we'll be throwing twelve year olds in PMITA federal prison for ninja'ing in World of Warcraft...
All I remember is playing it for about ten minutes and getting hella bored. I don't give a flying fuck about that russian guy and that manipulative skank they expect me to court.
The greatest thing about GTA 1 and 2 were that you could jump right into the game and start driving/killing/smashing things right away. It was instant gratification. GTA 3 was still some of that, in 3D - still quite a bit of fun. GTA IV didn't have that feel at all, I found it extremely tedious. Go here, watch this cutscene, idiot brother/uncle/half-landed-sack-of-shit-making-sure-you-get-the-stereotype tells you where to poop, you go there and poop, then go back to the garage/brothel/bananarepublic and have yourself another cutscene. It was like Final Fantasy 9 with cars.
Now if someone's really going to write a review of Red Dead Redemption, perhaps a nod to Call of Juarez might be in order ? When I read the write-up for RDR, I think of Juarez. Cowboys, sandbox, shitty combat mechanic, and a whole lotta barren land reminiscent of the march of doom from Halas to Freeport in EQ1.
Network ports are cute, but I find I get more mileage out of a basic Linux box running Samba. That way, I can install ALL my printers on one box and manage them centrally. The Linux box usually costs less than the ethernet option on the printer... and in my experience works more reliably.
What's an acceptable price for a steaming pile of shit ? That accounts for 95% of the *IAA's output.
I get that I'm a freak, but I would much rather torrent an album, then send a $20 paypal to the artist if I liked it, than spend $10 at Walmart to buy the same music on disc - and I'm not even tabulating my irrational hatred of Walmart yet. The big problem is that we all know the people who profit off the arts are not the ones responsible for our enjoyment. They are pimps, nobody likes a pimp. No, not even with the fuzzy purple hat and cane. Pimps are parasites, and so is the bulk of the *IAA.
Another example: in recent years I've become highly interested in the local music scene. When I find a band I like, I buy them a round and a copy of their album, or hand them a $10 and ask them to email it to me. Sometimes I help them put up a little web site, pro bono. I like that, no middleman. If it helps them make more of the music I like, great! If they want to spend the money on hookers and blow, that's cool too (call me!). If I was entertained, they deserve to be entertained, that's just how I see it.
You couldn't give me that end-to-end experience in a shrink-wrapped package, or a faceless download on iTunes. Real music fans want to connect with the artists, shoot the shit with them and thank them personally for creating something enjoyable. They don't go to shows to hear the same old music and sing along, otherwise bands wouldn't bother with the stresses of touring, they'd film the set in their backyard and sell DVDs to everyone. Fans go to shows because it's an intimate event, where they might meet & greet the idols, and meet like-minded individuals in the crowd.
Music is a social thing, you can't dumb it down to a number and a dollar sign. That's the most infinitesimally small part of it.
You're absolutely right. Who gives a crap about torrents, when you can carry a terabyte of warez in your back pocket...
Though I miss the old floppy parties, they were really just an excuse to hang out with fellow geeks and play LAN games and/or drink ourselves stupid. Fun times.
ACTA won't end piracy. Piracy will adapt. These corporate tycoons and their congressional meat puppets are sloppy and naive. So what if IsoHunt blocks all US addresses ? This is the goddamned internet! Proxies. Use them.
Swedish courts can write injunctions until their fingers bleed, it only means people will get their fix elsewhere. TPB can't work on and other "torrent related site" ? Ok, Garry Fung can hire them up here in Canada, at least until they replace Obama with another oil baron to which our P.M. can suck up.
The biggest problem with these unconstitutional laws is they open up opportunities elsewhere. If the U.S., Sweden, or even Canada becomes unlivable for piracy sympathizers, we will find some other place to work our jobs, pay our taxes and live our lives, and there will always be at least one nation that will welcome our money with open arms. Even if that nation is China, if push comes to shove, I'll learn some Mandarin and Cantonese and go help them destroy the west.
Regardless of your stance on piracy itself, at some level you need to take a step back and look at what they're really doing here. If it's not piracy it's drugs, if it's not drugs it's sex, if it's not sex it'll be something else. Underneath it all, these are people who want our money, can't get it via normal means - in other words, they're not selling something we want to buy - so they enact arbitrary laws that force us to give up our money, whether we like it or not. Why is Oxycontin legal if you buy it from this rich guy, but it's a heinous offense if you buy it from this other guy down the street ? Why ? Because the rich guy bribes the congressmen, who bribe the regionals, who bribe the chiefs of police, who tell their lackeys which agenda to push that week. It's not about right vs wrong, it's about who paid for those Audis.
Freedom, they don't like us having it. Pick one thing, anything you hold dear. If there is a financial incentive, they will take it away from you, then sell it back at a premium.
As a programmer, I'm going to stop you right there. What you speak of is noble, and might seem like common sense, but I don't expect a rockstar developer to be attracted to a non-profit org. Not unless your mission is to hit NVidia with a massive cluestick so he can buy GPUs that will actually run Crysis 2.
I obviously can't speak for everyone, but what motivates me is a combination of challenge and "coolness factor". I write code because I want to create something awesome, that I can be proud of and get oohs and aahs (and hisses) from my peers. That idealism is what drives innovation. Everyone else is just a "solutions developer", which is a fancy term for "duct tape programmer". Dime a dozen.
It's also never easy to take an internal app, generalize it, and sell it to others. For one, "tidying up the code" is never easy. In fact, in most cases it's a cost-prohibitive venture, something only to be done as a last resort. If your goal is to create a productized app, you need to plan for it from the very beginning, and corollary to that you need a developer that knows how to build resaleable code. That usually means adding a few extra layers of abstraction all over the place, significantly increasing development time and thus cost.
If you ever get to the point where you can sell the app, before you even turn a profit (revenue is not profit), you have to start worrying about support. Just because you know how to work it, doesn't mean that random idiot at that other NPO will have a clue. Remember, you spent an extra 35% to make this thing customizable. Before you can call it a success, you need to make that 35% back, in excess of support expenses. If the other guy's a complete imbecile, his problems are your problem. If that means you have to fly down and install it yourself, it's on your dime, because the dumb guy will say "This app is poorly documented" when what he really means is "I'm just here because no one else will employ me". His boss will take his word over yours, of course.
Then you've gone from running a lean, focused NPO, to running a full-blown software business on the side, with a team that is not experienced in that industry. I think for most people, that's more migraines than they're willing to endure "for a noble cause".
For once, you can by the cynic, and I'll be the optimist.
There are indeed some people who are capable of greater things than the average person. Or, to use your own words, I think that Da Vinci-level humans abound. The true problem is there are a hundred-fold more posers who are all talk and no walk. Given the nature of western business and economy, those posers tend to get farther up the corporate ladder than the Da Vincis, because the one skill a poser can truly master is the art of deception.
If I create software that (somehow) gets a person killed, through an error of my own doing and not the user's, am I not responsible for it ? Pretend EULA's don't apply, just for the sake of argument.
If a group of executives create a corporation, whose actions cause great harm and financial distress to millions of people (forget the wildlife for now), don't you think the people behind the corporation should be held responsible ? I think it's high time the concept of incorporation was revisited. Corporations don't ruin society, people do.
I don't think there's anything wrong with taking a picture of your meal. ONE! Right when they lay it down in front of you, snap the pic with your phone and dig in.
On countless occasions, I've seen pictures of a dish that made me want to try that dish, when the description alone didn't do it for me. How often have you been sitting in a restaurant, not knowing what to order, when another patron's meal arrives and you say "I want what he's having" ? Well a picture on a blog is the same thing, except I don't have to be in that restaurant to see it. More importantly, if it looks tasty, I am far more likely to want to go there, than were I just randomly walking around with a growling stomach.
In a similar vein, pictures help introduce people to foods they don't know. Show me a picture of something I've never eaten, and I can make a preliminary decision of whether I'd want to put that in my mouth. Show me just some long-ass vowel-anemic name and a terse description, and I'll trot my ignorant ass down to the pub across the street, where I know what I'm ordering. Or worse, I'll blindly order the strange thing, not like it, and tell everyone how disgusting it was.
The only chefs who should be worried about pictures, are the ones serving nasty food. Frankly, they deserve to fail, and anything that expedites the process is fine by me.
As much as I feel today's China is an unchecked threat to the so-called global economy, and by extension world peace, they do raise a valid point here. We can't just go pointing fingers without any proof, and since there's no legal way to get solid proof of piracy, the U.S. doesn't have a leg to stand on. Just as the RIAA, MPAA and BSA lose, or I should say settle, more suits than they win, because they know their evidence is bogus (but the defendant does not), this too is a false battle congress simply cannot win.
More importantly, it is a false battle they should not be starting in the first place. It is the embarrassing result of rampant lobbying by a handful of corporate giants, trying to hire public officials to throw their stones for them.
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The way I see it, Adobe is taking a cue from Sony and trying to supplant a perfectly usable and cost-effective technology (e.g. HTML, CD-Audio, HD-DVD) with a perfectly moronic proprietary cost-prohibitive overlicensed substitute (e.g. PDF, MiniDisc, BluRay).
They probably figured Acrobat would replace Internet Explorer at some point, you know, because HTML sucks in their mind. Why else would they embed code and video into something that started life as a (shudder) "Portable Document Format" ? The whole point of PDF was to have a faithful, device-independent representation of a print-ready document - PostScript to go! How they fucked it up is just classic Adobe narcissism.
I have a few beefs (beeves?) about this product:
1. Displayport is a pain in the ass, with its use of active vs passive adapters, both of which are still hard to find and confusing to the average consumer. Few displays ship with Displayport, and of those few, hardly any ship with a suitable cable, instead relying on HDMI or DVI. The cable isn't cheap.
2. Why did they spread to a 3rd slot ? Couldn't they have placed all 12 connectors in a single row, rotated 90 degrees ? Or at least split them off to a breakout cable. Motherboards are designed for double-wide cards, as they usually gap the two PCI-E 16x slots with a relatively puny 4x slot. A 3-slot card means no SLI/Crossfire in all but the most ridiculous boards e.g. Asus P6T6.
3. Everyone talks about LCD bezels getting thinner, but the average monitor is still a big clunky mess. Considering the exorbitant costs involved, and the fact that you still have bezels at least 1/2", I think the typical spendy gamer would be better served by a large LCD or Plasma TV. Sure, you will get better resolution out of 6 displays, but is 5760x2160 really worth the extra $3000 it will cost to pull off ?
4. Generally, the people who actually need (not just want) display matrices are those who couldn't care less about gaming performance. This is where Matrox comes in, because their GPUs suck but they are firmly entrenched in the pro multi-display market. Their M9188 card supports 8 displays on a single-slot card. Sure, it costs something like $2000, but if you're in the type of work that requires 8 displays (or 16), money is no object.
5. At some point, you need to consider the ratio of CPU/GPU to displays. At one point I had 7 displays, but they were fed via 3 PCs, linked together using Synergy. As a coder, it's really no big issue to have my IDE on one machine, my browser on a second, and a test environment (read: pr0n) on another. It's not like I'm going to maximize one window across 7 screens (not even pr0n).
So yeah, I think this product is a dead-end promo gimmick, as is most of the stuff at Computex. Just a bunch of tech firms showing off for bragging rights.
FTS:
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is seeking attention
FTFY.
"People must rely on properly configured OS-level permissions for securing against untrusted developers"
People must rely on a size 13 boot to the head for securing against untrusted developers.
I mean really, if you don't trust your developer, fire the incompetent lying sack of shit. I don't consider myself a super coder (anymore), but it's not exactly rocket science to secure the average PHP script. Sanitize the inputs, escape any SQL parameters (or use prepared statements), and if your app needs to do stuff like "exec('sudo rm -rf /')", you just might want to rethink what it is you're trying to do for your lusers.
The reason PHP takes so much flak is because it's a very popular, rather easy, and embarrassingly sloppy hodge-podge of diverse functionality. By that virtue, it attracts a larger-than-usual share of troublesome coders and users. Nobody's ever really heard of vulnerabilities in, say, A+, because there's only about 3 people who use that language.
A "fair man" ?
What really pisses me off is they get away with that sort of condescending bullshit because they know these transgressions are too cheap to litigate. You're not going to sue a police officer (and the administrator) over anything less than a couple thousand, and we all know judges have a natural lenience for cops - unless you stumble upon a cop who's pissed that judge off in the past.
Like everything else in this nickel-and-dime world, justice is a business. People get in that business to get a paycheck, fuck heroism and fair trial.
Naw, more likely if someone gets away, he will have a good description of you and your car to give as "evidence", to maintain his record.
They monitor us, we monitor them. That's fair.
They monitor us, we can't monitor them. That's unfair.
They don't monitor us, we monitor them. That would also be fair, because WE PAY THEIR FUCKING SALARIES.
If they don't like it, they're more than welcome to forgo their special extra-legal privileges in exchange for less surveillance.
The same Rampart division responsible for the most publicized police corruption scandal of the 20th century ?
I haven't seen the show, but unless it revolves around cops taking bribes from inferior hip-hop magnates and staging street violence for profit, I'd have to call shenanigans on the whole "based off of the real life" part.
Simple solution:cancel your cable subscription.
I have been subjected to very little redneck/inbred/swine-glamorizing/idiocratic/chia-pet-IQ programming since I started downloading what I explicitly wanted to see, and NOTHING ELSE.
A single episode of CSI makes gives me a painful eye-roll twitch already. if I had to channel-surf through Cops and that stupid-spoiled-teenage-garbage-eater-party crap, I guarantee you I would become the next David Koresh.
Difference being that a Picasso painting is widely accepted to be:
1. a rare and irreplaceable item
-and-
2. valuable
A virtual couch is just a series of bits. Habbo can immediately replace these things at negligible cost. Try replacing a Picasso at negligible cost.
I steal your car, you lose the car. The dealership can't snap their fingers and make a new car appear in your driveway.
I don't think I've ever seen a garbage disposal my whole life. Seems like a very "American thing", the rest of the world is perfectly capable of throwing waste in the GARBAGE before doing their dishes :/
"Most balanced" in the news industry is like "least retarded" in the special olympics. It's all relative...
DHS : "We have intercepted unpatriotic broadcasts from this IP address. We should brute-force our way in and terminate the offending process, while installing our own rootkit for future monitoring."
BOFH : "Yes. Or I could just kill the switch port and go back to farming motes on my DK. And while I'm in there, I'll disable YOUR port too."
It amazes me that the DHS continues to exist, after nearly a decade of blissfully ignoring the constitution and systematically wasting public funds with their half-baked scare tactics and military-grade solutions "Fuck thinking, let's blow things up the hard way". Seems I could replace the entire Cybersecurity wing with, you know, just me and a laptop running Linux.
Pretend for the sake of argument that today's money is NOT imaginary... a stretch, I know, but work with me here.
If someone breaches your bank account, takes out your money, they have money. They can use that money to buy stuff.
If someone takes your virtual furniture, they have virtual furniture. You can't do shit with virtual furniture unless you find another cretin to buy your virtual couches in exchange for MONEY. There's a big difference.
If I go get obscenely drunk tonight and invent "virtual bear hugs" and a web site where they can be traded, and someone "steals" a bunch of virtual bear hugs, it's still just mass hysteria built atop a pile of bullshit. The fact that there are some seriously deranged people willing to pay for this bullshit, does not mean it should be a matter of public interest worthy of police oversight. At the heart of it all, these people are arguing over nothing.
Ultimately, if anyone can do something about the "theft", it's the sysadmins of Habbo Hotel. Check the logs, find out who "stole" the shit, and return it. Maybe ban the user if this is considered grief-play. If we let this kind of thing get out of hand, next time we'll be throwing twelve year olds in PMITA federal prison for ninja'ing in World of Warcraft...
Capitalism is a faith-based system rooted in the belief in an imaginary construct that represents wealth.
It is no less a religion than Buddhism or Baha'i.
All I remember is playing it for about ten minutes and getting hella bored. I don't give a flying fuck about that russian guy and that manipulative skank they expect me to court.
The greatest thing about GTA 1 and 2 were that you could jump right into the game and start driving/killing/smashing things right away. It was instant gratification. GTA 3 was still some of that, in 3D - still quite a bit of fun. GTA IV didn't have that feel at all, I found it extremely tedious. Go here, watch this cutscene, idiot brother/uncle/half-landed-sack-of-shit-making-sure-you-get-the-stereotype tells you where to poop, you go there and poop, then go back to the garage/brothel/bananarepublic and have yourself another cutscene. It was like Final Fantasy 9 with cars.
Now if someone's really going to write a review of Red Dead Redemption, perhaps a nod to Call of Juarez might be in order ? When I read the write-up for RDR, I think of Juarez. Cowboys, sandbox, shitty combat mechanic, and a whole lotta barren land reminiscent of the march of doom from Halas to Freeport in EQ1.
Network ports are cute, but I find I get more mileage out of a basic Linux box running Samba. That way, I can install ALL my printers on one box and manage them centrally. The Linux box usually costs less than the ethernet option on the printer... and in my experience works more reliably.
What's an acceptable price for a steaming pile of shit ? That accounts for 95% of the *IAA's output.
I get that I'm a freak, but I would much rather torrent an album, then send a $20 paypal to the artist if I liked it, than spend $10 at Walmart to buy the same music on disc - and I'm not even tabulating my irrational hatred of Walmart yet. The big problem is that we all know the people who profit off the arts are not the ones responsible for our enjoyment. They are pimps, nobody likes a pimp. No, not even with the fuzzy purple hat and cane. Pimps are parasites, and so is the bulk of the *IAA.
Another example: in recent years I've become highly interested in the local music scene. When I find a band I like, I buy them a round and a copy of their album, or hand them a $10 and ask them to email it to me. Sometimes I help them put up a little web site, pro bono. I like that, no middleman. If it helps them make more of the music I like, great! If they want to spend the money on hookers and blow, that's cool too (call me!). If I was entertained, they deserve to be entertained, that's just how I see it.
You couldn't give me that end-to-end experience in a shrink-wrapped package, or a faceless download on iTunes. Real music fans want to connect with the artists, shoot the shit with them and thank them personally for creating something enjoyable. They don't go to shows to hear the same old music and sing along, otherwise bands wouldn't bother with the stresses of touring, they'd film the set in their backyard and sell DVDs to everyone. Fans go to shows because it's an intimate event, where they might meet & greet the idols, and meet like-minded individuals in the crowd.
Music is a social thing, you can't dumb it down to a number and a dollar sign. That's the most infinitesimally small part of it.
You're absolutely right. Who gives a crap about torrents, when you can carry a terabyte of warez in your back pocket...
Though I miss the old floppy parties, they were really just an excuse to hang out with fellow geeks and play LAN games and/or drink ourselves stupid. Fun times.
ACTA won't end piracy. Piracy will adapt. These corporate tycoons and their congressional meat puppets are sloppy and naive. So what if IsoHunt blocks all US addresses ? This is the goddamned internet! Proxies. Use them.
Swedish courts can write injunctions until their fingers bleed, it only means people will get their fix elsewhere. TPB can't work on and other "torrent related site" ? Ok, Garry Fung can hire them up here in Canada, at least until they replace Obama with another oil baron to which our P.M. can suck up.
The biggest problem with these unconstitutional laws is they open up opportunities elsewhere. If the U.S., Sweden, or even Canada becomes unlivable for piracy sympathizers, we will find some other place to work our jobs, pay our taxes and live our lives, and there will always be at least one nation that will welcome our money with open arms. Even if that nation is China, if push comes to shove, I'll learn some Mandarin and Cantonese and go help them destroy the west.
Regardless of your stance on piracy itself, at some level you need to take a step back and look at what they're really doing here. If it's not piracy it's drugs, if it's not drugs it's sex, if it's not sex it'll be something else. Underneath it all, these are people who want our money, can't get it via normal means - in other words, they're not selling something we want to buy - so they enact arbitrary laws that force us to give up our money, whether we like it or not. Why is Oxycontin legal if you buy it from this rich guy, but it's a heinous offense if you buy it from this other guy down the street ? Why ? Because the rich guy bribes the congressmen, who bribe the regionals, who bribe the chiefs of police, who tell their lackeys which agenda to push that week. It's not about right vs wrong, it's about who paid for those Audis.
Freedom, they don't like us having it. Pick one thing, anything you hold dear. If there is a financial incentive, they will take it away from you, then sell it back at a premium.
As a programmer, I'm going to stop you right there. What you speak of is noble, and might seem like common sense, but I don't expect a rockstar developer to be attracted to a non-profit org. Not unless your mission is to hit NVidia with a massive cluestick so he can buy GPUs that will actually run Crysis 2.
I obviously can't speak for everyone, but what motivates me is a combination of challenge and "coolness factor". I write code because I want to create something awesome, that I can be proud of and get oohs and aahs (and hisses) from my peers. That idealism is what drives innovation. Everyone else is just a "solutions developer", which is a fancy term for "duct tape programmer". Dime a dozen.
It's also never easy to take an internal app, generalize it, and sell it to others. For one, "tidying up the code" is never easy. In fact, in most cases it's a cost-prohibitive venture, something only to be done as a last resort. If your goal is to create a productized app, you need to plan for it from the very beginning, and corollary to that you need a developer that knows how to build resaleable code. That usually means adding a few extra layers of abstraction all over the place, significantly increasing development time and thus cost.
If you ever get to the point where you can sell the app, before you even turn a profit (revenue is not profit), you have to start worrying about support. Just because you know how to work it, doesn't mean that random idiot at that other NPO will have a clue. Remember, you spent an extra 35% to make this thing customizable. Before you can call it a success, you need to make that 35% back, in excess of support expenses. If the other guy's a complete imbecile, his problems are your problem. If that means you have to fly down and install it yourself, it's on your dime, because the dumb guy will say "This app is poorly documented" when what he really means is "I'm just here because no one else will employ me". His boss will take his word over yours, of course.
Then you've gone from running a lean, focused NPO, to running a full-blown software business on the side, with a team that is not experienced in that industry. I think for most people, that's more migraines than they're willing to endure "for a noble cause".
For once, you can by the cynic, and I'll be the optimist.
There are indeed some people who are capable of greater things than the average person. Or, to use your own words, I think that Da Vinci-level humans abound. The true problem is there are a hundred-fold more posers who are all talk and no walk. Given the nature of western business and economy, those posers tend to get farther up the corporate ladder than the Da Vincis, because the one skill a poser can truly master is the art of deception.
Corporations are operated by people.
If I create software that (somehow) gets a person killed, through an error of my own doing and not the user's, am I not responsible for it ? Pretend EULA's don't apply, just for the sake of argument.
If a group of executives create a corporation, whose actions cause great harm and financial distress to millions of people (forget the wildlife for now), don't you think the people behind the corporation should be held responsible ? I think it's high time the concept of incorporation was revisited. Corporations don't ruin society, people do.
I don't think there's anything wrong with taking a picture of your meal. ONE! Right when they lay it down in front of you, snap the pic with your phone and dig in.
On countless occasions, I've seen pictures of a dish that made me want to try that dish, when the description alone didn't do it for me. How often have you been sitting in a restaurant, not knowing what to order, when another patron's meal arrives and you say "I want what he's having" ? Well a picture on a blog is the same thing, except I don't have to be in that restaurant to see it. More importantly, if it looks tasty, I am far more likely to want to go there, than were I just randomly walking around with a growling stomach.
In a similar vein, pictures help introduce people to foods they don't know. Show me a picture of something I've never eaten, and I can make a preliminary decision of whether I'd want to put that in my mouth. Show me just some long-ass vowel-anemic name and a terse description, and I'll trot my ignorant ass down to the pub across the street, where I know what I'm ordering. Or worse, I'll blindly order the strange thing, not like it, and tell everyone how disgusting it was.
The only chefs who should be worried about pictures, are the ones serving nasty food. Frankly, they deserve to fail, and anything that expedites the process is fine by me.
As much as I feel today's China is an unchecked threat to the so-called global economy, and by extension world peace, they do raise a valid point here. We can't just go pointing fingers without any proof, and since there's no legal way to get solid proof of piracy, the U.S. doesn't have a leg to stand on. Just as the RIAA, MPAA and BSA lose, or I should say settle, more suits than they win, because they know their evidence is bogus (but the defendant does not), this too is a false battle congress simply cannot win.
More importantly, it is a false battle they should not be starting in the first place. It is the embarrassing result of rampant lobbying by a handful of corporate giants, trying to hire public officials to throw their stones for them.