So do you have an idea whether it's just a small segment of the Libertarian Party that supports it? The Manhattan LP supports it. Ron Paul has gone on record supporting it as well. The official LP web site says nothing about it.
The telecoms know what they're doing is wrong in every sense of the word, and yet they are continuing their actions with the full expectation that "I was only following orders" is a legitimate defense. They deserve lynching. Also, we *can* lynch them. The level of collusion between the two major parties and these two branches of government has created a situation where the truly responsible officials are in fact above the law. AT&T could have said no. They could have *publicly* said no, immediately identifying the government officials and putting the entire government on the spot. They should have been brave. They are a major US corporation with lobbying power individuals could never hope to have. If anyone could have said no, it was the telecoms. But they didn't.
His prediction is fatalistic, but you need only go to the Libertarian Party website to see that the Libertarian Party is against any regulation of the private sector. It's not a leap to imagine that a corrupt businessperson would use his freedom to discriminate against his workers, possibly even abusing his workers to the extent that a state of serfdom exists.
And money a central theme to the Libertarian Party. They even have their own currency, the Liberty Dollar. Sometimes, it looks as if the party is obsessed with money hoarding. And some Libertarians are. I would think most are not however.
I'm a libertarian and a political Independent. I could never in good conscious join the Libertarian Party... or any other political party for that matter. As the parent said, the party constantly shows how cold and dismissive it is to the weaker members of our society. The party wants to end welfare. It wants to de-emphasize the public school system. It is against affirmative action. And every now and then, the Libertarians will run a candidate somewhere who'll go into a rant about how we're using the wrong currency and should all switch to Liberty Dollars. The party just often leaves people scratching their heads.
Yes and no. It all started with NT 3.51. Windows 3.11 users like myself installed NT for better performance. People did the same with NT 4.0 vs '95/'98.
I believe the conventional wisdom is that ME was just a last opportunity to make a buck on the legacy-focused '98 crowd. The intention was for us all to go towards one of two XP systems based on Windows 2000. I know I bought ME the day it released (I collected OSen back then), and even I looked at my fresh desktop and wondered why the hell I bought this.:D
It's still kinda sad that one might consider Windows 2008 as a replacement for Microsoft's flagship consumer desktop OSen, Vista/XP. I mean sad in the sense that this is nothing new. I knew guys who went NT 3.51 on their laptops because they wanted more stability than Windows 3.11 had. I went NT 4.0 over Windows 95/98 for the same reason.
In both circumstances, I ran into hardware compatibility troubles. I wonder if Windows 2008 users wanting to use their multitude of consumer grade peripherals will have compatibility issues anymore.
TGI-Applebee-Chili-Tuesdays are a singular restaurant. Don't let the varying amounts of flair and the width of the stripes on the waitresses uniforms lead you to believe otherwise. There's no use in addressing TGI-Applebee-Chili-Tuesdays as "those places"
I can't stand CAPTCHAs but I have a very hard time reading more of them, and I'm pretty sure I'm not a bot.
The logic behind programming CAPTCHA type systems is beyond my experience, but I've been wondering about the feasibility of any system which verifies human input by asking a contextual question about some detail in an image. For example: the human is presented with an image of a boy and his dog. The human is asked the question: "What color is the boy's hat?"
As the parent mentions, a human is required to seed all the possible questions, and so therefore there is a finite dictionary of questions. You could add more potential images, each with their own specific questions. It would be trivial to learn the likely total number of questions. But I figure determining the correct answers could be harder. But also, I figure determining the correct answer as a human would be harder too. In my example, the hat is actually red. What if a human answers "magenta" or "rouge" or, if the human is color-blind, "grey"? It seems to me that potential questions need to be very carefully selected in order to avoid any misinterpretation.
So that said, are there such systems like in existence today that have resolved these issues? If you hate CAPTCHA, what is the best alternative?
There are a few other PS3 exclusives worth owning: Resistance, Grand Turismo, and Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. The former two are easily matched by Gears of War and the combo of Forza and Project Gotham Racing; but I have yet to see something comparable to Uncharted on the 360. It's a fun game that to me is reminiscent of Pitfall and Tomb Raider with an Indiana Jones feel to it. There is also Heavenly Sword; a wonderfully immersive game. The problem with Heavenly Sword and Uncharted is that both are relatively short (not as short as GoW however).
There are also some downloadable games like Pain and Flow. Both have a very narrow scope, but they are appealing.
Otherwise, at this time I think Xbox 360 is the better gaming platform in the strict sense. I am taking advantage of the PS3's media capabilities so I am getting more out of my system than is possible with a 360. I think overtime, PS3 will still come out top providing more developers start building off the PS3 and not merely porting to it from the 360, and providing PS3 exclusives get longer in duration. It's been said that these first generation PS3 games were so short that they felt like extended demos.
Overall, I still like the PS3 better as a system. That said, Xbox still has the better controller IMO.:D
Are you suggesting that by not listing the technical specs on the box, companies that make networking hardware are trying to maintain a secret, lock-in the consumer, and finally restrict their use of the hardware?
The only reason why technical specs are not printed on the box is because of marketing. Most consumers don't want to read those specs. They would never read those specs. Knowledgeable consumers conduct all their research outside of the store first. The only purpose of the box is just to wow you into feeling good about choosing the made-in-china wireless NIC in the red box over the made-in-china wireless NIC in the blue box.
I'll play Devil's advocate and say there is a sense that by condoning or encouraging people buying DRM'd products, over time this will lead to a large amount of DRM'd content floating in the wild. Think ten or twenty years into the future when people go back to look at this content as we do this era with things like '80s video clips and so on. In the future, the proliferation of DRM'd content may result in lost content. Consumers typically do not consider whether a DRM'd iTunes purchase will still be useable years down the road. This breeds a kind of disposable content attitude, leading future generations down a path of believing it's fair that they must purchase a video multiple times in order to play it on a multitude of platforms: computer, TV, portable video player, etc.
An opposing argument is that there would still be examples of the same content floating around without DRM; so it doesn't matter. There's no threat of valuable content being lost to time as a result of a DRM system no longer being supported. And that is likely so, although with politicians declaring war on protocols, who knows? Opponents of DRM believe that at best, content creators who want to use DRM are not thinking about the ultimate future of their content. They are only thinking about the immediate cash flow. And opponents of DRM want to discourage content creators from using DRM measures; therefore the best way to do this is to discourage consumers from purchasing DRM'd products; thus, showing content creators that DRM is not worth the investment.
They can't let Youtube use their content for nothing and compete against them in these ventures because, and I know this is a shock, it takes money to make stuff.
Sure they can. The quality on YouTube is pretty poor, and the runtimes on the videos are such that the vast majority of Viacom's properties couldn't be completely fit within YouTube's time restraints. NBC and ABC both have their own video sites where I can watch NBC and ABC properties at a higher quality and to completion. If want to see a 30 sec clip of the Facts of Life or Streethawk, or Automan, I can go to YouTube. It doesn't hurt the property holder, and if I want to watch a full episode of Lost, I can go to ABC. They can co-exist.
. Consider that there are tens of thousands of illegal clips posted to YouTube, the cumulative financial effect of which could conceivably be millions of dollars.
I generally agree with you, however given the quality and run time of these clips, Viacom can't accurately and realistically show financial damage. They can show copyright infringement in general, yes, but they can't show they've been negatively impacting by it. Look at the types of content Viacom is angry about: clips from television shows and films, clips taken from DVDs, clips taken from programming which is not available to the public in any other form (old TV shows), and music videos.
The latter is very much a commercial, and it makes no sense to prevent people from seeing music videos unless through MTV, Fuse, or VH-1. Clips from old out print video releases don't impact Viacom financially either because Viacom isn't making money on those products.
There's no telling how many people watched a small portion of a show in very low-rez on YouTube and was motivated to go out and purchase DVDs. As you can tell, my argument is that YouTube actually promotes interest in Viacom's products and can benefit Viacom financially.
I don't believe YouTube can call itself a common carrier anymore. YouTube has taken broad measures to remove infringing videos in the past, and so has created a recognized expectation to safeguard the copyrights of others.
Good. People should stop using their ISP's news servers for posting or downloading binaries. The retention on those servers just suck and the quotas are too small. There's just too much quality sheep porn to be had for a consumer to waste his time with such bad servers.
Seriously though, I wonder what the effect will be on commercial Usenet service providers like Giganews. I would think the immediate effect would be a leap in new subscriptions; but will it be very long before Cuomo decides to go after these companies, maybe even attempt to block Usenet access outright under some sky-is-falling failed logic. There is a lot of legal content in the alt.binaries hierarchy. There's a lot of porn, but at last I checked, much of it is spam for porn sites we presume to be operating legally. But some of my favorite binary groups have nothing to do with illegal subject matter or pirated goods.
They can be added, but won't newsserver admins decide whether or not to carry the groups? porn.girls.gone.wild probably already exists, but probably hasn't propagated far.
Now that I read over what I wrote, I do see that I mistakenly linked plagiarism as a goal of copyright protection, which it was not. But you do bring up a valid point with trusted digital notaries.
I don't see any reason to strength copyright protection as it is law today. I think it's already strong enough. But I am against abolishing copyrights altogether. My preference is for Creative Common licenses; however, I don't see deep pocket owners of copyrights stepping away from the current copyright law.
I enjoy it myself. There are other kits out there as well for the Mac platform, one made by Popcap (Bejeweled, Zuma). I only recommended the standard FOSS considering the neighborhood.:D
I'm not sure where the Pentax K20D compares with the 1DS. Pentax has pretty much withdrawn to the consumer and pro-sumer market. I would easily say that the Pentax cameras beat out Canon's Rebel line, especially when you factor in the ability to use K-mount lens going all the way back. I use a Super Tak and a Jupiter 9 whenever I can.
Ricoh actually makes great lenses. I prefer the lens in this generation of Ricoh over what's use in the Leica D-Lux 3 line. Ricoh is harder to get in the US though. One thing to note about the GR-Digital, it's a prime lens. Really nice wide, great for B&W. I'm a street photographer, so the Ricoh would be of great use to me, though right now I shoot Canon and Pentax. I don't know if the Ricoh's feature set is something that would be useful to your photography.
I have a Pentax K100D Super. The body on it pretty good. I like the viewfinder better than on the Rebel XTi. I also like the image stabilization system better. The K100D doesn't have the all-weather protection of the K10 (and I believe K20 as well), but it's a nice job. Of course, it loses on the pixel count. I haven't had a chance to shoot Sony, but I'd enjoy hearing a fellow slashdot shutterbug's opinion on it.
---it's not like the program is going to self destruct.
And you dont think if they could miraculously do that, they wouldnt?
Actually, I remember quite a few apps I had on diskette which had instructions not to install anymore after a specific number of installations -- usually 5. Afterwards, the diskette was useless.
I maintain a very large collection of photos from well over a hundred digital cameras, and I use this as my reference when making camera suggestions for people. For this purpose, Mac Finder and Spotlight are great. However, neither allows me to work on actually developing the shot. I need to eyeball every shot out of the hundreds I'll take in an weekend.
But for a while, while I was still learning Lightroom and discovering that all my meta data was being wiped out during exports, I relied extensively on command line tools such as exiftool. As you said, the possibilities are endless.
For me the perfect digital dark room is still a combination of workflow software for developing my shots and separate specialized tools for archival.
I take it the titles you use were pulled from the filename of your exports. I gave up on Aperture a while back when I couldn't get support for my cameras. Under Lightroom, when exporting I am presented with an option to adjust the custom naming convention I use for exports generally. I would expect Aperture to do this as well.
Now Mac is a different OS on commodity hardware, and I don't see much of a point.
You mentioned writing a game for Macintosh. If you wanted to do that, a Macintosh would be the better platform to work from as opposed to porting from another. There's several great tools at your disposal; Xcode, OpenGL, ClanLib, SDL is a great combo. You can do the development on Linux just as easily, but I really have enjoyed Xcode. You might too.
Ricoh is hardly behind the times on camera design and adoption. In fact, the GR Digital and Digital II are amazing cameras. Pentax is hardly behind the times either. The K20D is also quite an amazing camera. Pentax has one of the few consumer SLRs on the market that doesn't have a kit lens that's useless.
Many organizations buy into the luster of colorful brochures, happy sales reps, and the idea of the universality of Windows. They just assume there's a guarantee too.
Besides, Linux is a fad, and you know it's made by hackers, and hackers are evil, and it's a variant of UNIX, but it might be illegal too so you'll get in trouble with SCO or Novell or HP or somebody for using it, and besides no two Unixen are the same, etc. etc. etc.
Read my response above for a clarification of my point. You're arguing an example I gave of an opposing position I don't have.
But to answer your questions. I do know exactly what is needed to produce a hit game these days.
As for copyrights, I think there needs to be a new model for protecting digital properties. I'm uncomfortable with the use of the antiquated copyright system which was useful at best to prevent someone from taking my writing and passing it off as their own, or publishing it for sale as if it were theirs.
Personally, I do not accept that the software market is being injured by piracy -- the thesis for this whole debate. For one, it is impossible to know how many copies of your software are being bootlegged. The numbers generated are pulled out of asses in order to be as dramatic as possible, but really, I have no idea how many kids on myspace are "illegally" using Photoshop.
I bring up photoshop for a reason. It's such a popular application even among non professional creative types that its name is now a verb. It's probably a heavily pirated application. Its cost certainly makes it desirable. The more hands that touch Photoshop, "legally" or not, the more skilled users are created, and the more consumer loyalty is generated. So in this instance, software piracy can actually help a software product.
Slashdot Mirror
So do you have an idea whether it's just a small segment of the Libertarian Party that supports it? The Manhattan LP supports it. Ron Paul has gone on record supporting it as well. The official LP web site says nothing about it.
The telecoms know what they're doing is wrong in every sense of the word, and yet they are continuing their actions with the full expectation that "I was only following orders" is a legitimate defense. They deserve lynching. Also, we *can* lynch them. The level of collusion between the two major parties and these two branches of government has created a situation where the truly responsible officials are in fact above the law. AT&T could have said no. They could have *publicly* said no, immediately identifying the government officials and putting the entire government on the spot. They should have been brave. They are a major US corporation with lobbying power individuals could never hope to have. If anyone could have said no, it was the telecoms. But they didn't.
Oh I know, it was joke.
I was just pointing out how all these restaurants have morphed into a singular place serving basically the same items. :D
His prediction is fatalistic, but you need only go to the Libertarian Party website to see that the Libertarian Party is against any regulation of the private sector. It's not a leap to imagine that a corrupt businessperson would use his freedom to discriminate against his workers, possibly even abusing his workers to the extent that a state of serfdom exists.
And money a central theme to the Libertarian Party. They even have their own currency, the Liberty Dollar. Sometimes, it looks as if the party is obsessed with money hoarding. And some Libertarians are. I would think most are not however.
I'm a libertarian and a political Independent. I could never in good conscious join the Libertarian Party... or any other political party for that matter. As the parent said, the party constantly shows how cold and dismissive it is to the weaker members of our society. The party wants to end welfare. It wants to de-emphasize the public school system. It is against affirmative action. And every now and then, the Libertarians will run a candidate somewhere who'll go into a rant about how we're using the wrong currency and should all switch to Liberty Dollars. The party just often leaves people scratching their heads.
Yes and no. It all started with NT 3.51. Windows 3.11 users like myself installed NT for better performance. People did the same with NT 4.0 vs '95/'98.
I believe the conventional wisdom is that ME was just a last opportunity to make a buck on the legacy-focused '98 crowd. The intention was for us all to go towards one of two XP systems based on Windows 2000. I know I bought ME the day it released (I collected OSen back then), and even I looked at my fresh desktop and wondered why the hell I bought this. :D
It's still kinda sad that one might consider Windows 2008 as a replacement for Microsoft's flagship consumer desktop OSen, Vista/XP. I mean sad in the sense that this is nothing new. I knew guys who went NT 3.51 on their laptops because they wanted more stability than Windows 3.11 had. I went NT 4.0 over Windows 95/98 for the same reason.
In both circumstances, I ran into hardware compatibility troubles. I wonder if Windows 2008 users wanting to use their multitude of consumer grade peripherals will have compatibility issues anymore.
TGI-Applebee-Chili-Tuesdays are a singular restaurant. Don't let the varying amounts of flair and the width of the stripes on the waitresses uniforms lead you to believe otherwise. There's no use in addressing TGI-Applebee-Chili-Tuesdays as "those places"
But it can pump out an excellent burger.
I can't stand CAPTCHAs but I have a very hard time reading more of them, and I'm pretty sure I'm not a bot.
The logic behind programming CAPTCHA type systems is beyond my experience, but I've been wondering about the feasibility of any system which verifies human input by asking a contextual question about some detail in an image. For example: the human is presented with an image of a boy and his dog. The human is asked the question: "What color is the boy's hat?"
As the parent mentions, a human is required to seed all the possible questions, and so therefore there is a finite dictionary of questions. You could add more potential images, each with their own specific questions. It would be trivial to learn the likely total number of questions. But I figure determining the correct answers could be harder. But also, I figure determining the correct answer as a human would be harder too. In my example, the hat is actually red. What if a human answers "magenta" or "rouge" or, if the human is color-blind, "grey"? It seems to me that potential questions need to be very carefully selected in order to avoid any misinterpretation.
So that said, are there such systems like in existence today that have resolved these issues? If you hate CAPTCHA, what is the best alternative?
There are a few other PS3 exclusives worth owning: Resistance, Grand Turismo, and Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. The former two are easily matched by Gears of War and the combo of Forza and Project Gotham Racing; but I have yet to see something comparable to Uncharted on the 360. It's a fun game that to me is reminiscent of Pitfall and Tomb Raider with an Indiana Jones feel to it. There is also Heavenly Sword; a wonderfully immersive game. The problem with Heavenly Sword and Uncharted is that both are relatively short (not as short as GoW however).
There are also some downloadable games like Pain and Flow. Both have a very narrow scope, but they are appealing.
Otherwise, at this time I think Xbox 360 is the better gaming platform in the strict sense. I am taking advantage of the PS3's media capabilities so I am getting more out of my system than is possible with a 360. I think overtime, PS3 will still come out top providing more developers start building off the PS3 and not merely porting to it from the 360, and providing PS3 exclusives get longer in duration. It's been said that these first generation PS3 games were so short that they felt like extended demos.
Overall, I still like the PS3 better as a system. That said, Xbox still has the better controller IMO. :D
Are you suggesting that by not listing the technical specs on the box, companies that make networking hardware are trying to maintain a secret, lock-in the consumer, and finally restrict their use of the hardware?
The only reason why technical specs are not printed on the box is because of marketing. Most consumers don't want to read those specs. They would never read those specs. Knowledgeable consumers conduct all their research outside of the store first. The only purpose of the box is just to wow you into feeling good about choosing the made-in-china wireless NIC in the red box over the made-in-china wireless NIC in the blue box.
I'll play Devil's advocate and say there is a sense that by condoning or encouraging people buying DRM'd products, over time this will lead to a large amount of DRM'd content floating in the wild. Think ten or twenty years into the future when people go back to look at this content as we do this era with things like '80s video clips and so on. In the future, the proliferation of DRM'd content may result in lost content. Consumers typically do not consider whether a DRM'd iTunes purchase will still be useable years down the road. This breeds a kind of disposable content attitude, leading future generations down a path of believing it's fair that they must purchase a video multiple times in order to play it on a multitude of platforms: computer, TV, portable video player, etc.
An opposing argument is that there would still be examples of the same content floating around without DRM; so it doesn't matter. There's no threat of valuable content being lost to time as a result of a DRM system no longer being supported. And that is likely so, although with politicians declaring war on protocols, who knows? Opponents of DRM believe that at best, content creators who want to use DRM are not thinking about the ultimate future of their content. They are only thinking about the immediate cash flow. And opponents of DRM want to discourage content creators from using DRM measures; therefore the best way to do this is to discourage consumers from purchasing DRM'd products; thus, showing content creators that DRM is not worth the investment.
They can't let Youtube use their content for nothing and compete against them in these ventures because, and I know this is a shock, it takes money to make stuff.
Sure they can. The quality on YouTube is pretty poor, and the runtimes on the videos are such that the vast majority of Viacom's properties couldn't be completely fit within YouTube's time restraints. NBC and ABC both have their own video sites where I can watch NBC and ABC properties at a higher quality and to completion. If want to see a 30 sec clip of the Facts of Life or Streethawk, or Automan, I can go to YouTube. It doesn't hurt the property holder, and if I want to watch a full episode of Lost, I can go to ABC. They can co-exist.
. Consider that there are tens of thousands of illegal clips posted to YouTube, the cumulative financial effect of which could conceivably be millions of dollars.
I generally agree with you, however given the quality and run time of these clips, Viacom can't accurately and realistically show financial damage. They can show copyright infringement in general, yes, but they can't show they've been negatively impacting by it. Look at the types of content Viacom is angry about: clips from television shows and films, clips taken from DVDs, clips taken from programming which is not available to the public in any other form (old TV shows), and music videos.
The latter is very much a commercial, and it makes no sense to prevent people from seeing music videos unless through MTV, Fuse, or VH-1. Clips from old out print video releases don't impact Viacom financially either because Viacom isn't making money on those products.
There's no telling how many people watched a small portion of a show in very low-rez on YouTube and was motivated to go out and purchase DVDs. As you can tell, my argument is that YouTube actually promotes interest in Viacom's products and can benefit Viacom financially.
I don't believe YouTube can call itself a common carrier anymore. YouTube has taken broad measures to remove infringing videos in the past, and so has created a recognized expectation to safeguard the copyrights of others.
Good. People should stop using their ISP's news servers for posting or downloading binaries. The retention on those servers just suck and the quotas are too small. There's just too much quality sheep porn to be had for a consumer to waste his time with such bad servers.
Seriously though, I wonder what the effect will be on commercial Usenet service providers like Giganews. I would think the immediate effect would be a leap in new subscriptions; but will it be very long before Cuomo decides to go after these companies, maybe even attempt to block Usenet access outright under some sky-is-falling failed logic. There is a lot of legal content in the alt.binaries hierarchy. There's a lot of porn, but at last I checked, much of it is spam for porn sites we presume to be operating legally. But some of my favorite binary groups have nothing to do with illegal subject matter or pirated goods.
They can be added, but won't newsserver admins decide whether or not to carry the groups? porn.girls.gone.wild probably already exists, but probably hasn't propagated far.
Now that I read over what I wrote, I do see that I mistakenly linked plagiarism as a goal of copyright protection, which it was not. But you do bring up a valid point with trusted digital notaries.
I don't see any reason to strength copyright protection as it is law today. I think it's already strong enough. But I am against abolishing copyrights altogether. My preference is for Creative Common licenses; however, I don't see deep pocket owners of copyrights stepping away from the current copyright law.
I enjoy it myself. There are other kits out there as well for the Mac platform, one made by Popcap (Bejeweled, Zuma). I only recommended the standard FOSS considering the neighborhood. :D
I'm not sure where the Pentax K20D compares with the 1DS. Pentax has pretty much withdrawn to the consumer and pro-sumer market. I would easily say that the Pentax cameras beat out Canon's Rebel line, especially when you factor in the ability to use K-mount lens going all the way back. I use a Super Tak and a Jupiter 9 whenever I can.
Ricoh actually makes great lenses. I prefer the lens in this generation of Ricoh over what's use in the Leica D-Lux 3 line. Ricoh is harder to get in the US though. One thing to note about the GR-Digital, it's a prime lens. Really nice wide, great for B&W. I'm a street photographer, so the Ricoh would be of great use to me, though right now I shoot Canon and Pentax. I don't know if the Ricoh's feature set is something that would be useful to your photography.
I have a Pentax K100D Super. The body on it pretty good. I like the viewfinder better than on the Rebel XTi. I also like the image stabilization system better. The K100D doesn't have the all-weather protection of the K10 (and I believe K20 as well), but it's a nice job. Of course, it loses on the pixel count. I haven't had a chance to shoot Sony, but I'd enjoy hearing a fellow slashdot shutterbug's opinion on it.
---it's not like the program is going to self destruct.
And you dont think if they could miraculously do that, they wouldnt?
Actually, I remember quite a few apps I had on diskette which had instructions not to install anymore after a specific number of installations -- usually 5. Afterwards, the diskette was useless.
I maintain a very large collection of photos from well over a hundred digital cameras, and I use this as my reference when making camera suggestions for people. For this purpose, Mac Finder and Spotlight are great. However, neither allows me to work on actually developing the shot. I need to eyeball every shot out of the hundreds I'll take in an weekend.
But for a while, while I was still learning Lightroom and discovering that all my meta data was being wiped out during exports, I relied extensively on command line tools such as exiftool. As you said, the possibilities are endless.
For me the perfect digital dark room is still a combination of workflow software for developing my shots and separate specialized tools for archival.
I take it the titles you use were pulled from the filename of your exports. I gave up on Aperture a while back when I couldn't get support for my cameras. Under Lightroom, when exporting I am presented with an option to adjust the custom naming convention I use for exports generally. I would expect Aperture to do this as well.
Now Mac is a different OS on commodity hardware, and I don't see much of a point.
You mentioned writing a game for Macintosh. If you wanted to do that, a Macintosh would be the better platform to work from as opposed to porting from another. There's several great tools at your disposal; Xcode, OpenGL, ClanLib, SDL is a great combo. You can do the development on Linux just as easily, but I really have enjoyed Xcode. You might too.
Ricoh is hardly behind the times on camera design and adoption. In fact, the GR Digital and Digital II are amazing cameras. Pentax is hardly behind the times either. The K20D is also quite an amazing camera. Pentax has one of the few consumer SLRs on the market that doesn't have a kit lens that's useless.
Many organizations buy into the luster of colorful brochures, happy sales reps, and the idea of the universality of Windows. They just assume there's a guarantee too.
Besides, Linux is a fad, and you know it's made by hackers, and hackers are evil, and it's a variant of UNIX, but it might be illegal too so you'll get in trouble with SCO or Novell or HP or somebody for using it, and besides no two Unixen are the same, etc. etc. etc.
Read my response above for a clarification of my point. You're arguing an example I gave of an opposing position I don't have.
But to answer your questions. I do know exactly what is needed to produce a hit game these days.
As for copyrights, I think there needs to be a new model for protecting digital properties. I'm uncomfortable with the use of the antiquated copyright system which was useful at best to prevent someone from taking my writing and passing it off as their own, or publishing it for sale as if it were theirs.
Personally, I do not accept that the software market is being injured by piracy -- the thesis for this whole debate. For one, it is impossible to know how many copies of your software are being bootlegged. The numbers generated are pulled out of asses in order to be as dramatic as possible, but really, I have no idea how many kids on myspace are "illegally" using Photoshop.
I bring up photoshop for a reason. It's such a popular application even among non professional creative types that its name is now a verb. It's probably a heavily pirated application. Its cost certainly makes it desirable. The more hands that touch Photoshop, "legally" or not, the more skilled users are created, and the more consumer loyalty is generated. So in this instance, software piracy can actually help a software product.
Hopefully, that cleared up my message.