1) if you appreciate a creative work, why not pay for it? Buy the DVD, buy the CD, buy whatever medium and you can view or listen as many times as you want. If you don't want to pay, you don't get to see the result of the creative process. If you don't want to pay, why would the creator of Pulp fiction let you to see the movie? What obligation does he have in the world to allow you to see it? I never understood, and most likely never will understand this typical
2) Why should an author's heirs not be entitled to the fruits of the labour of their ancestors? Why should they be entitled to his house, savings, but not future profits? Why would it be that, because coincidentally, someone dies, you get to see the movie for free? Why would you rank higher than the creator's children? Let's hope Stephen King dies just after writing a masterpiece, because now we are entitled to read it for free. What sense does that make???
I think all first year computer science / programming / engineering students should be introduced to this and learn how to write programs for this environment first before moving on to modern systems. True power is being able to write useful stuff with only 64kb of ram and 1mhz of processor, and have it run in an acceptable time frame, and taking those skills and scaling up today's multi-core/ multi-gigahertz/multi-gigabyte address spaces.
While I agree, I wonder if this is actually true. To what extend does knowledge about efficient coding on an 8 bit machine with limited memory teach us anything about programming these heftier CPUs? Maybe the only people that should really have chewed the bits are the writers of compilers. For all others it might not matter so much how the compiler and the OS handle memory allocations and the like, and it may be more useful to focus on the program structure instead of the implementation on the CPU.
Could sophisticated military tanks and anti-aircraft missiles given or sold to countries like Iraq be equipped with a way to disable them if they're compromised, without opening them up to hacking by an enemy?
A tank with a kill switch?
On topic: who would buy such a device that can be disabled by others? And even if it is made for the "domestic" market: why be at risk that someone else hacks into your own stuff and disables it? The solution to this problem wasn't technical, but political.
Even if I were to never even look at a single line of the source, the fact that it's availble to others adds value for me. I can go download a patch someone else wrote that fixes a bug MS hasn't bothered to fix. [...]
I am also in favour of Open source myself and get your point. However, after the OpenSSL bug, my belief in this "someone else" has significantly lowered. If too many people rely on "someone else" fixing a problem in his/her spare time you are worse off than when people are paid to fix closed source software. If the problem is important ($$$) enough, it wil be fixed.
No discussion on one point, though: the slide keyboard made it more vulnerable and eventually it broke down on me, after intensive use. On the other hand: its 512 MB internal memory was also becoming a hurdle, so one year later I would have needed to replace it anyway.
Love makes the world go 'round, with a little help from intrinsic angular momentum.