Every developer out there seems to think DRM will "get them more sales" at least at some point in time. Some then realize this fact: The people pirating aren't "lost sales"- they're people who either can't/won't buy your product for varying reasons.

You want to win the "can't" crowd back if possible- you're never going to convince the "won't" crowd ever. The former is a possible customer, the latter is not and will not be.

DRM might slow the infringers down (it's been proven that pretty much every DRM solution to date has been circumvented within weeks of the release of the title...and that initial crush in the case of many titles won't be where you make your money if you're download only/mostly...) but it will pretty much never stop them. Ask Microsoft how nifty their DRM has been on the 360. DRM won't turn the "can't" crowd to be your customer- it won't put money in their pockets to buy. DRM won't turn the "won't" crowd into your customers- if they want your game badly enough, they will take it whether you have DRM on the title or not. If it's such that they won't bother, you've failed at making a fun game.

DRM is a folly wherever it gets used. It's use is based off of a flawed premise out of the gate.

There is no magic solution - you are talking about managing multiple environments with different requirements and technologies in some meaningful, automated way.

You're looking at home-brew here.

What you want to aim for is

0) Stop using multiple technologies if you can. If that's not an option, it just makes more work.

1) Clearly define policies regarding development, testing, and release. These have nothing to do with tools. You build and select your tools based on these policies.

2) Automated pushbutton deployment. You want your code releases of each new version of a site to be automated. You also want rolling back to the previous version to be automated. This applies for CI, QA, and whatever other stages you want, all the way to Production.
3) Automated deployment should involve at a minimum tagging a given revision and pushing it to the correct environment.

4) You can use commit hooks or some other method against TRUNK to run a CI server that continually does regression testing and other funky stuff... as well as just shows you a live version of what's in trunk "right now".

5) When working towards a target release,developers need to include any necessary scripts to update (and rollback, if necessary) their respective databases.

6) Config data... can be handled by having a separate /config folder for each environment, version controlled separately - and where access and change control are again strictly defined and limited, and well documented. this would automatically be inserted by your pushbutton deployment process.

First: That's not a legal right.
Second: It only works for marriages because states already have reciprocal recognition agreements regarding marriages.
Third: The fix is not to force a new definition of marriage on everyone. The fix is to add civil unions to states' reciprocal recognition agreements.

First: It's only an issue because civil unions aren't always recognized across state lines. Amending the state reciprocal recognition agreements will fix that.
Second: Are you seriously complaining that it's too hard to dissolve a civil union? I thought they wanted to marry so they could commit to eachother?

First: That's not a legal right.
Second: The person can simply go through the normal citizenship process. (I don't think marriage to a citizen should automatically make a person a citizen, so I could make that argument as well.)

First: Joint tax filing is not a legal right.
Second: They can usually file state taxes jointly.
Third: Again, the solution is not to redefine marriage, but to add a "civil union" joint filing status to the federal tax code.

Assuming your number is correct, how many of those benefits are legal rights, as opposed to, say, tax benefits for having children? Can you show me any of those benefits which are actually relevant to a majority of homosexual civil unions? (For example, child tax deductions are completely irrelevant for the vast majority of homosexual couples.)

(Remember: gay-marriage supporters like yourself complain that gays are losing rights. Tax benefits are not a right, they're merely benefits. If that is your chief complaint, fine, I don't have a problem with you complaining about benefits, but don't call them "rights" when they're not.)

No, of course not; but I've already mentioned the solution: amend state reciprocal recognition agreements to include civil unions. That will solve most of your complaints, and would be far easier for the majority of the country to stomach than redefining something so important to them.

One hospital's indiscretion should not reflect on the country as a whole. Or should I regale you with stories about people who are discriminated against in the South just because they're Mormon?

My point is, an anecdote does not give you license to claim there's some rampant mistreatment of $MINORITY going on.

So can partners in civil unions. Not sure where you're getting that. But even if they couldn't the solution would be to change that.

But even if that weren't an option for some contrived reason, it's literally a trivial matter to write a will giving your possessions anyone you want in the event of your death.

So can gay couples. Or are you referring to specific adoption agencies who won't give kids to gay couples, because they think gay couples can't provide an adequate child-rearing environment? If that's the case, you need to address that issue (the child-rearing environment one), not complain about the adoption agencies.

First: Nothing you listed is a legal right.
Second: Everything you listed has a relatively simple fix which does not involve redefining "marriage".

Do you feel it's right to force the majority of the country to accept your new definition for "marriage" when a relatively simple alternative exists?

It's not paranoia, just yet another ego trip. "I'm so important they want to blow me away!" No Darl, you little turd, we want to see you live the rest of your hopefully long, long life as the insignificant worm you really are. That's a fitting punishment for egomaniacs.

You really needed to round that off with "you'll be incredibly lucky to get Darl working for you."

You can count "earth" as a resource the moon has that mars doesn't... Sure in a few thousand years it will be easier to live on Mars and take resources from Martian soil than ship them to the moon from earth, but for the next 5 or so human generations, it will be easier to ship stuff to the moon from earth.

However, why would anyone want to live on the moon, there is no solid business reason to colonize it.

I think the real moral here is to use Java rather than .net! :P

In all seriousness, it's only a matter of time before more .net exploits are discovered. Java is the more open solution, with a better security track record. *shudder*

I'll show you where it is: Open up your Firefox browser, surf to "about:config" and search for blocklist. There ya go. Oh wait, that's the place that allows you to turn off or fine tune Mozilla's blocklist.

I thought most bacteria did not engage in sexual reproduction, but instead basically cloned themselves for each successive generation. If that's the case with this particular species, I don't think it would be entirely fair to call this group inbred, considering all of them would be clones, not just this group.

I didn't clarify the question. The user asked a perfectly clear question. It was just the wrong one--it wasn't what he needed. I clarified what he actually wanted and supplied the *right* question.

Western countries have by far most access to cheap energy and cheap food. Yet their population diminshes and they (we) import immigrants to fill the gap. It is true for all advanced economies. Once a nation gets sophiscated enough to have people educated and equipped with birth control means, growth halts as people can "trade" number of children for economic conditions. Emerging countries will see the same thing once their societies will get sophiscated enough.

It's a shame that western nations keep so much countries in 3-rd world rank by manipulating/corrupting their governments, stealing their natural/energy resources and making them debt slaves. Excess population growth of many countries is actually an effect of those shameful actions. Cheap energy source and help in achieving real advancements (as opposite to this shameful circus performed by Bono, Geldof and other idiots) would solve the problem.

I've contributed a fair bit of code to clang, so I'm biased, but these are may views:

• The code is much cleaner. I wanted to extend GCC to support Objective-C 2 with the GNU runtime library. It was easier for me to write a complete code generation implementation for GNU libobjc in clang than it was to make simple changes to GCC, coming from no familiarity with either project.
• Clang is much easier for new developers to modify. Time from first looking at clang code to first diff being accepted was about a week for me, and that's including trying to remember how C++ worked after avoiding it for about 5 years.
• Clang is more modular. You can easily pull out the front end, for example, and incorporate it in an IDE for syntax highlighting.
• The modular infrastructure means that there are other interesting projects being built on top of clang, like the static analyser and an indent tool with full semantic awareness.
• Clang is much faster than GCC and uses less memory.
• Clang is BSD licensed, while GCC has just become GPLv3. This may not matter to you, but the FreeBSD team doesn't want any GPLv3 code in the base system.
• Clang uses LLVM for code generation, which comes with a lot of other advantages (it's trivial to write optimisation passes - I've written three) and you get things like link-time optimisation, JIT compilation, and so on for free (there was a demo of a C JIT based on clang at last year's LLVM devmtg).

People who don't know how brains learn, might believe the "that it never actually had" part.

But if you know anything about that, you will know that what they did, was the same thing as what we call "learning": Associating something with something else.
In this case they just provided the "bad feeling" part of the association, while the odor was in place. Causing the fly to learn that the odor causes that bad feeling.
The same thing as if someone would always kick you in the balls when you see a pretty lady. (Just that the kicker would be invisible.)

And actually, a large laser on your brain *is* something pretty bad, that is unknown to a fly.
So this is nothing very special at all! They just found another way to "kick the fly in the balls". ^^
With an indirect way, using ATP and laser, but still just that.

Acer users Linux to have an OS on machines for the Asian market where people will install pirated Windows. They sell Linux laptops without a GUI, and some other manufacturers sell laptops with FreeDos, for the same reason.

OK, funny, but that isn't the issue here. Whatever the license says, the code is still legal, distribution within the terms is still legal and Darl and company are still toerags. What could happen is that a piece of legalese in the license may suddenly turn out to translate into layman as "you may print this code out, roll it up and beat baby seals to death with it," and the copyright holder may not have wanted that many baby seals on his or her conscience.

The GPL (v2) has been around long enough that I would have imagined those kinks had been spotted but, as with other licenses, the law behind them may change. What "derivative work" means today may not be the same thing it means tomorrow. Quite why they're singling out the GPLv2 for this when all licenses are subject to the same foundations of sand I'm not really sure. Maybe they think it will promote discussion - the fools!