http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/rewrite/access.html

you can kill leaching at the server level fairly easily. If by leaching you mean people direct linking your images and using all of your bandwidth. Stealing / downloading pics, there is always a way.

comparing great coders of the past to great musicians is a little bit wrong... Great musical works by geniuses of their day were exposed, meaning, if you were appropriately skilled, you could simply write them down and look at the score, the code, and see directly what the Genius had wrought. With programming it is more obscure, unless the code has been released to the public, all you have are errors, mistakes, and interface design to illuminate you as to the processes and logic that went into its creation. one example would be google. you don't learn alot about the google backend from its web interface, but you know there is some serious stuff going on in the background to spit out a result to you based on the words that you typed in cross referenced with what amounts to basically all of human knowledge.

unfortunately apple doesn't support multiple platforms.

I can't wait for android desktop to come out!

I would definitely prefer a la carte.

You could always just buy gold or silver and pay someone off with that. In the old days the cashless system was called barter. Still works today.

there is actually only one cat.

true enough. Some will never learn from history.

The Luddites didn't win in the long run.

Foxconn wants to replace 4 million of its workers with robots in China. The wages there have quintupled in the last few years and it is becoming cheaper to do it with robots in China. The robot revolution happened already, that's why there are no jobs and companies are showing profits despite high unemployment. Welcome to the new economic paradigm.

you can tell the difference, but you would have already have had to spend a bunch of dough on tuning the room and putting in very good speakers, and tuning them to the room... and of course for the very fine detail, you would have had to spend most of your life wearing earplugs. But there is a difference. also not all microphones need power. most use an induction based transducer to create a very small ac voltage (-60ish dB), which is then bumped up by the mic preamp, depending on the device to -10 or +4 dB. Condenser mics need power to charge the plates, tube mics also need power... and there is at least one mic that I know of which has a dynamic element but has active electronics in it to tweak the frequency response and requires phantom power.

try zzounds.com or guitar center for usb or firewire connected audio i/o devices... look in the category "computer recording"

At some point, the length of cable will reach a point where the capacitance will start to kill the low end of your frequency spectrum... Crosstalk on balanced, twisted pair lines is typically very low. It is the whole point of twisted pair... The transceivers at each end use some form of common mode rejection to kill most of whatever the lines pick up in interference. the higher the number of twists per unit of length, the better it will be at rejecting noise and crosstalk.

Someone will put a dish on his roof, hack in and use it to spam...