While I'm glad the correct outcome was made in this case, I shudder to think what would happen if the prosecution had NOT made a mistake and had notified the defense.

Before trial, prosecutors offered a plea deal that included pleading guilty to two FELONIES. A guy whose sole "crime" was to let people use their own purchased hardware as they saw fit had the choice between:

1. Having his life ruined - try to get any kind of job if you're not famous with 2 felonies on your record.
2. Rolling the dice with 12 folks who couldn't get out of jury duty with the downside being years in prison.

That this case even got as far as it did is a very sad commentary on our legal system - what if the defendant had been scared enough about the prospect of spending years in prison that he HAD taken the plea deal?

It seems that Diaspora somehow got that NYTimes article, got mucho donations from that even though at that point they had NO CODE, and yet somehow now I hear about it all the time as somehow it's going to be a "facebook killer".

Linux got popular initially because Torvalds is an excellent programmer and his project spread through word-of-mouth. Diaspora got discovered because there was a Times article about vaporware.

Mod parent up. There was a good article posted here on slashdot recently where Fareed Zakaria in Time magazine makes the argument that often the best and brightest come from other countries to get trained at American institutions, only to go back to their home countries and make technological innovations that benefit those societies. We should be doing everything we can to keep those smart folks HERE so the US can more directly benefit from their intelligence and work ethic (example - see Vinod Khosla).

Surprise surprise - capitalism on the internet is largely about companies dominated by the network effect. It is interesting, though, that while many folks thought the internet would lead to a broader spectrum of companies given that start up/fixed costs are so low, the network effect has tended to consolidate power to a very small number of winners.

I think the overall effect on capitalism itself will be very interesting. Capitalism was always about winners and losers, but previously you could have a lot more winners given that there were a lot more markets. The internet is connecting all these markets, making space for fewer (albeit much bigger) winners. We talk a lot about the rise in income inequality in the US over the past few decades, and I think it has as much to do with technology as with any policy changes. Technology fundamentally makes things more efficient and breaks down market barriers - in many ways this is a great thing, but I think people are just now starting to realize how it has broad negative effects given the way our brand of capitalism works.

I know I'm late to this story, but thought I'd try this.

I'm the original developer behind Perf4J: http://perf4j.codehaus.org/ . Perf4J is a library for performance tracking code in Java that uses the appender frameworks of popular Java logging frameworks to handle timing statements. The library has been pretty successful, but right now I don't really have the time to be the sole "despot" for this project. I'm looking for someone to essentially take this library over from me, or at the very least add some cool new features (#1 on my list is a port to logback).

This could be a great project for a college student wanting to get into open source. The library itself is not too big, I think it's easy to understand the design, and there are a ready list of features that users have requested. Plus, if you do a good job on it, while I can't 100% guarantee my company will hire you, I can 100% guarantee will give you an interview, and there is no better thing on your resume than showing that you can actually CODE a real project.

Don't agree it's nothing like a placebo. Granted, I need to RTFA, but you could design some interesting experiments that test whether people's PERCEPTION (e.g. it seemed like the elevator door did close faster even though it really didn't) was altered with these non-functional elements. That is like a placebo.

While I understand your position, the statement "We aren't a group of chump manufacturing people" highlights the problems with many people's thinking. For decades we off-shored manufacturing jobs, and the general sentiment from college educated white collar workers was "Sorry, that's the way a dynamic economy works, you need to upgrade your skills." Thus, given that this way of doing business is now biting you in the ass, I'm surprised that you still think you are so different from "chump manufacturing people".

The problem with our economy is that we are growing the classes of people who are fundamentally unemployable. While it's nice to say you need more training, the fact is that many people will never have the skills to be a software architect or a Hollywood director or a Wall Street banker. For millions of minimum wage people, blue collar workers, and growing number of white collar workers like paralegals, programmers, etc., capitalism is not working (and that doesn't mean I think any of the other ...ism bugaboos are the answer)

But that's not exactly true. At McDonald's I can go and order a Southwest Grilled Chicken Salad and get a relatively healthy meal. At facebook I can check all my privacy settings but that still doesn't stop app developers from selling my information.

The book "Outliers", by Malcolm Gladwell, makes much the same argument, and gives a couple very persuasive examples of how pure luck is an absolute requirement for outsized success. One example I particularly like is how professional Canadian hockey players tend to be born early in the year, the reason being that those born earlier will be more physically mature than their younger teammates born later in the year, and the "tracking" that occurs at an early age ensures that those differences are magnified as players get older. Thus, if you had two kids with the equal potential to be hockey superstars, it's much more likely that the one born in January would make it while the one born in December would not.

Yet, for some reason, so often (especially in the US) we complete discount the factor that luck has in making people successful - we laud the uber-successful as "geniuses" and think that raising the rate on the highest tax bracket is somehow unfair because we think individuals are solely responsible for their own success.

Uhh, you're missing the GP's point. It's HIGHLY doubtful a small group of scruffy super smart hackers a la Angeline Jolie and friends in "Hackers" created this virus. Given the complexity you point out (and by the way, you missed a very important point - stuxnet utilizes stolen encryption keys from TWO Tiawanese chip manufacturers), it's much more likely that a large, coordinated government or corporate organization that was able to assemble experts from many different fields was behind the attacks.

Ugh, why is it that developers think they're so superior when they utter such nonsense as "If a programmer is so incompetent he can't get leap seconds right, I shudder to think what else he did wrong." It makes me more likely to think the person who writes this has never written actual code in a real, production system when you have things like actual deadlines to worry about.

It's not that a good programmer couldn't get leap seconds "right", it's that it's very easy to imagine a case where the non-congruity of timing calls introduced by leap seconds could be overlooked. In a complicated program where there are literally millions of things that can go wrong, not thinking foremost about leap seconds should be expected.

I totally disagree. While of course this happens to some extent, and while in general Slashdot has some pretty common points-of-view (FOSS supporters, generally libertarian leaning, etc.), the level of groupthink and mob rule is many orders of magnitude less on slashdot than on digg. While part of this may be due to the audience, I think the biggest factor is the moderation system. There is no "agree" or "disagree" moderation on slashdot. There are certainly many times I've moderated stuff as interesting or insightful even if I didn't necessarily agree with the sentiment of the poster.

On digg, it's all up or down. You'll frequently see comments like "**** Republicans!" rated very highly. Whether or not you agree with Republican political views, putting four asterisks before their party name adds nothing to the discussion. You rarely, if ever, see a comment like that rated highly on slashdot, unless there's something sarcastic behind it. Of course, now you'll probably see lots of comments like that as responses rated highly :-P

My guess is that there's not much that can be done to combat this given that game development is such a highly competitive industry. I bet you'd find a similar atmosphere in Hollywood - the millions of wannabee actors and actresses that move to LA all dream of being the next Julia Roberts or Tom Cruise, but the vast majority will end up bitter, dejected, and many will be making porn.

Similarly, all those game developers dream of building the next Warcraft, but the vast majority will end up bitter, dejected, and many will be making porn sites.

The fact that this was modded insightful is even more proof of why most tech people should never run a business. "Oh, the majority of users on the internet can't use your site? Tell 'em it's their problem."