True. But ear plugs won't provide the real life experience that working in a Real Job prior to college will. That experience provides not only quiet, money, and freedom during college, it provides what you need to make the most of college.

I used to help in hiring people where I work. Those fresh out of college who never worked before are always less capable than people the same age who finished high school and then worked in any job. The former are locked into the "follow directions" mentality and expect everything provided to them on a silver platter due to so many years of being in classrooms. They literally cannot think. The latter know how to think for themselves.

Shit like this will fly only until there is some serious competition *cough* Android *cough*.

Military. It doesn't need to be cheap. It only needs to look cheap.

You're not thinking like an entrepreneur! If you can convince people that they should change their MAC addresses, and if you have a EPROM recorder with which you can perform that service for a nominal fee, then you're in business! It's as easy as:
1. Marketing
2. ???
3. Profit!!!

Reminds me of a guy on the evening news one night who argued against something by using band-aids as an example in his argument. He said something to the effect that you live in a country where band-aids are sold in colors matching the skin tone of white people. This individual happened to have a dark complexion, so his example made a point. But if he would like a black band-aid, chances are that others want one, too. So instead of arguing that this country is crap because we don't have black band-aids, he should have:
1. Shut up so someone else wouldn't think of this idea.
2. Go into the black band-aid business.
3. Profit!!!

Bottom line: When you find a need that nobody fills, YOU should fill it!

Noisy dorm room? The solution to the excessively noisy roommate is very simple but requires a slight modification of the way we view the world with respect to education. The solution is to live in your own apartment while attending college. Impossible unless your parents have tons of money? Nope. You don't need your parent's money. I'll explain:

Today, it is common practice to finish high school and immediately go to college. Why?

I did things differently and I believe it was extremely beneficial. I went to college, but not until later. First, I got a Real Job. Contrary to public misconception, you do NOT need a college degree to get a Real Job!

Now mind you, in the beginning, it wasn't a particularly well-paying Real Job and it wasn't in the field I wanted to work in (software engineering). But I was out of high school so who cares? It was a job in a dirty machine shop where I started off sorting nuts and bolts, moved on to sorting expensive end mills and drills, moved on to cleaning dirty machine parts, and moved on to writing programs for their machines, setting up a company-wide network, and doing quite a few wonderful IT-related things for that company, all of which began one day when the boss found out that I knew quite a bit about computers and programming. By the way, the job started paying pretty well! Since I was living well below my means, not going out to bars nearly as much as my friends and not spending money on anything that wasn't absolutely necessary, I saved up quite a bit of dough during those years and learned a tremendous amount.

When I was 24, I decided it was time to attend college and get that degree. I noticed something very interesting. The students who were fresh out of high school had NO CLUE about living in the real world. They would cram for tests only to forget the stuff a day later. They didn't have the life experience to recognize which information was a solution to an important problem, and which information was interesting but unimportant. How many times have you heard a student ask, "When are we ever going to need this in real life?" I heard this quite a few times, and always in reference to EXTREMELY IMPORTANT KNOWLEDGE!!! But you cannot possibly recognize what is important without the real life experience that you can ONLY get by working in a Real Job before going to college and getting into lifelong debt with student loans.

Remember, back in the day, children worked after school and during school vacations. Nowadays that is very uncommon, even in high school, due to "child protection" laws that place many limitations on how, when, and where children can work. Although these laws may protect children in one way, they harm them in another way by robbing them of important life experience during those years. Today, 30 is the new 20 because you need to gain, during your 20s, the life and work experience that your grandparents gained when they were in their teens. Today, people in their 20s are less mature than their counterparts in the 1950s were. You need that time, after high school but before college, to get that real life experience. Plus you earn Real Money, live in a Real Apartment, and if your job, like mine, isn't in the field you wanted to work in, you gain additional insights, knowledge, and experience by exposing yourself to something totally different. Much better than graduating from college and realizing that you have an infinitude of student loan debt and no clue what to do next. Not to mention that you do NOT have roommates (quiet or loud) during college, and you do NOT need your parent's money! When you want noise, you can go to a bar.

Ah the good ol' operating systems of yesteryear.

Good thing they figured out the swabs were contaminated. Had they not, some innocent woman might have spent years and years of her life in prison, for nothing.

But I have such a better idea than this. Simply, you create a special tool that make runs before executing the compiler or linker. This special tool reads in your source file and basically places each and every function in a separate translation unit. These are compiled into object files. Any given game will have thousands of different functions in it, so you'll get thousands of object files. Now you set up your linker to link these objects together a few hundred thousands of times (this will require a grid if you're in a hurry), each time giving you a unique executable that is a unique permutation of the order of the object files. Each permutation will have to be associated with a number in a database. The game is ONLY sold online. You have to download it. When you do, you receive a unique executable image that NOBODY ELSE HAS. Your name, billing address, and credit card information are then associated with the ID number of that executable in the database. The game producer monitors all the warez sites for images of their games. When they find them, they know exactly from which of their customers each copy originated. Knowledge that this is the case will prevent MOST people from copying the game. Only hard-core pirates will try. As an added benefit, the fact that each executable is unique will prevent (or make it extremely difficult) to distribute patches that modify the behavior of the game. Once purchased and downloaded, you NEVER have to activate, you NEVER have to be online, you NEVER have to do anything. Pay, download, back it up to a CD or something, and enjoy.

I have a way you can fix DRM. In a game executable, you will have thousands of functions. All you have to do is come up with a system where each person who buys a copy of the game receives a completely unique executable image where the functions come in a certain specific order. That order can be tied somewhat to your name and the credit card you use to buy the game. All of this gets compressed and stored in a database. Then the game developer monitors the w4rez sites and downloads every copy of the game that shows up on them. The executable will identify the culprit who allowed the game to be copied. Busted! An additional benefit is that patches for the executable cannot be distributed.

This will be true only until players begin supporting the lossless format.

Agreed. This is not an adult suspected of illegal drug trafficking while crossing an international border. This is a 13 year old girl. THIRTEEN! And she was not suspected of trafficking in illegal drugs. Ibuprofen is a common medication in widespread use and is perfectly legal. The fact that something like this takes place in the United States of America is proof that this country is corrupt.

This is the year of the netbook, the cheap car, and next thing you know, they'll be selling houses made out of cardboard for dirt cheap, too.

I feel the same way. I loved BeOS back in its heyday. Maybe you should check out Haiku. It is supposed to be an open-source re-implementation of BeOS in such a way that provides source and binary compatibility with the last commercial version of BeOS, and then to proceed from there with new research. It finally has GCC 4, as of January, which means that it's not stuck in the "classic" 2.95 days of GCC anymore. This will help speed along development considerably. I hope to see a great comeback!

You know what's incredibly funny? If they did use an evil tool to uncover every exploit in open source code, to make the FOSS community look bad, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot because the bugs would get fixed at warp speed. Beyond the initial "bad" publicity they'd generate for FOSS (there's no such thing as bad publicity), the joke would be on them because they'd still be stuck with their bugs but we'd be free of ours. :-)

Let me modify that suicide joke for the GP:

Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Friends do assist M$ addicted friends in upgrading to Ubuntu.

Heh heh... my favorite Linux distro. :-)