So you're saying that modifying game files and building a custom game patch in order to enable the settings isn't modding. But rather tweaking. Well if that's the case then everyone should be able to do it with no problem at all right? Oh they can't? Well what's the reason behind that, oh right it's because this is beyond the technical level of most people. See this is the difference between a basic "tweak" where files are easily accessible and modding where you're "modifying" files in order to change what's accessible/enabled/available.

If it was purely tweaking, this would be more akin to editing .ini files in say oblivion/skyrim/etc, it's not that however.

Let me start with a hardy fuck you soundblaster though, and finish by saying that "onboard" still isn't good enough. The majority of chipsets out there use realtek based sound solutions. In turn the drivers used are straight out of the gate realtek, with no polish. If you're lucky, the company who has them on their board might slap a fancy UI on them. They're well known enough to cause all sorts of issues from latency drops, to causing DMA/IRQ conflicts with other hardware. While it's fun to say "they're good enough" that's akin to saying, I can drive 80km on my new run-flat tires, it's good enough to get me where I need to go.

If you want a good sound, break down and blow the $50-80 on another card that has decent driver support. Your gaming/movie watching/audio listening/etc will thank you for it. Personally anything from Asus(xonar series), or HT Omega(if you really want to blow the money) will do you good, especially since they actually fix their drivers. And don't simply software disable functions like Soundblaster did on their LIVE! series cards.

Because great men like Winston S. Churchill are now long dead.

It's more that he created an enterprise to facilitate criminal activities, particularly contraband smuggling and sales. Operating a business for the purpose of facilitating crime in general is different than "being a criminal".

What? This is bullshit, dude. Programming isn't a layer on top the physical world of spatial relationships; it's a layer on top the physical world of discrete, numeric algorithms.

In the real world, you have analogue power levels--voltage, current. Then, we build digital circuitry, such that being about 2.8-3.8V from ground state is "3.3V" or "ON", and being below that is "OFF"; being above that is "HALT, CATCH FIRE". This is a purely numerical behavior: the variations in the real world do not apply to digital circuitry.

On top of that, you build a set of operational codes to manipulate states, i.e. assembly. You also build programming languages such as C, Python, and so on, which turn complex algorithms into a static analysis tree, optimize the tree, and then convert that into optimal procedural operational codes.

The best we have for programming is object orientation, which takes a lot of procedural stuff for repeated modules away; but then you need to build the procedural framework to use those objects, as well as the discrete procedural behavior of the object. You're reducing complex procedural code down to a limited interface so that you can write other complex procedural code to handle that, thus reducing the amount of complex procedural shit you have to think about interacting with other complex procedural shit.

You can't program a computer by putting a ball on top a stick. Computers need programming in terms of what is absolutely understood and non-ambiguous.

Reading the summary, I thought this would be about actual hacking... say, making the car do something awesome it couldn't do before. Maybe, like adding a special performance mode, improving its charge rate, or adding features to its entertainment system. I see it's really all about pwnage. I'll pass.

How about Microsoft/IBM screwing Gary Killdall out of DOS

Uh... he didn't create DOS. He created CP/M. You could say MS screwed DR out of a _deal_ with IBM, but it's likely he did that to himself.

I would have ruled that money laundering laws are stupid and should be thrown out! There are a lot of other shits we could charge this guy with. For example: Continuing criminal enterprise.

Okay seriously, some people are retarded. They can't manipulate numbers because their brains are broken. Low-functioning sociopaths can't understand social interactions, and don't connect the pattern behavior together to fake it; high-functioning sociopaths recognize it as an academic subject, and fake it.

How is it hard to believe that some--perhaps many--tasks require an uncanny ability to do a certain thing, which nobody has? Maybe any idiot can learn to make a shitty program in Visual Basic; but, for the vast majority of people, no investment of time and effort is going to make them John Carmack. Similarly, some investment of time will teach you to sculpt; no investment of time will make you Michelangelo. Your creative writing courses won't make you Brandon Sanderson, Stephen R. Donaldson, or J.K. Rowling; the best you can hope for is being the next no-talent hack like Tolkien.

All these people can file SLAPP motion. Even the legitimate ones can claim she's running SLAPP cases around the whole issue, and have her barred from bringing this shit up ever again.

"Complex" is not for laymen. There is only so much that you can do with any "appliance". Beyond that, you actually have to know what you are doing. This "problem" has nothing to do with programming.

This. Thinking about the web apps I've written, most of them required fairly deep knowledge in the area of the app -- auroras, photography, specialized group management, history, genealogy, measuring instruments, Chinese, retail procedure -- all areas an interested party could potentially bring to the table.

But the tools to instantiate, manipulate and present those ideas? Those simply don't exist in "amateur" form -- I had to create them. And in doing so, I used knowledge starting with HTML and CGI and CSS, but which extended well into Python, (replaced Perl), C, SQL, a fair bit about the underlying structure of the host OS(s), knowledge of how to structure an application in the first place, and to wrap it all together, a fairly deep knowledge of what's efficient and what isn't.

Now I will admit that I am particularly resistant to Other People's Code, partially because I am unwilling to be subject to other people's bug fix schedules (or lack thereof), and permissions (or lack thereof) and functinonal choices (or lack thereof); and partially because the more stuff I write, the more handy tools of my own I have to bring to bear on the next problem that depend on no one but myself and the host language(s) -- which frankly is quite enough dependency for me anyway. Plus it's been writing all this stuff that's made me a decent programmer in the first place. So even if there *were* a library out there to generate general purpose readout dials, I wouldn't have used it; the result would have been the same. All my own code. Not the least bit reluctant to reinvent the wheel.

Still, the idea of making all that stuff both available and trivially usable (and that's what we're talking about here, because a non-programmer will have to hit this at a trivial level) seems to me to have been tried multiple times in multiple venues, and to have failed every time. Personally, I think it's because as programmers, we underestimate the complexity because we've internalized so much; we can't see the actual level of difficulty very well, because it starts out relative to our own skills. This has resulted in quite a few attempts to "make it easy", and none of them have hit any serious stride. The best any of these can boast is a small following making very limited applications, if you really want to stretch what "application" means.

I don't think the idea is ready to fly. The only context I can visualize this actually working is where you have some *very* smart software that can take an abstract description and write code *for* you. That software would have to be (a) very damned smart and (b) conversant with an enormous range of general human knowledge. Right now, as far as I know, that's the precise description of a competent applications programmer. And nothing else.

Ideas don't arrive in convenient order. Interruptions occur. The world is not a smooth surface, it's full of bumps, pits and detours. Sometimes (as here) there are even reasons to top post. Such as, so someone will actually see it. So get over it. Notably, the AC comment you're objecting to contributed more to the conversation than yours (or mine) does. There's a lesson there.

You crazy anti-vaxxer! Who let Jenny McCarthy in here?

Well, they gave the Westerners syphillis, so... call it even.

If it's 97% of the world's scientists, that's just a fallacious appeal to authority as only some scientists are climate experts. Example of a false authority: Bill Nye.