It just goes to prove no one is irreplaceable; not even Jobs.

My key points on the subject are:

1. A love of the art and the job.

2. An eagerness to learn and try new things.

3. The willingness to risk your job to do "the right thing" on a project.

4. Acceptance that others in the business (not just the team) have valuable inputs that need to be respected.

5. Experience. Years and years of in-the-trenches experience with a variety of technologies and techniques.

6. (And perhaps most importantly) A background in the history of computing. The realization that "with a computer" or "on the web" does not make something "new" and patent-worthy.

civilization reaches a point where its porn and virtual reality [preoccupy them]

Until..."I've been hacked! She has 3 green dicks! That I can live with, but not her looking like Kim Jong-Un now."

Next you'll be telling me you can create operating systems in less than 15GB!

If you complain, we'll re-write it in Java and make it 30GB

"illegal moves...may cause...strange things to happen"

Quantum chess, my favorite! Oh wait, that's the prenup fineprint

Do you mean % of software devoted to maintenance? % devoted to "changing data formats"? I know later in the book he claims OOP wraps data formats and therefore allegedly reduces the impact of those on code. But those later arguments are spurious in my opinion when compared to the alternatives. Adapters can be made in any paradigm. And reducing that 18% slice may increase other slices. Either way, those 2 slices are not measures of OOP improvements.

Toldja, 640 bytes otta be enough for anyone. -Gill Bates

No. A refund is a return payment made from a merchant to a customer. Refunds are not made to third parties that were never part of the original business transaction.

Ok. Agreed. Ubi shouldn't owe them a 'refund'. But they are the party that owes restitution here.

The customer should seek restitution from the middleman that made the fraudulent charge.

"fraudulent charge" is a pretty strong charge to make. The keys were sold legally in Eastern Europe by buyers who then exported them legally elsewhere.

The only "contradiction" would be to what Ubi -wants-. That doesn't amount to fraud. It is not fraud to buy something in a price discriminated market, and legally export the product.

Europe is very economically diverse. Germany has nearly 4x the per-capita GDP as Poland, which happens to be right next door. What's affordable to someone in Germany is not necessarily affordable to someone in Poland.

My city is very economically diverse. Less than a mile away are people making a fraction of what is typical in my neighborhood. Yet we both pay the same price for milk, cars, and movie rentals.

I hear your argument, but I'm not sure what makes the line between germany and poland a magical line the free market dare not cross.

That bike rack that you mentioned above is purchased outright, whereas Ubisoft's games are licensed.

Semantics. I *purchased* a license. I don't pretend I have any special exceptional copyright ownership of the underlying intellectual property any more than when I purchase a copy of a book... but I did *purchase* a license. The store had a "buy" button, I pressed it. A one time transaction was completed. I know own a license. Its listed as one of my games. And I can click a link to my "purchase history".

  There's a principle in law... if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then its a duck. (You see this principle applied in other areas too like when corporations dress up their employees as "independent contractors" and the law sees right through it.)

Many leasing companies will not allow the lessee to take the vehicle out of the country without permission.

A lease agreement is a negotiated several page document that both parties sign multiple times over. Pretty sure that's not a better analogy for buying a video game.

Region locked game consoles are a good example of this. Outright revoking access to the service is crude, which is why many publishers are switching to language-locked editions. A high-priced English-French-German-Spanish-Italian edition on one side, and a cheap Polish edition on the other. This can negatively affected ex-pats that don't speak the native language, but that's a very small group.

Yup. I agree they can do stuff like this. But you can take a region locked game console to North America and play games purchased in that region for it. They don't get to show up your house with a hammer and smash your console.

or you agreed to the ToS and accept the consequences of breaking them.

Which terms of service did I any one agree to before buying the key that indicated UBI could revoke the game if they weren't from the country the key originated from?

I don't deny they exist... but I'd like to see them.

Primarily? Because it won't pass the testing without a lot of work. In particular, there are negative assertion tests on header files (some things are not allowed to be dragged into the namespace, and the header are promiscuous). There's also a whole bunch of testing having to do with full and almost-full devices. There are also signal issues and process group membership issues. For example, you can "escape" an exclusion group on Linux by setting your default group to one of your other groups; Linux overwrites the membership in cr_groups[0] as a synonym for cr_gid, and doesn't handle POSIX saved IDs quite right, either (Neither do the BSDs, so this isn't a Linux-only problem).

Last time I attempted to run the test suit on Linux as a lark, there were about 20K failures (mostly tests not compiling because of it bailing out over the header file issues. There are also some parts of the system that have been subsumed by systemd; this isn't intrinsically a problem on its own, so long as the system *also* supports flat config files as an addendum, at least for some aspects of logging.

Also, getting the UUCP to work over USB serial dongles is likely to be something of a bear, unless you make the HDB modifications for handling the "rung indicate" as a notification to take the shared file lock on the callout device so the getty's don't start trying to chat with each other.

Finally, there some considerable legal/licensing issues for the trademark.

"update"... I think he means he went from one to the other, I'm assuming MS put out Windows Updates to 10 just the same as anything else? But I could be wrong.

However, even so, in the world of UEFI, GPT, etc. why the fuck does Windows still stomp over the boot sector as if it owns it? Add your partitions, mark yourself as active, put an entry in the UEFI if you find it. Otherwise, stop. You don't need to overwrite the boot sector if you've got that far because it worked well enough to boot your installer! And anyone installing non-standard boot sectors will be smart enough to just add your partition in as an option to boot from.

There is no conclusive evidence that there even exists such a thing as interplanetary travel for a life-form. We've barely touched the moon ourselves.

Now, granted, the acceleration from the beginning of the last century to the Moon-missions was extraordinary. But since then, if anything our acceleration has slowed to an absolute crawl. The expense of a simple one-off mission that we've already done several times just isn't viable any more.

Now, consider, that you could get to Mars. It'd take decades of planning, travel, etc, but you could get there. That's the nearest planet.

Now don't consider distance, etc. necessarily. Consider resources. Now you have to find the time, money, resources, engineering, etc. in order to make fuel to make the next jump. That's not easy at all. Hell, Mars is being talked of as one-way at the moment. And if we got to there, to get to Jupiter would take even more resources, energy, etc. Now there are ways and means to cheat this, but they are slow, and not capable of sustaining human life along the way at the moment.

But let's say, on every planet we visit, we find a ready-built space-base with fuel and oxygen enough to get to the next planet. We land, breed like fuck, and it only takes 20 years - doing nothing else - to plan, fuel, and travel on to the next. That's nearly two centuries before you're heading out of solar system. And you're unlikely to be overtaken at any point, even if Earth finds an energy source 10 times more powerful in that time.

Asteroids - even less resources, even harder to land on, even more difficult to colonise. Let's say we fire out probes all the time we're doing this (ignore where the resources for these probes comes from).

The next star is 8 light years away. Let's assume every star is that far away from the next, every star has the same kind of planetary system, etc. It's going to take several centuries to get to the first. Several millennia to traverse a handful. Meanwhile, all the probes your sending out will barely hit the next star but let's say they hit 10 stars on the way out, and talk back instantly if they find something. We could cover a few hundreds of stars in that time.

Let's go mad... several millennia of this (we'll stick with c as the limit of physics, but that might obviously change - at that point, we'll reconsider Fermi's Paradox anyway!), and the entire race dedicated to populating a planet, building the infrastructure to convert every resource it has to nothing more than space travel "fuel" (of whatever kind), and their sons move on to the next planet, all the while sending out hundreds of probes. Every few centuries, they go to a new star.

That's, rounding UP, (10^4 years / 2 x 10^1) generations, 10^1 stars per millienia in each direction. The orders of magnitude wouldn't get near 10^8 at all.

Do you realise where that gets you? There are a hundred billion stars just in our galaxy. That's 10^11. It'd take thousands of millennia (millions of years) to do this at stupendous speed across the galaxy, stopping to do nothing else.

No doubt there'd be advances and speed-up, but you're still orders of magnitude in debt before you've colonised a galaxy sufficiently. And then you consider the number of galaxies - That's another 10^11 or thereabouts.

And then you add in real-life, where we aren't just able to do nothing but look for aliens. What you're suggesting is that, even if there was a civilisation just a few stars away from us (incredibly unlikely given what we can see), it'll take anywhere from centuries to millennia to discover them. Assuming speed-of-light all the way, and communicating with probes all the way, etc. it'll take longer than man has so far existed in a form capable of doing such things to actually make any kind of contact if only, say, 1% of the galaxy is habitable.

The numbers just get more ridiculous after that.

Now, of course, we're limited by our current knowledge. But that's the point. Our current knowledge says there's nothing even in range. And even with exponential increases in detection, capability, resources, dedication, etc. we're still talking millions of years. And until we can enhance that knowledge, even assuming we can do the impossible of a "Moore's Law" for such things, we're still not in the right ballpark to actually find anything with any certainty.

And it's more likely, in those millions of years, that we die out entirely, especially if we spread ourselves so thin. Fuck, we're not sure we'll make it off the planet ourselves - we have literally never sent a human being to another planet, ever. If we're lucky we might get a self-sustaining colony going somewhere before the Earth kicks us out. But even then, something on Mars, or Alpha Centauri, is NOT as hospitable to life as Earth currently is. Sustaining a population of any significance would be nigh-on impossible. But we just assumed that every generation, we could just build a new shuttle, fuel it, launch it, etc. just using the resources of the planet we've landed on and leave mum and dad to rot on the planet we've just stripped bare and that was none too hospitable when we arrived.

The problem is not lack of imagination, it's just a sheer numbers game. Until those numbers change significantly (they change all the time, we've revised all sorts since we started detecting more planets around foreign stars), we're up shit creek without a paddle. Even if there are a thousand other civilisations doing exactly the above, all looking for each other, it's going to take extraordinary feats of science, and hundreds of millennia, for them to even get close to detecting each other. And then when you run the maths for the chances of them crossing over at a point where they recognise and detect each other, it actually gets even worse.

Personally, I believe in the unofficial science line here - sure, there are likely civilisations out there. They may be more advanced, they may have technology orders of magnitude greater than ours (and thus also orders of magnitude less impact than we might be looking for, if they are at all conscious they can be seen), they may dedicate their entire civilisation to finding us, for millions of years, AND STILL NOT FIND US.

That's the problem. It's not naivety to make up fantabulous numbers like this, run them, exaggerate every possibility, and still find that it's incredibly unlikely that anything significant would ever happen. It's not naivety to extrapolate that back to more realistic numbers and say the same.

The problem of space is distance and time, and a speed limit. Even breaking the speed limit, and making the time as short as possible, and taking best cases for distance, and exponential advances in technology? Still unlikely that what we see in the galaxy will change significantly.

And, unfortunately, all we see in our galaxy are inhospitable places, vast distances, and not enough time - in our civilisation or even our universe - to make a dent in them.

If your electric motor is powerful enough, you can dispense with the counterweight. It might not be very efficient, but it's possible.

that was my first thought as well, until someone pointed out that it's not the cable to the motor that's the problem it's the up and over then attached to the counter balance that is the problem.

You're falling into the trap of confusing ethics and the law. Whatever you -- or I, since I expect we'd agree -- think of the ethics of the situation, so far I haven't seen anything to suggest their actions in not respecting keys used other than under the conditions they were sold with is actually illegal. The law with respect to digital purchases, DRM, and remote access/activation schemes may be some anachronistic dinosaur, but if it's the law right now then complaining about the action on a forum like Slashdot isn't going to change that.