This is true.
In high school I went to a summer program and walked away with a full version of Visual Studio.net. It was great having such a full-featured IDE at home instead of the crippled demo version that came with my programming text book! Then I went to college where we used GCC, and I haven't used Windows since.

He may have done that if he hadn't already been in the middle of making his point. He wanted her to understand that if you can't afford something, getting it for free isn't right. So if he gave it to her for free, she would be happy and say "oh yes, I see your point! Thank you friendly man!" but really nothing would have been accomplished. If she's going to accept the implications of doing what's right for the sake of doing what's right, she has to accept those implications while feeling all the nasty consequences that come with it.

Of course, he slowly realizes that no matter how reasonable he is with her, she's already dead-set on maintaining her point of view. So he wraps up the conversation with some nice stories to make a point to us - the bystanding readers.

He is a bit of a jerk.

Because when you're 13 you invent things for their sheer awesomeness.

That's an interesting idea. I wonder how effective it would be for developers such as Aaron Ardiri to "violate" copyright but pay the copyright holders royalties for using their intellectual property. That way Sony wouldn't have to spend the money developing the new software and independent developers wouldn't have to worry about new ideas falling flat.

What are the chances Aaron Ardiri would have paid royalties if Sony had asked him to?
What are the chances Sony would have accepted royalties as sufficient recompense if Aaron Ardiri had suggested that model?

In fifth grade I lived in Italy. We built bridges out of pasta there. (Seriously)

When it comes to EVE, I have to wonder if there's a difference.

18-year-olds who have sex with a 17-year old? How about 15 year olds who distribute pictures of themselves? We have virgin sex offenders!

Child porn? There were no children involved. There were *drawings* that were *supposedly* intended to be children. There are 20-year-olds who look like 12-year-olds. Why can't they just label these pictures "20-year-old-sex! (wink, wink)" Who's to say what the artist intended?

I mean, Australia can still outlaw them, but I don't think anyone else can.

It's the huge selection of homebrew apps that make WebOS really attractive.

But the carriers will be less happy, since they charge the same for a plan whether or not you buy a phone through them. With the Nexus One, the customer pays for the whole phone, AND pays the full service price.

Carriers need to stop being phone vendors and need to start being service-providers. Customers should be able to see what part of their plan is funding their service, and what part is paying off their phone. That's the only way to create price-competition between phone manufacturers: show the customers what they're really paying for their phone instead of hiding the price in the service plan.

Face research from a while back did decent job studying facial attractiveness. While it might not be as satisfying as a study of the entire body, it does give you the option of creating the most beautiful face ever.
http://www.faceresearch.org/

Funny. Isn't that like some kind of cue for a people to "alter or abolish it?"

"hd-dvd fanbois"

That's got to be a small club.

I know that I download plenty of games, but never ones that I haven't bought. I tend to lose or scratch my CD's, making them unusable, so I have to download working versions of my games.