...and I'm not voting on any level this year. There is not a single candidate on the state or federal level that I believe will make any discernible difference over the other. I'd at least pitch in for local elections, but having just moved to a new area of my state I haven't had time to form any educated opinion of the local candidates.

I am strongly against throwing in a vote just in spite of a candidate I dislike more, since the fact I dislike any of them means they aren't worth my vote. Maybe they are to someone else, but not to me. So fuck it this year. The lesser of two evils is still evil. I'll vote when I feel there is someone worth voting for.

While its just a YouTube comment, it seems a Pixar representative made some comments of his own. Amongst them was one which explicitly stated that Blender can implement OpenSubdiv if they wanted to.

Of course the comment holds no legal weight whatsoever, but its an encouraging sign.

A snip from that comment (emphasis mine):

OpenSubdiv is a free open-source API : any software vendor can implement our code in their application, including Maya, 3DS Max, Mudbox, Mari or Blender. The implementation is based on a joint research effort between Pixar and Microsoft Research.

Indeed. Why just the other day I was able to successfully listen to Holy Diver while downloading Firefox. Then when I double clicked the Firefox installer, ReactOS went straight to a BSOD.

Honestly, it does Windows better than Windows.

Of course I'm not ready for "next gen" prices. I'm not even willing to pay the current gen prices. If I can't wait it out for the price to come down by at least 50%, I won't buy it.

It doesn't help that almost all commercial PC games come in the form of sloppy console ports these days. I wouldn't even consider pirating them. If there wasn't such a strong indie game market I probably wouldn't buy any new games at all.

Actually, its built atop what once was the quake 2 engine, but has since been modified to extremes to support all these cool new things.

Can't really complain when the price tag for your average end user is "free."

I agree entirely. I'm not sure about Alien Arena, but I have noticed with a few of these open source FPS games, particularly AssaultCube (I used to love playing AssaultCube), a certain social phenomena will occur where only a handful of the "elite" developers, contributors, and players will be recognized and their ideas accepted as okay to be part of the game. Anything which conflicts with their interests is deemed bad for the game, even if the larger portion of their user base prefers these "bad" ideas.

So, slowly but surely, the large, interested communities who enjoyed what the elites did not will fade away and find other games. The end result being something like a few weeks ago when I tried to get on one of these games again just to see if things calmed down, and all I saw was a bunch of empty servers.

I understand that people would be protective of their work and after a while, sensitive to ideas of change. I also understand OSS permits people the option of splitting from a community and making modifications to a game they feel make it better. But when it comes down to banning players and servers alike from a master server for playing certain maps and modes too much, then you have a problem.

Trolling aside, I'm just glad those who did buy one are doing cool things with them.

I had put myself on the waiting list a month or so ago and just today I got invited to purchase one. But they claimed delivery would take 12 weeks at least. Since I am likely moving downstate, and since I've already waited this long for one, I figure I can hold off at this point.

Besides, for what I want to use it for I need to pick up some more hardware and finish my software for the cause. I intend to set up an amateur radio repeater using the Pi as the controller.

If I had to take a guess, he probably used a plugin that supports straight up OpenGL, an audio backend with support for OpenAL, and for input used XInput2.

Congratulations, Pirate Pay. You repurposed the same technology Low Orbit Ion Cannon offers so that it could target BitTorrent clients. Its a bit early to assume anyone will jump on this software, though. Fighting fire with fire and then complaining when down the road your network hosting this software is inevitably being DDoS'd by the clients it aggravated would come off as a bit hypocritical.

Although, I wonder if this targets specific torrents, or just any torrent downloading it detects on a network. I'd be rather ticked if I was in the middle of downloading a Debian DVD ISO and my download speeds dropped substantially because my system was being DDoS'd for using my download protocol of choice.

That ship has sailed and its never coming back. Save for the hobbyist minority, most other users don't care about any of the selling points of a Linux Desktop Operating System.

Tell them its free, and they will tell you they didn't "pay" for Windows and that it came with their PC. Even if this is a load of crap, they don't know the difference. Some of them will even ask you what Windows is, or what an operating system is. I hear this lots from all age groups since many people just don't care how it works.

Tell them they can customize it and there's many choices, and they'll tell you they just want to check their email and write up their reports.

Tell them there is games, and they'll argue they can't play Skyrim. Tell them they can play Skyrim with Wine, and they'll tell you its too complicated.

Your average PC user wants consistency, and that's either going to be Windows or Mac. This is especially notable in the area of people who know just enough about computers for work purposes. The only people who I have ever convinced to try Linux are those with dated hardware that don't want to run XP but can't run Vista or Windows 7.

I knew this extremely large trollface would come to represent something important, someday!

Unless Linode decides to cough up $15k in a private deal, there will likely be no compensation. IANAL, but since the United States government doesn't recognize bitcoins as a legal form of currency anyway, taking this to court would probably be fruitless and a waste of time. Unless I'm missing details, of course.

If they were to be compensated, though, there is some potential to have this incident set a major precedent in regards to the legitimacy of bitcoins in the U.S.

Your average Granny-user remains clueless and storing gigs of uncompressed bitmaps on their system.

It's not all their fault, really. MSPaint doesn't have JPEG support in Windows 98.