Smart computer scientists do not think that. In fact they thought it would take very long and may well be infeasible decades ago. There are just a lot of stupid CS types around.

It has been known for decades that completely new theories will be needed. Anybody that has missed that has not bothered to find out what the state-of-the art is.

Requiring the operator of an RC Plane to be a "Licensed" Pilot if it is for commercial use, but any joe smuck if it is for hobby use seems to be a problem for me.

For one reason, Piloting an RC aircraft, from the ground, is a different skill set than Piloting a small plane from inside the aircraft itself.

The entity receiving the money is known as a stateless organisation. It's controlled by Apple, obviously.

How does an organisation become stateless? They take advantage of different of residency in different jurisdictions. For example, country A may say you are based in A if your headquarters are there. Country B may say you are a country B organisation if your board meets there. Country C may say a company is comes under its laws if the bulk of its board are residents there.

One way to be stateless that that situation is to have your headquarters in country B, and have your board meet in country A.

This is what the entity Apple transfers the money too does, so it isn't under the control of any country's laws. It is perfectly legal, of course.

This loophole won't be around for much longer. All that is needed to fix it is the various countries get the respective laws consistent. Doing that is on the agenda for the G20 meeting in September.

Some smaller publishers may start to care, but the larger ones want at least one order of magnitude more. But it shows that you can get the finding even for an advanced project without a publisher. Good. This is what the Internet is for: Connecting people globally and cutting out the intermediaries that make out expensive.

It depends on whether the audience has the maturity to read about an event without automatically getting upset about it. Sadly, most Americans have been conditioned by repeated example to do the opposite. This is highly desirable from the standpoint of the media, because irritated emotions tend to shut down critical thinking.

It makes me wonder exactly when and how those rules got onto the law books, how they were sponsored, and what relationship the supporting politicians had with the major corporations of that time.

There are lots of ways to cheat that are legally legitimate.

Nonsense. Even though "greed" is an US mainstream way-of-life, not everybody is scum, and competent craftsmen usually a lot less so than others.

I do IT in a machine shop.

We have 3 machines that still have Windows 95 for their OS, 2 with Windows 2000, and 2 with Windows XP

These are not standard intel processor based PCs. They are RISC processors that run a real time OS that communicates with the machine PLCs, and Windows provides a nice interface for the operator to interface with.

Last time we got a quote, it was $14,000 to upgrade one of the machines to Windows XP. I am not sure they can even be upgraded to Windows 7. They still work, so why bother spending the money.

I have a Tool inventory kiosk that has Windows XP on it too. I could upgrade it to Windows 7 or 8, but I have no guarantee that the Kiosk will function normally if we do that. So we are not upgrading it. I have better things to do with my time.

None of the machines or kiosks have Internet access. I will take my chances that they are secure enough.

I believe the relevant quotation is "the best thing about STDs is that there are so many to choose from."

I think the real mistake is that TFA thinks Valve cares about the success of the Steam box; there's no content that you can't get without paying Valve for hardware, so the idea of a Steam box becoming their main business is utterly preposterous.

I was about to post this! 2.0 was called 1.4 while it was in development, then someone pointed out that all the other operating systems had bumped their versioning up higher already, so they changed it. 1.5 was never more than a footnote on a roadmap.

Well, it seems quite a few people actually do not want "new", but good. Just look at what games get financed on Kickstarter. These people are not the majority, but it does not matter. What matters is that enough people are willing to pay (and paying a reduced fee in advance with a higher risk is entirely fine by me) to keep good game developers able to practice their craft. What has been forgotten by many with the whole "publisher" mess, is that in order for a good game to be created, providing a reasonable salary and reasonable infrastructure funding for a relatively small team for a few years is quite enough. That is why 3 Million provided by 60'000 people gets us Wasteland 2, while no publisher would touch it at these numbers. This new model cuts out the greed. Don't forget that game designers _want_ to create games. Getting rich is not on their agenda. It is very much for publishers that today add nothing of value, but huge overhead.

Capitalism can actually work if greed is kept under control and monopolies are prevented.

I don't think it is a problem. What I see actually happening is that the dross of the developers creates free stuff of low quality for the huge masses that do not want to pay. The good developers still charge a fair price and get revenue and/or move to alternate financing models like crowd-sourcing. I think we have one instance of capitalism actually working for a change here: Games are priced in relation to value provided.