Yeah, massive dev buy-in problem. The apps that were there were OK, but there weren't very many overall. That was really the both the first and last nails in the coffin. When they launched, it was $100 to publish an app, so if you wanted to give your app away for free, it cost you. jwz has a couple of good posts about the app posting nightmare. Besides, why maintain apps for three different mobile platforms when IOS is already widely adopted, and Android is winning the footrace for second place?

It should be pointed out how easy it is to load code from alternate sources by rooting. KONAMI CODE = done. I spent a few minutes looking at the PITA/Benefit analysis of rooting my Android phone and decided to leave it alone.

Some nobody who parked his car in his driveway, then got all upset when someone took it. boo fucking hoo

Some nobody who painted a canvas and got all upset when someone took it off his wall. boo fucking hoo.

amidoinitrite?

I'd love to see the UX design team go start working on Android. WebOS is still hands-down the best mobile OS I've used day-to-day. The functional UI + ease of rooting were huge advantages for WebOS. Too bad it got saddled by Palm's historically bad record of actually like, selling phones, to people... Android feels so hacky, and IOS, while pleasant enough, is too much of a limiting walled garden for me. I like being able to use VNC over an SSH tunnel, for instance, or get a terminal on my phone.

I'm "people", I'm "people" with a couple of thousand CDs. I'm "people" who go to 20-40 shows a year.

Do I think anyone "deserves" to achieve Ozzy wealth, or Mick Jagger wealth arbitrarily because they're musicians? Shit no. Do I understand the economics behind /why/ it costs $1MM to produce a record and stage a short tour? Absolutely. Lots of "small" bands live very close to the edge and I think it's good to support them. For this reason I don't go to movies very often, because A:) they don't interest me particularly, and B:) I don't want to support an ecosystem that gives Brad Pitt $10MM to crap out Oceans Twelve.

People make choices, I choose to spend money on music. Other people choose to spend money on video games, or comics, or movies, or expensive cars. I think the Amanda Palmer Kickstarter is up around $850k now, so it looks like some number of people get enough value from what she does to contribute.

Amanda Palmer just posted a very long and informative blog about where all the money goes when people donate to her Kickstarter effort to finance her upcoming tour/album. In that post, she references Steve Albini's classic rant against an industry churning through young talent and keeping all the candy for themselves (well, one of his rants on the topic, anyway).

I'm glad to see these issues starting to get major traction and hopefully change can come from without, since it will never come from within.

"it seems that nowadays not even people wanting to know their future are safe from fraud"

If you pay someone money and expect them to tell your future, you will never be safe from fraud. In fact, as your palm reading crystal adviser, I sense...fraud...in your future.

This is one of the least ethical things I could think of to do as a gamer. If you wish to help you government, help them feed poor people. If I found out that a game I was playing actually helped my government kill other humans more efficiently, I don't even know how I would take that information.

/Be/ elitist. Go ahead, it's justifiable.

Luckily, in the aerospace industry, there's no such thing as a "$5 wrench". Hell that was probably a $700 dirty rag.

Well, in my mind, the article is saying "can't help peeking at" to mean exposing yourself to it needlessly. We can agree that being exposed to credit information, medical records and the like is a daily part of life at a Sr. level. The issue is people who can't help themselves from looking at private crap that they don't need to see. Admins reading exec emails, poking through HR shared folders, and looking at Medical or Credit data in databases, just to look.

I mean, we have to have this power to do our jobs, we don't have to abuse that power just to satisfy our boredom or curiosity.

The people "peeking" at info are by definition Not Professional.

Yeah, I kind of do to. Those chairs suck. I think the problem is that all the really good designs are patented forever, so we can't just start having the Chinese stamp out stackable Eames chairs by the millions. Perhaps my sarcasm has turned into another fine reason for patent reform?

Another reason for it is that until later in high school I was way taller than most kids in my class, and the chairs are for average height. I'm sure short people had similar problems.

Why do people really need to worry about this? Kids play, they get hurt, they get better, and stronger, and hopefully smarter. I propose we buy little Aerons for all schoolkids because those plastic stackable chairs suck and will hurt their backs. Many kids aren't athletic, and that's fine, but many/most kids like playing throw/hit the ball games, and they should be allowed to.

/'bout the biggest pair you've ever seen, dingleberry!

First question: Are you a good enough programmer to use radio buttons or checkboxes to build a multiple choice quiz?