On my motorbike, I'd feel much safer if all the cars around me were driverless. Human car drivers, who so often tend to blank out half-unconscious and fail to check blind spots, are the leading cause of death for bikers.

From my R&D experience across many companies, it's clear to me that a "software engineer" is a proper superset of "developer".

1. A 'developer' is paid to create code that works within the company's contrived runtime environment and passes a few stages of testing, while a 'software engineer' is also paid to ensure the code actually works reliably in this nebulous abstract construct called the "real world" - customer/client installations where there are innumerable environmental variables and things that can go wrong.
2. A "developer" nods timidly and reluctantly to Murphy while passing in the corridor. But the software engineer says "Thanks for another great night. What would you like for breakfast?"
3. A "developer" goes whining to her/his team leader when the tools or OS play up. A software engineer cracks out the machine-code debugger, logic analyser and oscilloscope, traces all the API calls, and spits out working patches for the bugs in the libraries, drivers and kernel.

If I had some plant that was failing at 3:15am and costing me a fortune, I know which I would prefer to have on site.

But the Supreme Court had no choice but to stand up for justice. No going soft on patent abuses!

I'm thinking along the lines of the emacs "spook" function, amongst other things. You just need enough a large enough group of participants working together.

The system can be trained in weird ways. For instance, if enough people in enough places scratch their noses with their left hands, then break out in a mock fight, the system will learn to sound the alarm every time someone scratches their nose with their left hand.

Or, for something more socially useful - have people pull out a cellphone, talk for a few seconds, then pull out a mock gun and pretend to mug others. Then, the system will freak out every time some annoying jerk pulls out a cellphone in public. Along that same theme, train the system to send in the troops whenever someone adjusts their underwear in public, or picks their nose, or farts loudly...

Firefox is the greatest browser, with advanced features to benefit every user at a profound spiritual level:
* Its memory bloat teaches us to be mindful of our resources, both within the computer, and our use of our resources in everyday outer life.
* Its slowness helps teach us patience.
* When the whole browser freezes up from a bit of incompetent CPU-thrashing javascript code running in one tab, it teaches us to be responsible for our own coding decisions and how they affect others.
* Its slow startup teaches us that wonderful things don't happen instantly, and that we need to lose our attachment to time

Stay away from Chrome - it feeds the ego by promoting our addiction to instant gratification

Framing the discussion as "piracy reduction" is long obsolete. Might as well call it a "reduce gas diffusing in a vacuum" conference.
They need to restart with a premise of "finding ways for content creators to be rewarded for their works". Then we might start getting some workable and relevant ideas.

(/me ducks)

After countless stints in Dependency Hell, I would ask: which is the predator, and which is the prey?