Atari, is that you? :P http://www.google.com/search?q..."do+the+math"

Also to rent an ip address isn't free.

Maybe the popular theaters will get hit instead?

I agree. It is hard to keep up too since I am an old fart. :/ I wonder what it would be like in 30 years.

Hackers should take down MPAA instead. :P

Or sexy. Eww!

Exactly. There's nothing frightening about this at all; it's a nuisance at best for the sites. Between using IP addresses directly, or editing a hosts file, or switching to an offshore DNS server, it's all of a 30 second delay.

For sites dedicated to piracy, it won't make the slightest difference in traffic. The demand is there, so people will seek out the product. The idea that making it marginally (or even substantially) more difficult to find will reduce demand is like saying "If Barnes and Noble doesn't carry pornography, there won't be any demand!"

Is piracy morally justifiable? Not really. In the end, someone is going around the rules of society for personal gain. Still, available evidence suggests that the actual economic damage is minimal, at worst, and possibly that it's helpful to the bottom line. People who pirate seem mostly to be people who wouldn't pay anyway, so they're not really lost as customers. Additionally, word of mouth can help the popularity of films, regardless of whether that opinion came from a free screening, a paid viewing, or a pirated download. From a practical standpoint, it doesn't make sense to focus efforts on stamping out something that's so benign. In other words, we shouldn't tolerate measures that negatively impact the rest of society to protect one group from an imaginary harm.

And the cloud / cloud services aren't going away anytime soon. I have a hard time thinking of those as "Fads" though they might be supplanted or the terminology might change in a few years.

"Big Data" for me is still a buzzword that I'm not sure I understand the value of for most IT shops.

My first boss in IT (and the guy who hired me) was black.

I'm white and I was the first guy he hired into the newly formed department.

Ditto. We need t(rans/ele)porters!

I have seen my chicken brush and floss his teeth when we were college dorm(itory) roommates. :P

I had both a first generation Rio (or was it diomond?), and a disk Man I'd used in my car via aux in back then.

If anything was released commercially, I swapped disks. The mp3 player was used purely for bootlegs and b sides I couldn't easily get on disk.

The 64 megs held less than a CD at high bitrate, and transferring music over serial was slllllooooowwwwww.

I was middle class, disposable income teen (hs senior), I was the only person I knew with an mp3 player until the iPod, and not the first gen, the one with the touch wheel and clicker

Yet I did know audio nerds, I'm very skeptical that mp3 players were used by many at all at that time.

That's not how I remember 1999. Mp3s that's weren't garbage were hard to come by, syncing large collections was super slow, even disk space was somewhat relevant back then.

The flash based long life players had essentially no storage.

It's not higher math, but it's also not correct. ;-)

There is not a fixed amount of CO2 produced per person so doubling the population doesn't necessarily double the pollution. Further there are often serious issues that result from population decline. Just look at Japan. Besides, most of the Western world has near zero population growth and that trend is moving into Asia. My guess Africa won't be THAT far behind. Yes, birth control should be provided and encouraged in developing countries but I don't think we really need to be draconian about it.

Population does matter but it's not everything. Take a look at the Mayans. Many folks feel that the Mayan empire collapsed because they weren't living sustainably. Certainly population growth played a role but so did slashing and burning the rain forest.

I wished I could use non-Apple firmware. I am currently using Whited00r. I also dislike having to use iTunes even if it is a (thi/3)rd party software.