I don't know about you, but I only buy something if its probable value to me is greater than its price. If they're getting more money out of my wallet, that probably means I'm getting more value. There's nothing wrong with that.

What's so evil about targeted advertising? It's win-win if you make rational decisions. Yeah, it sucks for someone who buys anything that's shiny, but what else is new?

It's a feature.

Sad but that's probably true unless if the parents of the child intervenes of course (which they should). I'm not yet a parent but I believe they should be the primary educator of their children - they know their child's strengths and weaknesses after all. Encouraging a child's curiosity and imagination and all that. Schools should only serve as a supplementary education.

And even if a child is unlucky enough to have irresponsible parents and end "up on welfare floating between dead end jobs," at the very least, he gets an education and with it the tools for self improvement. One can only blame his parents & society for so much; ultimately, he/she is answerable only to themselves.

No, "everyone" is look at the CURRENT 3G coverage map. NOT the ones from 6 months ago. Hell, there's a whole TWO cities in my state (one being the one I live in, but not the even bigger one just 10 miles away, where I often work) that is on their 3G coverage map. If you don't believe me, check their site. Don't look at the green map - the one that does have a lot of coverage, that's just voice. You have to click "data" and look at the purple map - THAT is the data coverage map and the dark purple (which is in the minority by far, even now) is the 3G coverage. Compare that to Verizon or AT&T's 3G coverage maps. T-Mobile has done a lot to improve 3G coverage in the last 6 months, but they're still a LONG way behind the competition.

Maybe T-Mobile has 3G coverage not shown on their coverage maps - if they do, great! But if that's the case, then they need to update their maps or they'll keep having people go to Verizon or AT&T due to their own coverage maps showing them to not have much in the way of 3G.

Ask Slashdot is better than Google in many ways, and worse than others.

By appealing to a technical crowd you can really cut down on the noise you'd have to slog through on a google search. In exchange you have to make sure not to waste our time with stuff that google would have helped with.

There are so many ways IPv6 remains broken and too many of the people with influence can tend to say 'working as designed'.

I know that's controversial, so I'll enumerate my pain points:
-DHCPv6 DUID is a pain to 'pre-provision'. When any operating system or firmware instance dhcpv6 for the first time, it sends out something that you'll never know what it would be ahead of time. In 99% of cases, the DUID is a generated value at 'OS Install time' that is used only for that specific OS, and a reinstall or livecd boot will change it out completely. stateless boot, multi-boot systems and multi-stage booting (i.e. pxe -> os) cannot hold together a coherent identity because DHCPv6 is explicitly designed not to do that. Binding by MAC is considered 'evil', but it has been the strategy used for ages. I wouldn't mind so much if DUID was commonly implemented as a value retrieved from motherboard firmware tables, but no one is stepping up to drive that behavior in a spec visible to all parties.

No PXE/bootp boot. I believe they are trying to reinvent, from scratch the boot design from IPv4, and are nearing completion. I fear the extent to which the baby has been tossed out with the bathwater (i.e. 'root-path' was dropped and no one has pulled it into dhcpv6).

Some standards are missing the capability to operate in IPv6. I.e. IPMI hase some IPv4 specific portions of the standard without IPv6 capable equivalents.

you really shouldn't be bragging about an Army education supplied by the lowest bidder.

If you've ever lived in a city where an awful lot of snow falls in the winter, you would know that it's not enough to merely plow the snow. At some point the piles of plowed snow accumulates to the point where you can't plow any more snow onto the pile. In Michigan's Upper Peninsula, every so often during the winter months, GINORMOUS monster snow blowers are brought out which are used to blow the mini-mountains of accumulated plowed snow into dump trucks, which haul the snow out into the countryside. In Wisconsin, this sort of thing happens on a smaller scale in parking lots. There they use end loaders to put the snow into dump truck...which then haul the snow out into the countryside.

Here's a video of one of these giant snowblower trucks in operation. (One manufacturer of these trucks is Oshkosh Trucks. I bet they'd be willing to sell a few to the city of Moscow.)

It takes a serious investment of tax payer's money to buy and keep such equipment. It's not clear to me that municipal governments in Russia function as effectively as they do in Canada and the US. Are taxes collected? Do citizens actually pay their taxes? Or are the citizens too poor to pay taxes, and the wealthy oligarchs excused from paying them? If taxes are paid and collected, do they end up being used for public needs? Or do those funds end up in the pocket of some public official?

In America a lot of people like to bash "government" as wasteful and inefficient, but most Americans have no idea of just how wasteful and inefficient a government can be.

By definition, "God" is perfect and makes no mistake.

Exactly. To take it further, the best "investment" I ever made was buying half-life. I played it for 8 years! Not because it had the best single player (I haven't even finished it, one day I will!) or multiplayer experience, but because of all the amazing mods it had. I suddenly found that the game was really 15 different games.

It's the same with Starcraft & Broodwar, I had played it for a couple of years straight, and yet every so often I would install it and waste a good hour or two on tower defense maps (the original).

Looking more at the games that I own, it seems multiplayer games are the only games that would sell. But then there's also Civilizations 4 and Galactic Civilizations II, which I never played online but still play extensively today, and it tells me that probably majority of gamers only buy games that offers high replay value or unlimited hours of gaming.

And I remember Portal (2-6 hours), The Monkey Island III, and Final Fantasy 7 which are all relatively quick games but I still bought and thoroughly enjoyed, even if I only played them once or twice.

And though there are plenty of copies out there for the said games I mentioned... most of my friends, cousins, and I still bought legit copies (even when we were teens back then and had no jobs).

Maybe it is a money issue... but maybe more importantly, it's the value of these games. If developers/distributors want to convert these 'pirates' into customers, they should polish their games and show some passion to their customers/communities.

E.A. for example, and in my own experiences pirating their games, are notorious in releasing unfinished games. Their games don't make it easy for modders and don't bother listening to community complaints. Suffice to say, I even stopped downloading their games off of torrents.

A pirate, paying for nothing, refusing to even look at their products.

I'd rather think that more often than not the people that pirates games do so because it's free, convenient, and consequent-free.

Think of it from the point of view of kids. All they'll need is a computer and a broadband connection and they'll be able to play all the latest games(movies, music, applications, books, comics, etc.) that they want.

The only incentive to buy games is for multiplayer and new updates. Stardock understands this, and thus controls their patch distribution to the ones that have legitimate copies for Galactic Civilizations II.

And the kids who do pirate now, will eventually grow up and get jobs and more importantly, money. Hopefully by then, with all the years of guilt of screwing good developers, they would buy the games that brought hours of fun to their lives.

At least, that's what I did. Doesn't make up for all of my past actions but it did remove the guilt of screwing the really good game makers out there. And for the other hundreds of buggy/DRM-ed games & software out there, I'm just glad I didn't have to pay for them and will now avoid them. :)

Bottom line, I bet it's all about money. A small percentage of pirates might be pirates because of their ideologies on DRM and whatnot, but that's just a handful of souls.

Developers/distributors thinking that every pirated copy is a lost sale is idiotic and hopeless. There will always be piracy, better to just not think about them and concentrate on making a good product. It could be a marketing tool even if the game is well made: All things being fair, the more people playing the game the more mods, custom content, and vibrant communities will form.