We had a deal - those creating works get a period of time to capitalize on those works, after which they go into the public domain, and in exchange for those works being given over to the public, the public agrees to not violate that copyright without facing penalties.

Most works are no longer being given over to the public domain, therefore it's absurd to punish people for pirating them - a contract has to offer something to both sides.

WRT to software piracy (specifically games) - DRM put the nail in that coffin for me. When it became easier to install torrented, cracked games on release day than it did to install legally purchased software, I gave up giving a shit.

That said, contribute to open source (either funds or assistance), and definitely support projects where there isn't an obvious profit motive just the creation of neat tricks.

I won't even dignify "patriotism" with more than a laugh.

Can't pay a competitive wage. Can't offer benefits remotely close to what private employers will offer. Lose a ton of personal autonomy from matters trivial (no 420) to absolutely vital (Wanna move to a different state? Nope. Wanna quit? Nope. Wanna change jobs? Nope.) Be beholden to whatever high-functioning sociopaths make it through our joke of an electoral season.

Oh, you might get to play with some cool toys that you might not have access to as a civilian, I guess. And those who don't have any skills to start with might get some training out of it, though, to be honest, if you're old enough to join a service like this and you aren't at least somewhat self-taught already, you're probably not actually going to ever be good enough to be more effective than "the enemy" at what they will want you to do. You'd get a few competent journeymen out of it, I guess.

If your Xmas was ruined by not being able to play computer games maybe you should find more hobbies.

Xbox down? Go out side.

I remember when the iPhone was released and people said the same thing.

Google is sitting on a mountain of IP for both projects. Some companies look a bit beyond next quarter's results.

I wish I could go into my job. Do something once and get paid for it forever.

You've still sold a user a book. They still have your book. They just skipped by the scanning every page part.

Which is why it is relevant that the movie came out in 2009. After time they settle. Unless you're going to argue that "Shawshank Redemption" is just living on studio PR?

Perhaps if everyone else thought the movie was good your nieces and nephew just have bad taste. It was also a great book and highly rated by teachers.

You might want to use a different example for your first one:

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs has 7.0/10 on IMDB (after 5 years), got an 87% on Rotten Tomatoes, 66 on MetaCritic (with an average user score of 7.6),

It was a good movie.

"This is the End" was also pretty good with a 6.9/83%/67/7.1 (respectively).

DS9 was great with the philosophical questions.

I wish we'd explore more into the quadrants than "lets reset the clock and start over"

I remember his first year when it was a 'hoax'. Then the next year he went all in and made it real. As ugly as his website should be I hope some version exists in archive.org, he's been a christmas tradition since early 2000s when I first heard about him on Fark or Slashdot.

The point isn't the number of lights he has. The point is how interactive his site has always at least seemed to be.

I wish they would had put their efforts into Debian's kFreeBSD. It can't move to systemd and they downgraded it from an 'official' Jessie release.

Personally it's a bit of the best of FreeBSD and the best of Debian (apt-get) in a nice package. There's no problem with ZFS being 'in' the kernel. The latest versions of FreeNAS and FreeBSD both have ZFS booting.

Plus it still has all the debian server admin tools.

Someone on Reddit pointed out that the author may be using the wrong character.

XBMC is now Kodi.

Plex was OSXBMC renamed. The sources got quite divergent when Plex went more commercial.

I wonder what it would take for Dish to just start their own channels and programming.

Netflix has done it. Amazon has done it. Yahoo is doing it with Community. I would actually subscribe to dish if they had new original programming and not Fox News.

They could strike like they do in Montreal by not wearing Standard issue uniforms.

Having members and actually having power are two different things, the person you replied to was saying unions don't exist with the teeth that they used to.

We have unions in name only. Every single time the UAW contract comes up at my company they rabble back and forth and then "hurray, we reached an agreement." Union bosses and contractor get their cut for the 'negotiation'. Employees don't really get anything and the people at top win.

The standard of living for a lot of the US would improve if more people unionized (like programmers) and actually demanded a fair wage instead of getting worked to death by EA and the likes.