I don't know how it works in other countries, but here in the USofA, there's a little thing known as "the presumption of innocence," meaning that the accused is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty. This does the exact opposite by assuming that anybody who's accused must be guilty and penalizing them without allowing them to present a defense. No judge would ever be stupid enough to rule in favor of Rightscorp, making the idea DOA at best, even if they don't get sued into bankruptcy the first time they try to enforce it.

We try. Good gods we try.

Yes, I'm sure that some of you do. Alas, not enough.

I live in LA, where there are lots and lots of police scandals. Why? Not because our police are so bad, but because we don't put up with police misconduct or sweep it under the rug. Almost all of the scandals out here would be ignored in New York or regarded as "business as usual." Stop putting up with the corruption, get the voters to care enough to vote the crooks out of office and keep them out, and Chicago will clean itself up because it won't happen on its own.

If this software searches out all images of a subject and averages them automatically, that means that there's no human control over which images to use and which to reject. Imagine what would happen if you were to let this program loose to create an average image of Shirley Temple. She started in films at the age of three and reached the age of 85, and the software would create an "average image" by mixing images of her as a small child with ones of her as an elderly woman. Even worse, there's a non-alcoholic cocktail named after her, and pictures of it would almost certainly get included.

The only honest politicians we have here are the ones who at least have the decency to stay bought.

Yes, and as long as that's your attitude, nothing is ever going to change. Start enforcing the laws that are supposed to prevent this type of thing and stop voting for corrupt, machine politicians because right now, you're getting exactly the kind of government you're voting for.

Or perhaps you mean Ubuntu...

...which is based on Debian. Maybe you might consider trying a distro that's based on something else, such as Fedora, based on RedHat. Right now, I'm running Fedora 20 on my laptop and 19 on my desktop because I just haven't had time to upgrade it. Normally, my desktop runs 24/7, only rebooting for kernel updates. Current uptime is a little over 9.25 days and I can't remember the last time an update broke anything. Of course, I'm not foolish to run anything that's as bloated as Gnome, preferring Xfce with Compiz, but It Just Works.

I'm a vet: Gun Line, '72. Even though I was never in close combat, I'll bet that I have a much better understanding of just what war is than anybody who never served. Believe me, nothing in those video games can possibly match the experience of being in a war zone, especially if you're close enough to the fighting to see and/or hear the action. (Actually getting shot at, of course, is different; nobody ever shot at me, personally, but I did see 6" shells hitting the water behind our ship, and there's nothing in any game that comes near to that because you know that it isn't real.)

I don't think Military service is even the best way (although I do think it a good one).

What branch did you serve in? I was in the Navy back in '72, serving on the Gun Line.

Our soldiers always go somewhere else to fight.

Speaking as a 'Nam vet, that sounds real good to me! The best place to fight a war is always on somebody else's territory.

I think a lot of us in the US (and not just kids) could use that kind of experience.

If you really think that, there's an easy way to get that experience: enlist, serve, spend some time doing something for your country instead of whining about what it should be doing for you.

The non-computer game I like best right now is Oh Hell, especially at a penny a point. I've been playing it for decades at a club I belong to and according to the records kept by one of the players I'm "lifetime positive" because I've won more overall than I've lost. Most players consider it a cheap form of entertainment but I'm one of the few who considers it a minor source of income.

Make it easy for your users to report real problems to your developers.

Many years ago, I did tech support for a small startup that used a proprietary database (btrieve, I think) as part of its back end. The developer who wrote that part would have the program show the user the exact error message returned if the database had a problem. Alas, not only didn't the messages make any sense to the users, they didn't make sense to me, either, and I wasn't given any access to the documentation, meaning that unless the developer came down from his ivory tower, they were useless. Not only that, he refused to modify his code so that we had an idea which file was causing the error. This is just one of the reasons that the company folded.

... you're going to have a lot of folks in the army who don't have an education much past that...

I don't know what the requirements are for enlistment now, but I do know that back when I was in the Navy ('Nam era) it was pretty much a given that everybody in the Navy had at least graduated from High School. Of course, back then, the Navy had the highest mental standards (and the Marines the lowest, although they did have the highest physical standard) and I don't know what the Army required. Now that there's no draft, I wouldn't be surprised to find that all branches required either a High School Diploma or GED. You might want to revise your image of soldiers as ignorant, functionally-illiterate thugs.

... there are something like 17 different representations of strings depending on which engineer/department wrote the code!

That can't possibly be a good thing. What's worse is, there's no reason to think that any of the code checks to see which type of string it's been passed instead of just assuming that it's been sent the One True String.

Either way, you need to be savvier than your average Windows user.

That's not exactly setting the bar very high, is it?

Batman no; Spiderman maybe. I can remember at least once he was out in LA introducing himself as "your friendly coast-to-coast Spiderman."