I don't have any problems with commercial software either. I wouldn't personally pay for Adobe PS because I don't need it, but this doesn't mean everybody else is in my situation. The point I was trying to make was that neither Adobe nor any other company keeps from porting its commercial software to Linux because of "OS religious hate", as if it was opposite RMS; I believe it's just a market decision. They don't want 'more users': they want more people who'll pay to use their software. And as such, they must believe that the cost of porting their software is greater than the profit they can get from users in the target platform.

An owner doesn't have a reason to let any garage band kid play in their establishment (is that the word?), in their venue I mean, just because someone thinks he should be paid to do it. If you really should be paid to play, then the job offers will fall all over you (yes, playing music is also a job), because owners know you move a large crowd. If you're nobody, you need to show yourself to the world, and pay for the time and infrastructure you're using. I don't see anything wrong with this. It is not a favour: it is business.

While I agree with many of your points, I don't think a company (be it Adobe or any other) is capable of 'religious OS hate'. This applies to individuals. If someone were to show them the money, they'd start porting their crap to other platforms before they can say 'This is the year of the Linux desktop'. They don't do it because a great percent of us Linux users stand for FOSS and wouldn't ever in a million gazillion years think of paying for a product like PS. This of course doesn't take into account those who work with it and/or need it.

While I can understand a person's desire for the thief who took his precious iPad to leave this world, the application finds the iPad, not necessarily the person who took it. If I where to take my mother's iPad with me and forget it at some place I visited, I don't think a search warrant would be the way to go. If I took somebody else's iPad and dropped it inside someone's car, I also don't think a search warrant would be the way to go.

Anonymouse is blocked by the sysadmin at work, so I still can't access the blog post. Could somebody please post the text in a comment? Thanks.

Probably a straw man argument, but I understand the direction you're going with this. Maybe a better example would be: "So you would not mind if he gets on the bus playing reggaeton at full volume on his cellphone, right?" It's indeed legal, and annoying, and most likely a dickish selfish action prone to make everybody else feel the urge to take the phone off his hands and throw it out the window.

Perhaps not moves in the web, but apparently G. Van Rossum has had some privacy problems related to his contacts.

The nmap guys seem to have considered a few scripting languages too for a while, and stuck to Lua because of a couple of reasons addressed in this conference (and probably in some other place in the NSE docs). While I know nothing of the people behind the scenes of Wikipedia, I do kind of trust the decisions made by the nmap team, so my guess is it's not a clueless decision.

I usually think of the difference between learning/understanding something and only remembering it as the difference between a PDF file with text and one with a bunch of scanned pages.

I can relate to what you say, being a non native English speaker. While it took me years to get to an acceptable proficiency in English through (admiteddly) informal methods, I found that learning French was remarkably easier. This might be because my native language is Spanish, which is a closely related romance language, but it still worked both ways: it took me comparatively little time to start being able to derive the meaning or the use of unknown words once I had a minimum grasp of French, and this worked retroactively with English. I might not be able to define or to list with precision every use or meaning or definition of every word I use, not in English, not in French, and certainly not in Spanish, but I can relate and "learn" somehow to use words and language constructions easier now than five years ago.

This makes actually a lot of sense, more so now that it's becoming a lot more common to move away from the now classic huge and expensive recording studios to smaller and simpler, home-made recording studios. The technology is making it easier for any dumbass like me to tape him or herself playing the bass and just paste it over some play along tape, and have it sound sort-of-decent with your favorite (pirated) software and a couple of google searches. Since, as you said, what most musicians want is to actually play live in front of people, the whole 'recording an album' thing is just a means you use to try and make more popular whatever it is that you play, even if just a little bit.