> It's quite another thing to take actual copies of something and pass them off as one's own

I don't know where you read into my sentences that I ever suggested that should be possible. It's downright ridiculous.

The original author should always be compensated. And of course if the derivative work is making money, the original author should be compensated, but not excessively.

A famous (and ridiculous) example of copyright gone wrong: The Verve's song: "Bitter Sweet Symphony". It's a twisted world where a company that currently holds the rights to some old material (remember, they're not even the creators of that stuff) can claim someone elses *entire profits* because they used a sample (which they even cleared before use, but there was something wrong with the fine print) in their song.

Also, I'm opposed to the *control* the original authors (or more accurately, the copyright holding companies these days) want to exert over their work. Making derivatives impossible in the first place.

If you don't want your ideas to be extended, you probably should keep them to yourself.

You have no inherent right to it once it's out in the open. You have no right to forbid people to sing your song (very badly and out of tune and very loud) in their car or in the shower. You have no right to forbid other musicians to play your songs in their garage.

If someone else thinks your music is good enough to be re-interpreted, you should be *proud*. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery. Also, it will serve to *increase* the popularity of the original material.

The idea behind copyright is that you can make enough money from it to support yourself, your family and whatever your favorite pasttime is (e.g. save the rain forests or maybe cocaine and hookers). That's a good thing. But lately, it's been more and more twisted and corrupted by greedy people. It's about exercising a ridiculous amount of control over the material. That has to end.

From the article:

> Apple's preoccupation with security meant that the high-quality audio "stems" he created never left Abbey Road.
> If the separated parts leaked out, every amateur D.J. would start lacing mixes with unauthorized Beatles samples.
> Instead, Martin created low-fidelity copies imprinted with static for the Harmonix team to take back to the States -- in their carry-on luggage.

And why would that be such a terribly bad thing? It's exactly this kind of gone-out-of-control control-thinking that makes me respect the idea of copyright less and less. I believe that trying to 'make a quick buck' from the work of others is unethical. But creatively extending someone else's work is art.

On a unrelated note: Has someone already managed to rip the individual tracks off the Guitar Hero / Rock Band games? I assume they're not just simply there as .wav files on the CD :-)

Preparation is everything.

I've been to the ACM programming contests a couple of times. While we (two physics students and myself a math student, we easily eliminated the CS students in the local university qualifying round) were doing somewhat ok, we suffered from lack of preparation (which basically consisted of bringing along a copy of Sedgewick's "Algorithms in C"). The other teams (most notably the St. Petersburg and other eastern european teams) had coaches, months of preparation behind them and brought tons and tons of binders with print-outs of pre-written programs that needed only a little tweaking to be applied to the current problem set.

The ACM (and probably IOI as well) problem sets repeat the same (or very similiar) problems over time. Typical examples: graph problems involving a simple breadth first search, or perhaps a minimal cut, or the typical geometric problems where you have to do a robust point-left/on/right-line test, or do some space partitioning, or you need to do some optimization using dynamic programming, etc. All that stuff can be trained, written down and brought along (the ACM rules used to allow bringing along unlimited amounts of stuff in dead-tree format), or just memorized.

I just want to clarify one thing, so I'm not misunderstood:

When some general or politician decides to kill a lot of people, it doesn't make any of his fellow countrymen a murderer as well. The majority may have voted the guy into office, but he probably didn't say "and if you vote for me I'll nuke as many Japanese civilians as I can" beforehand.

The rest I'll let stand for itself, because your claims are really just that. Your claims. Nothing more.

I didn't need to give an argument, because the comment was phrased as a question, introducing the topic into the discussion.

It may have been phrased a tiny little inflammatory, but that was the stimulation to spark a discussion of the matter.

I'm entirely open to the possibility that there was some justification but I still believe that that number of civilian casualties has far too high (and we're talking peaceful people here, especially children, who couldn't care less about the war). It could probably have been kept much lower (e.g. nuking the snow cap off Mount Fujy would have probably a devastating psychological effect as well).

> Because I didn't need to re-make the same points.

Then your entire post was just an attempt at insulting me? That's not nice.

>> What exactly did *your* posting contribute to the discussion?

> What does this one of yours?

It educates you on the rules of rational debating. Some of them are

1) Stay polite
2) Have an open mind
3) Back up your claims with arguments

There's more but those are the most important.

Your posting proves that nothing is so bad it can't be used as a deterring example for others.

> You don't understand the history then.

That's an unfounded accusation. And very impolite.

> Wrong on both counts. Please read and understand the history (as some people have informed you in the replies).

You don't give an argument to support your 'wrong' statement. Instead you refer to the other replies. Yes, I read them. And some of them make excellent points (one way or another), thank you. Your reply does not.

What exactly did *your* posting contribute to the discussion?

While I think Eclipse is great, I believe NetBeans is even better these days, at least for someone just picking up Java. The advanced features don't get in your way as much as with Eclipse.

I don't think they needed to use *two* nukes for that. Wasn't the second one just outright mass murder? (you could also argue the first one didn't need to be deployed against civial targets).

Two great platformers I played through 100% on the PC that are perfectly controllable with the keyboard:

Pandemonium I and Pandemonium II

Two great platformers on the Mac (originally the Mac Plus) that make awesome use of the mouse as well:

Dark Castle, Beyond Dark Castle

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Castle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemonium_(video_game)

I'm pretty sure the device is capable of multitasking just fine. But Apple doesn't want applications to run in the background. The upside of this is increased battery life and no CPU hogging by buggy applications.

=> No matter how much crap you install, your iPhone can't get slowed down by it.

And of course applications are expected to perfectly be able to resume their tasks where they left off once you give them the focus again.

That means in practice, you won't even notice you're only running one app at a time.

slash-achievements!

Achievement unlocked: [ Post 5 consecutive posts using the Preview button first ]

Except that you can't run multiple apps on the iPhone, the only exceptions are the phone software, the ipod and internet tethering. But you can't run more than one custom application at the same time. Once you press the menu button to switch to another app the old one gets immediately suspended.

What really breaks Wii Fit is the time spent navigating the menus between exercises.

What it needs is a way to setup a simple list of exercises in advance (like a songlist in Guitar Hero's quickplay mode), and then run you through those as quickly as possible (don't explain to me how it worked *every time*, thank you), and with as short load times as possible.

As it is now, you never really break a sweat...

Which one should I use? Is FoxIt's reader any better? I suspect it also has some vulnerabilities but gets less attention from the bad guys because Acrobat's Reader is much mode widely used.