I think it's a combination of "I don't care why they changed it, it's different and I HATE different"

Yes, people are adverse to change. That doesn't mean change is bad, but neither does it mean it is good. Rather, it puts the onus on the person suggesting the change to show why the disruption and re-learning that will need to take place is worthwhile.

If, as you say, it is a "nice UI that really isn't very different than the old UI" then why is it necessary to force people to spend any time re-learning the interface? Why take up more real estate to do so and then tell users "well if you want it back, just minimize our annoying new UI?" This isn't somebody's pet project; it's an enterprise-class software suite used by literally millions and millions of people around the world. Change for the sake of change is not helpful; it is actively counter-productive in the most literal sense of the term.

I honestly can't decide if communication is Microsoft's great failure or if they really don't have a coherent reason for the things they do. It's happening again with Windows 8. Is the UI change just the stupidest possible idea in the world, or is it the greatest thing since sliced bread and they have just been utterly failing at actually communicating why? Don't get me wrong, I see how it's beneficial to THEM to essentially be able to focus on one UI across devices, but I don't see why I should want a touch-driven UI for my computer with mouse support tacked on top instead of an operating system built for that usage--and more importantly, one I have been largely familiar with for what, 15 years?

So yeah, I'm not adverse to change but somebody needs to show me why the learning curve and lost productivity is ultimately worthwhile. I don't care if that learning curve is five seconds or five years. If they can't do that, they deserve the derision. It's not like they don't have the budget for it, so I have to assume it's because they don't have the rationale.

Why is it that geeks always need something to be flawless before they find it worth consideration?

If the worst this system produces is people using gas cans, it's a victory. There will be people who will find the inconvenience enough incentive to get their insurance which is exactly the goal. Since the technology is largely already there, the database check shouldn't be a significant additional cost. (Who knows with government mandates though.)

If there is a reason to oppose this it would be the fears of Big Brother and the ability of government to know almost exactly where you are every moment you are in country. Still, with due respect to our British friends, it seems like that ship sailed a while ago. If they're (going to be) doing it, it won't require this program.

Well I think you've hit the problem. $60 for a good game isn't unreasonable; I'm something like 75 hours in with MW3 and more like 120 hours in with Skyrim. Less than a dollar an hour--some significantly less--is definitely a good value.

But that hinges on it being a good game, and there's little way to tell short of your, errr, previews. Dragon Age, for example: Fantastic game; easily worth the money and more. So naturally I was ecstatic when Dragon Age 2 came out -- but then horribly, horribly disappointed in it. It's similar with the Final Fantasy games; the early ones are great, 7 is of course one of the better games ever, I enjoyed 8-10. Twelve was good-not-great, 13 (14? I get them mixed up with the MMOs mixed in) I haven't even played through one time. I'm not even far enough in to say if it's good or bad; it's just so linear that it never captured my attention. (I really need to give it a fair shake -- I'll add it to the old to do list.)

In other words, even using a successful product as a gauge for the next product in the line is unreliable.

Likewise, sometimes there are good games that still have questionable value. Syndicate (the new one), for example, was what, maybe a six hour storyline? $60/6 = $10/hr in terms of value. Even factoring in the ability to replay it later if one wishes, that's extremely borderline. I'm actually not sure I would classify it in the "good" category either, but even if it was the value wouldn't be there.

Then there's the games where there is nothing particularly wrong, and there's lots of hours to be spent with it, but it just isn't worth it. Sports games often fall into this category. The actual improvements from version to version tend to be minuscule; people who pay for them every season are paying $60 primarily for a roster update. One may play it 120 hours and look at it and go "well, $0.50/hr right?" but the value over the previous game they already had isn't nearly as great.

The problem isn't $60 for a game; the problem is $60 over and over trying to find a game worth $60. In my opinion there are far more in the "no" column than the "yes," so that's a lot of money down the tubes even factoring in surplus value from the yeses.

In my case, it makes my purchases significantly more cautious. I've said this in several discussions before, but Steam is a good example: I impulse buy games around $10; I probably have a half dozen such games that I have never even opened. $20 requires some thought but probably happens (especially if it's down to $20 from $60). $30 is where I start wondering if I really think I'm going to get value back. $60 means I need to have a lot of information in advance, usually in-depth experience with previous games in the series, and a fuck-up like DA2 kills that goodwill outright. Publishers, as a whole, would probably make more money on me by lowering their prices. Most of them are simply too happy to hope that their game will be one of the $60 payouts and gamble a more likely income at a lower price point.

So what you're saying is that your friend is a vandal -- and too stupid to avoid admitting it to any random person who asks in a store much less avoid getting caught to begin with?

I'm not a big fan of red light cameras for a number of reasons, but damaging other peoples' property is not the right answer.

It sometimes confirms something, but only if the person (or agency in this case) accidentally confirming it isn't particularly clever.

Monday: "Did you steal my sandwich?" "Of course not!"
Tuesday: "Did you steal my sandwich?" "Of course not!"
Wednesday: "Did you steal my sandwich?" "I can neither confirm nor deny whether or not I may have stolen your sandwich."

That doesn't work. If you want "I can't confirm or deny" to work you have to use it consistently.

In this case it's a one-time allegation about something EPIC has little or no proof even exists. Can "give me all your secret information NOW!" be responded to with anything other than "I'm not even going to tell you if I have secret information much less give any of it to you?"

Furthermore, since Slashdot itself isn't doing the moderation (with one notable exception), well written opposing viewpoints get modded up and stay there.

Sometimes, but definitely not always. I'd even hesitate to say a majority of the times.

Further, there are different kinds of "well-written opposing viewpoints" that may be accepted differently. We accept Google fanbois and anti-Google trolls; Apple fanbois and anti-Apple trolls. Microsoft fanbois get destroyed. Anti-Microsoft trolls often get modded up. I don't believe I have ever seen a pro-Sony comment. Has one really never been posted, or has it just never been moderated into my threshold (+3)?

Even when there is a alternate opinion that is respected and modded up, there's usually a chorus of drivel modded up alongside (and often in reply) to it. For example, if somebody makes a post about the attitudes of many free software developers and happens to get it modded up, you'll see five versions of "fork it" or "fix it yourself" modded up. You still lose whatever insight the original poster may have had to impart in a sea of groupthink. If you have all day to read comments, yeah, they might be modded up waiting for you. You're still wading through nonsense to get there.

In other words, Slashdot, like similar moderation schemes, still produces an echo chamber. Sometimes something gets through, especially in areas where the community itself is split, but that doesn't mean it happens often. I really don't think it's a great example of democratization of the moderation process.

Frankly what I was hoping to see in this discussion, and would love to see, is some discussion about fresh ideas on how to approach the problem. We have the old +/- system, restricted +/- (basically Slashdot), pre-moderation, post-moderation, karma systems... but they are all flawed. Is flawed the best we can do? Is there no new ideas on how to tackle the issue in the last 10 years?

That may or may not be true, but I honestly have seen nothing to suggest any deep thought or analysis went into it. It sounds a lot like he went "herp derp, 20% is greater than 5% so I'll stop doing Android." There are a lot of questions one needs to ask beyond that to understand what's going on and if it was ultimately a good decision.

The first and simplest is where is the growth? If sales for Android are growing while sales for iPhone are plateauing, he has probably made a bad decision. Relatedly, does having that extra 20% of his time allow him to make up the lost sales revenue? In other words, can he get more iPhone sales or more money out of existing iPhone sales or is he essentially saturated?

The second question I would ask myself is why. Is it just that iPhone users are more likely to buy than Android users? Is it that he has obviously been developing for iPhone longer and sales have established themselves? Is he advertising for one and not the other?

In other words, 20% of your time for 5% of your profits is only bad if you can put the time to better use (or would just rather have the free time based on the ROI). We don't have enough information to make that call and I don't know that he bothered to get enough either.

Well you are a thoroughly disagreeable fellow and I have to resist an urge to find you and punch you in the face when you use a term like pigs to refer to the police, but I actually agree.

This is fraud, plain and simple. There needs to be six ex-police officers in jail to start with. Then we need to figure out if this was some sort of conspiracy among them, and if it went at all above them. If some supervisor told them to "just write in these numbers," he can join them in prison.

Pretty unlikely. There is a lot of factors that go into a decision about whether or not to extend somebody a job offer. Even if you found some kind of quantifiable way to show you were "more qualified," they'll simply cite other factors that have no method of quantification. How are you going to convincingly argue against "we felt Joe would be a better fit in our company culture?" Especially when you're standing in a courtroom lambasting the company at the time?

Maybe you would win, but being that sure of it is simple folly. Employment cases are not easy to win.

But isn't there a saying that goes something like "Never attribute to cleverness what can more easily be explained by anything other than cleverness"?

There might be some perversion of the original, but the original was from Napoleon: "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."

In the case of the peace officer thing, I actually think the OP has it wrong. Searching without probable cause isn't just wrong, it's illegal, and as such of course he is correct that he wouldn't want people in the job who would do so. However that's not what the situation was; the situation was somebody asking for access. It's no different to the real-life equivalent of a police officer asking if he can search your car. "No" is a perfectly acceptable answer, but it doesn't necessarily mean "yes" is wrong and it doesn't mean that it's wrong to conduct the search if given explicit permission to do so.

I understand it's pretty rare to accidentally get child porn on your PC, but it is not impossible. Isn't this exactly how you want somebody to react if it happens?

I'm pretty tired of how lazy the police are getting these days. There are entire categories of crimes that basically amount to "it's too hard to prove you actually committed the crime we want to get you for, so we had this created instead." Are we really at the point where we're going to take somebody's children away for trying to do the right thing because it's too inconvenient to investigate it and arrive at a real conclusion?

If they have an allegation to make with regards to how the child porn got there, they need to make it. Otherwise they need to commend him and ensure that nonsense like this doesn't happen.

It appears that Sabu's children were an exploited liability. Would you risk your loved ones for your ideals? Or is your answer still simply and obviously "fuck snitches"?

(Not the OP.)

Thinking about your children and the impact that your actions have on them is awesome. I fully encourage it. It is, I think, part of the responsibility of parenthood: Your life is no longer just about you, and you need to be cognizant of that fact.

But it's rather late at the government informant stage to throw down the "look how good of a parent I am!" card, isn't it?

Would I risk my loved ones for my ideals? Probably not. But see, I would make that determination before I decided to commit federal crimes and then not commit them. If I decide to commit the crimes, I have already abandoned my children to the hope I am never caught. Having a last-minute change of heart doesn't make him noble and it doesn't make up for what he did to his kids--he's still likely to go to jail.

Since we're quoting media it reminds me of a scene from The Simpsons, where Bart is talking to an, ahem, faith healer:

Bart: I figure I'll go for the life of sin, followed by the presto-change-o deathbed repentance.
Brother Faith: Wow, that's a good angle. Uh, but it's not God's angle. Why not spend your life helping people instead? Then you're also covered in case of sudden death.
Bart: Full coverage? Hmm...

Sorry, Sabu; you don't get full coverage. So yeah, he deserves our derision for being a scumbag to his children. He also deserves our derision for squealing like a stuck pig the second he was caught, and for throwing everybody who acted with him under the bus to save himself.

Every single turn on this whole LulzSec trip he has shown himself to be utterly and completely self-interested. "Should I commit crimes? Forget the kids." "Oh no, consequences! Forget the others!" He can try to paint it however he wants, but he's still a little fuck from every perspective I can see.

If you had a design you felt was innovative enough to patent and you spent a ton of R&D on, and you saw a company producing something that you believe is infringing on your ideas, would you just sit back and let them run with it?

See, that is the flaw in your argument. You're supposing that any appreciable portion of patent law relates to something "innovative enough to patent" that somebody "spent a ton of R&D on." Especially as it pertains to companies the size of Apple or Microsoft.

There are a few such cases, to be sure. But the vast majority are incremental improvements slapped together, or something done for decades with "using a computer!" stuck on the back. There's no bar for innovation; every idea a company that size has ever had goes through the patent process because $10k to them is worth less than a sneeze. There are an estimated 250 million Android phones that have been activated[1], growing at a rate of about 700,000 per day. Let's ignore the existing install base (which Apple probably will not); at $5/device, they are asking for $3,500,000 per day. Do you see now why filing BS patents that took no thought and no effort at every turn in hopes that one hits the jackpot makes sense? $3.5MM can pay for 350 patent applications per day that never make a dime. (And you can be assured that many "make a dime," whether directly, as a patent bludgeon or simply as a boost to the company. Patents can be valuated and listed as a company asset on its balance sheets even if it is never licensed.)

Maybe this is one of the good patents that cost a billion dollars in R&D. I doubt it, but maybe. It still doesn't matter. The next one won't be, and there will be a next one.

And let's be honest here. There's no mobile patent worth $3.5 million per day.

[1] http://www.asymco.com/2011/12/21/how-many-android-phones-have-been-activated/

It's better than what PlayOn did.

I bought it, gosh, I don't know, four years or so ago. It was right after it came out of beta. In fact I'm pretty sure I got a discount for pre-ordering it.

At some point a year or so later they decided that they liked money or something. I got an e-mail telling me of course I wouldn't lose the features that had existed when I bought it -- but they wouldn't be giving me any of the new features they had developed (which consisted primarily of new websites that would now work with the software). That was part of a new subscription service. I suppose uptake for that was poor, because a bit after that they started offering a $79 lifetime "subscription." So basically they wanted an extra $79 from me for software I already bought. We're not talking major changes here, just iterative additions to supported websites it can scrape content from. In fact they actually removed a few sites that they had labeled as "beta" but given to the previous customers and then decided were only going to be for the subscription customers later on.

Technically they've done nothing wrong. I'm sure in the license somewhere was verbiage that I was not entitled to any functionality upgrades, but it still struck me as shady. Especially when it went from "come on, your monthly fee will support continued development!" to "just pay us one more time." If they need monthly income to support the product, I could at least understand that. Wiping out that excuse shows it for what it was: A money grab.

It's kind of ridiculous that I paid for it at all, given the abundance of quality free software in the same realm, but they made me actively regret having done so.

I really can't agree with your post, and I think a poster has already replied and hit most of my comments with regards to your objections to the methods of the government. There was a couple of other things I wanted to comment on, however:

If this turns out to be at all true, and if we were a healthy democracy, the "leader" and his handlers would be facing serious jailtime, while those incited into this behavior would see a blackmark on their record and probation, hopefully scared straight. But those days died out sometime in the early naughties, and things have only gone downhill from there.

I generally consider myself rather lenient on crime. I'd certainly never make it as a politician with my beliefs. With only a handful of exceptions, I usually don't support anything approaching life sentences, even for murder. For example I have argued a few times on other websites that that boy who killed three people in Ohio probably should not receive anything near that level of punishment. I also believe sex offender laws go way too far, especially as they cover things like "sexting." I wish prosecutors would use more common sense and stop pretending to be tough on crime so that they can leapfrog into a more political career. Etc, etc. In short, I am anything but a "HANG THEM FROM THE YARDARM!" tough-on-crime type.

But even still, I have no idea why you feel the way you do as quoted above.

These people committed crimes, and they should be held to account for that. I probably wouldn't support harsh sentences (I'd have to see exactly what they're accused of before I can comment), but probation? Being a spineless twat who can be whipped into committing crimes doesn't excuse you from the consequences of those crimes, nor should it. They certainly deserve to spend some time in jail, even if it is only a year or so.

What is even more telling, is how blase people are about the idea of a countercultural "leader" inciting criminality and then handing those he's managed to influence over to the authorities for "processing." Too many of us don't even seem to know enough to be ashamed, or appalled, by this kind of thing

I wouldn't say I'm blase about it; rather, I'm amused. These idiots tried to act superior and invincible, and yet this guy squealed like a stuck pig the second consequences caught up with him. Are any of us really surprised about that? Why should his "followers" be? Why should "I thought this stool pigeon would protect me!" be any kind of defense? The hackers he has helped to indict should be appalled, but I'm not. It's exactly how the government should be trying to bring down organizations like this.

I just find it hilarious. Do you remember their final message, where they tried to make it sound like they'd accomplished what they set out to do and were therefore done instead of the reality--that they were running for the hills as fast as their legs could carry them, screaming over their shoulders that they hope somebody else will take over for them? It reminds me of the Robin Williams joke about anthrax: "Remember when they sent Anthrax to Tom Daschle's office? They cleared that fucking place out. 'Everybody out, come on!' Helmets, suits, they're all leaving. And when the Congressman walked out they go: 'But the rest of you, go about your lives. Everything is perfectly OK. We'll be miles away.'"

Honestly the only thing that bothers me is that he's going to get less of a sentence for being spineless. He should share their fate, but I suppose there would be no reason to help the investigation if that were the case. Ah, well.