I completely agree with you. The unfortunate thing is that money dictates what happens in the world, and justice is an afterthought implemented inconsistently.

God, this times a 1000. Have you ever had a need for resettng PRAM and NVRAM?

- Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command, Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.
- Turn on the computer.

Uhh.... MOM!! Can you come help me turn on my computer?

True, I remember the game going black for a second and the start menu popping up, and then thinking "Shit."

But seriously, one thing Microsoft did get right is that they pretty much reserved the windows-key as a system-wide shortcut key. Start-D (desktop), Start-L (lock), Start-R (run), Start-F (find), Start-E (explorer). I *love* those key bindings.

Contrast with Mac's F9, F10, F11 and F12 keys. If your program just happens to use one of those keys, you're shit-out-of-luck (as is the case when trying to debug something in Visual Studio in a virtual machine, for example).

I agree that business needs and societal needs are two different things. However, if Amazon stayed on course, and (hypothetically speaking) got into a drawn-out legal battle because of which they would need to raise prices to the millions of their business consumers (and by extension, customers), the societal gain on grounds of principle would be moot if Amazon could no longer serve their customers (or be forced to raise prices, i.e. everybody else loses).

Nobody said Amazon gains nothing; the general consensus is that the cost of continuing DDoS attacks coupled with legal liability far outweighs any fees Amazon is collecting from hosting. Even if you have just one administrator dedicated to thwarting DDoS attacks for just an hour a day, it's not worth it.

According to Alexis Madrigal, the answer is no. http://twitter.com/alexismadrigal

Shivetya is right, just look at the huge success that was the National Opt-Out Day for body scanners. It was the same crowd ./ calling for NOOD that is now calling for Amazon's head. What happened on Nov. 24th? Nothing . Even if I were to agree with the basis for taking pitchforks to Amazon's HQ (which I don't), the pure ratio of talk vs action here is approaching pathetic levels.

People here need to subdue their knee-jerk reactions -- "OMFG Amazon == PURE EVIL, KITTEN KILLERS!" -- and examine the situation from a few different angles before jumping to action (or at least, the thought of action). Jumping on the "get the pitchforks!" bandwagon every time during a controversy dilutes calls to action that might actually matter, weakens any valid points made by your party, and destroys any diplomatic solution to the matter at hand.

Is this a serious question? Businesses are interested in getting the biggest ROI and therefore cut services that aren't profitable. This happens all the time outside of your armchair rights-activist circles. Amazon isn't offering hosting services so you can feel warm and fuzzy about the world - it's offering services to make cold, hard cash. Why should they bleed money and risk a nasty litigation process without any potential return on investment? Wikileaks came and it will go, and most people outside of civil liberty circles will forget about it in 3-6 months (which may be a gross overestimate). This really is a no-brainer on Amazon's part.

What should Amazon do, in your opinion? Drag this out on principle, lose a bunch of money or cut Wikileaks' legally dubious services? Sounds simple to me. Show me a company that wouldn't cut Wikileaks under these circumstances*, and I will show you a company that will be bankrupt soon. *the only alternative is what they already did: move the servers to a country that offers some kind of safe-harbor against this.

It worked for California!

Why do you think a compiled language with dynamic message routing/dispatch is superior to others? Personally, I think message routing and dispatching sucks (as implemented in Objective-C/XCode) because of a) null pointers and b) calling non-existent methods is perfectly valid. I can't tell you how many times XCode didn't throw even a warning (let alone a compile-time error) because I tried to call a method that didn't exist, or whose signature I messed up by, say, one parameter. Sometimes, I've had to clean all targets just to see if there are any warnings which the compiler didn't report previously -- and if you're using OpenFeint (for example), rebuilding the entire project is very, VERY slow. By the way, passing parameters as key:value pairs just so that you can pass parameters out of order creates one hell of a readability mess for no real gain.

How about passing messages to null pointers? Why should that even be legal? Java will complain about it at compile time, why can't XCode handle that at compile time too instead of letting my program blow up with _TERMINATED UNCAUGHT EXCEPTION_? (Yes, I'm a Java developer by day, iPhone by night)

But more to the point, why does it matter if a language is compiled, has a dynamic message routing/dispatch blah blah blah...? If the language does the job well and is easy to use, who really cares if it's object oriented, message/dispatch, procedural, functional, etc? Personally, I don't think that Obj-C is the best tool for the job as I feel like I just can't code as quickly in Obj-C as I can in Java (or PHP). Partly it's syntax problems (all those square brackets are kind of a pain), partly the nature of the language as described above, which makes reading and testing code much more difficult, IMHO.

Golf-clap, both to you and the parent. Well played.

"It is only considered stolen on the most tenuous circumstances. Jeez, they pulled up a ancient law that was crafted to stop people from stealing tethered horse."
It is funny you should say this, because I still can't tether my iPhone.

As far as car mechanics go, one major flaw is that once you even touch the hood, your fingers accumulate so much dirt and grease that I wouldn't even imagine touching my keyboard, let alone a touchscreen.

For living in a Disneyfied world of illusion, there's porn . For everything else, there's real women.

FTFY

So what's so bad about that?