I don't know about that. I think having faith in someone you love is a virtuous thing. Even showing trust in a complete stranger is an admirable trait in my opinion. I am not a wealthy man by any means, but I think karma has been good to me. Life is a cold and ugly place for the cynical.

Did anyone else notice the stealthy advertisement in the list?

Oh please. I learned to type when I was 6, and I don't write code to practice my typing. Your tools should do as much work for you as possible! Bonus points if you make some of your own (automation? Code snippets? How about a single debug console for both your client-side and server-side stacks? anyone?).

Not to speak for the GP, but I don't think he changed his tune at all. The very best code IS self documenting, through the use of naming, structure, and semantics. Even the very best programmers can't be perfect 100% of the time (who has time for that?), so a well placed comment describing the intent of a code block is at least better than nothing, and would be a valid use of a comment. A comment is simply an apology for not writing the very best code.

Thank god for modern IDEs, and their ability to quickly navigate through function references. I know you old timers (not referring to parent specifically) love your VIM and eMacs, but those environments seem to be conducive to terrible code (at least in the regards of readability). With a modern IDE, you can afford the luxury of being overly verbose in your "structure", because you are not having to take a bunch of shortcuts to avoid all that extra time typing and navigating through your code.

It should be hammer.pound(nail), or maybe even something like human.do(new PoundCommand(hammer, nail)). OOP is all about grouping and managing your cross-cutting concerns.

And why should I care what one does with their own device, while not affecting any other users? They can hack away at it all day long for all I care. The issue here (as I understood it) is that these apps are granting special multi-player features, serving out extra content, and a variety of other server-based activities, without verifying the authenticity of the request.

This is not a failing of the ecosystem, but of the propensity of app developers to trust client side data. The client is a dirty evil little thing, and under no circumstances would it be a good idea to grant it access to precious sever side resources (such as in game purchases) without validating the request against private data (EG. an auth token).

Yeah, that's what's so cool about it. Endless possibilities.

I think for a lot of people, piracy is less about getting something for free, and more about a refusal to continue playing by a set rules that are counterproductive to the progression of society as a whole. People are fed up with this whole concept of "Intellectual Property," and it's spreading more and more every year. The media empire is drastically attempting to sway our thinking back to the old ways, but they are fighting an uphill battle, as people are beginning to realize what is best for the media empire is not what is best for the progress of society. We no longer need IP to "force" us to create! The internet has made it quite evident that it is human nature to explore new ideas, create, and to be creative. What we need more than ever is access to free flowing (uncensored) ideas and information from all over the globe. This more than anything will bring us together as a species, and allow us to progress in a direction that is not just ideal for the privileged few, but to every human being on this planet. I strongly believe that Intellectual Property is counterproductive to this goal.

It was a good ride, but it's time for Big Media to go. Let's start by abolishing all concepts of Intellectual Property, and simply make plagiarism illegal instead.

Writing to tmp breaks encapsulation, and so it is considered more "dangerous" than setting up your own internal temporary storage mechanism. File name collisions are the most obvious issue to arise from this. In worse cases, you can leak sensitive information (I remember one of the GUI terminals in Gnome was dumping the buffer as plain text to tmp, even when using SSL).

We now live in the information age. The old rationales of copyright no longer apply. It is trivial to reverse engineer this day and age. In fact, that's what all the hubub is about. We need a new way of doing things, for a new age. It's up to our generation to make that happen.

The solution, then, is to get rid of the "publishers," not give them more power to exploit us, in the hopes it will satiate their appetite. It won't.

I know you didn't mention big media, but you were happily going after their red herring, like it has any relevance on the actual issues at hand, so I thought it was worth bringing up.

The fact that you seem to believe a "poorer selection" of art has a greater detriment to society than a lack of free will, really says a lot about the effectiveness of their campaign. Sad, really.

Here's the dirty little secret Big Media doesn't want you to know; Big Media does not care one bit about pirates or piracy.

Almost every independent study shows the direct results of piracy (EG. the "lost sale") is negligible to the bottom line, and have sometimes even shown to improve revenues for lesser known artists. Big Media did not get to the position they are in by being stupid. What really scares Big Media is a free and open internet.

What most people fail to realize is that the profitability of the media empire has nothing to do with media sales. When mainstream media is owned by 5 conglomerates, they get to decide what's popular and what's not, what issues are talked about in the news, what is and what is not "popular opinion," and they even get to decide who we may choose as our president. This is not some tin-foil-hat wearing conspiracy, you can go to school for this, and learn from the masters of marketing how to sway public opinion. Big Media is not afraid of lost media sales from piracy, they are afraid that if alternative distribution channels of media exist, they will lose their control over popular opinion, and thus the source of their power.

To this affront on our freedoms, there can only be one response: Death to Big Media!