The Chrome source code is actually a great set of documentation for GTK, since it uses a lot of advanced functionality and it is very well-indexed and easy to search.

It was indispensable when I needed to add basic Unicode screen I/O to my application. By contrast, the gtk.org manuals were good for very little beyond identifying the functions to search for.

Really?

In a lawsuit filed in August 2009, BREIN claimed that "80 to 90 percent of all torrents... [link] to copyrighted material." (citation)

All that remains is to take the number of torrents on LegalTorrents.com, estimate the number of torrents available through other sites, compare the two numbers, then revise upward the estimate of illegal torrents.

Absurd and asinine it may be, but such claims are already being made.

Admittedly, it's overstating the importance of LegalTorrents.com by quite a lot. This is a site that has tried and failed to reinvent itself a number of times over the last six years, and seems destined to fail again.

But in response to the claim that it will someday support the argument that torrents have substantially non-infringing uses, it's fair to point out that it is far more likely to damage such arguments.

The name of this particular service - LegalTorrents.com - serves to focus undue attention on the ubiquity of torrents providing access to infringing content.

Moreover, it comes down squarely on the wrong side of an important issue: torrents themselves are arguably never illegal, in that they only provide a means of finding content, and leave the actual distribution up to participating clients. Google indexes plenty of content that is either illegal or infringing, and though they deal with plenty of copyright-related complaints, they have not seen the need to establish an explicitly "legal" search service.

The company would also do a tremendous disservice to those advocating legitimate uses of torrents, if the number of torrents it tracks becomes a convenient shorthand for the number of legal torrents available. It might be good for business to publicize those numbers, to the extent they aren't readily visible, even if it is very bad for other legitimate users of the protocol. For instance, it would be trivial to assert that only 5% of torrents are available through LegalTorrents.com, and to imply that the other 95% are somehow illegal or questionable.

Frankly, it would be better for everyone if they had simply picked a name they could brand and advertise effectively. I can't see "LegalTorrents.com" getting the same sort of traction with Fortune 100 businesses as Akamai has, and it draws an inordinate amount of attention to the fact that the legality of the underlying protocol is controversial.

Well, it seems to me that this is the straightforward part - if it's not exactly easy, it's at least fully under your control as the publisher.

What you can't control is what happens when the user tries to install or run your game. How do you know they have picked the right installer or executable binary to double click?

Getting it right is what QA testing is for. The benefit of FatELF is that the end user only has a single program to run. By eliminating the choice between binaries, you eliminate the possibility that he will somehow make the wrong choice.

Exactly. Take Blizzard, who ships Windows and Mac versions of their games on the same media. Fat chance of getting an official Linux release in the absence of a universal binary solution. Blizzard tends to ignore platform-specific package formats in favor of their own installers, the better to control and customize the installation experience. By avoiding the standard MSI format on Windows, for instance, they avoid introducing a lot of unrelated dependencies and vastly simplify the post-release patching process.

If you don't mind hacking around on the command line to get a game to work, the current state of affairs probably suits you just fine. But there's no business reason for Blizzard to support Linux users with an official release, if the best they could provide is a different set of command line inputs to type in. This of course assumes they would not develop installers for every Linux distribution on every compatible architecture, along with the necessary documentation and technical support for each. I think that's a fair assumption.

Any FORMER mormon who leaves the church will be prevented from seeing his family and friends again. Anyone current mormon who breaks the rules and speaks to a FORMER mormon risks the same. When you get done watching Religulous, go work on your reading comprehension.

Speaking as a former Mormon, I can confirm that you are spewing nonsense. I haven't watched the "documentary" in question but I am going to visit my parents for Thanksgiving. I left the church 15 years ago and never experienced any of the ostracism you suggest is commonplace. Quite the reverse; from time to time, the missionaries will stop by my house to offer to help out with yard work, or to invite my family to a church event. The interactions are always cordial, if a little awkward.

Possibly it's different if you are excommunicated, but consider what you have to do to get excommunicated; in practice it doesn't happen unless you kill someone or start spreading a lot of anti-Mormon hate. In which case it's hardly surprising that friends and loved ones would disown you. It's possible there is an official policy of no contact in such cases, but the worst that would happen if you ignored it is a discussion with your local church leader.

Frankly you sound like someone who has done a lot of research into these questions and I commend you for that. But you might want to consider your sources a bit more carefully, and talk to more people in the real world. Most people are not backstabbing SOBs who will turn on you in an instant if you step out of line. There are a few nutcases out there, but you don't have to be a Christian to be a jerk.

I think we can all agree that what we need is a new federal agency to identify the true Libertarians.

I agree. I would've loved a class like this in high school but I was reading most of the suggested SF authors already. Students at that age lack the requisite judgment and maturity to distinguish important literary works from self-aggrandizing escapist fiction. Ideally that's where the teacher would come in, but the submitter's biases are rather transparent. He seems more interested in justifying the inclusion of fan favorites than in imparting useful analytical skills to the "flunkies."

Any list of fantasy authors for a literature course that does not include Borges is immediately suspect. His stories are short, and his ideas are profound and influential. Tolkien is equally significant, but more properly considered within the tradition of classics and folklore. Studying him in a literary context is fruitless and arguably even harmful.

A more productive avenue would be to look to favorite authors and see who they cite as significant influences, then assemble a list of stories by those authors. Or one could simply pick award-winning stories from the last few decades that have held up well in popular and critical esteem, e.g. "Flowers for Algernon." An interesting approach would be to group stories not by author but by place of first publication, to identify commercial and editorial influences on the fiction.

Or he could simply plug the class as a chance to read "Ender's Game" for school credit, and not bother arguing the academic merits of the curriculum, which will be slight. There's a reason that high school English classes do not survey works by Dan Brown, John Grisham, or JK Rowling. It's the same reason that the list as proposed is ill-conceived and fundamentally misguided.

The trouble with Warcraft "lore" is that it's an inconsistent grab bag of tropes from popular fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Chris Metzen at least has the good sense to borrow from better authors, but the end result is still derivative well beyond the standard in video games. It's a very good template for Blizzard, which essentially does the same thing with the games as a whole: polish off all the rough edges off original, groundbreaking games, then digest the essence down to mass market pablum.

In the Warcraft 2 era, the result was still somewhat inspired. Over a decade and three World of Warcraft releases later, the cracks are beginning to show. The lore in Wrath of the Lich King reads like bad fan fiction, with only a thin veneer of fantasy lite spackled over sources as inconsistent as Tolkien's Mordor, Norse mythology, and Lovecraft's Elder Gods. Plot continuity is achieved through item progression rather than narrative cohesion, and if the game wasn't a relentless treadmill of unthinking advancement, players would quickly notice that the story makes no sense. As it stands, there's little incentive on either side to care.

You should look into some of the newer, highly rated works at IFDB. There is a small but active community still developing these games, and each year sees one or two new gems that rival or surpass the most popular efforts of the Infocom era. The best days of the format may well be ahead of us.

OEM installs can be quite problematic with Vista. The mass imaging process underwent some significant changes between XP and Vista, and a lot of early Vista laptops were prepared improperly by manufacturers.

For example, my friend had a Sony Vaio from June 2007 where key system files and folders were symlinked to a (non-existent) Y: drive. Her laptop worked OK out of the box but slowly destroyed itself as Windows updates were applied incorrectly or in an unanticipated way. Eventually it lost the ability to rename files and folders, and to apply new patches.

Windows itself is very stable but if it gets installed or deployed in an incompetent way, the results are obviously not going to be consistent or stable.