Advertising must cater to the poor, wise, rich, foolish, people with spots, or smoking joints, all equally -- fool all the people, all of the time.

you really need this technological wonder device!

Bitcoin is not subject to, artificially limited by, nor of value due to copyright. You are not stealing bitcoin, you are stealing the value that bitcoin represents. That value is not some abstract hypothetical potential profit loss but a fairly easy (within a reasonable margin for exchange variation) to quantify amount of spending power in any currency in the world.

If I steal your credit card number (and bitcoin is ultimately nothing more than a secret number that allows you to unlock a persons money and spend it) and then buy something with it I've stolen pretty much the same thing. A number that allows me buy goods using a system that operates entirely on streams of bits.

If I hack your bank account and transfer the money out, that money also is a stream of bits. The same of your paypal account.

These things are unique and set up in such a way that the value, just like an individual tangible CD, can only be possessed by one person.

Software does not actually belong to the guy who holds a copyright in the case of copyright violation the software actually belongs to the guy sharing it and violating the copyright. You can steal a copyright, you can't steal the software. If you copy the software, you both now have copies and nothing is lost from the source. Software that is shared becomes no less functional no matter how much it is shared, software can be possessed by every person and they will all have the same thing with the same intrinsic value.

Bah. I still have a 20 MEG drive that works perfectly. (Actually, two. One MFM, one IDE.)

I got rid of most of my very old drives a while back too. And too late, discovered that some of 'em were worth big bucks to data recovery companies... $900 for that 10mb Rodine. [crying]

What I've noticed since the, um, Great Migration referenced in your sig, is that slashdot now has a lot of posters I don't recall having ever seen before..,. some of every stripe, but generally without the fire in the belly, if you know what I mean. I think that, more than the current crop of articles, has caused a shift in tone.

I now spend more time on SN. Fuck beta!

Not only this, but different areas (including differing microclimates) compost at different rates. The claim is meaningless unless they knew what the local rate was before the incident, AND to what degree it was accelerated by human activity (frex, foot traffic pulverizes dead leaves so they decompose faster).

I'd be all for that if you could discharge educational debt via bankruptcy as you can with other forms of debt. Once you do that, I suspect lenders will start doing much better risk assessments on individual candidates. It might end up meaning fewer people go on to higher education, but it should also mean fewer people end up in minimum wage (or no) jobs with crushing amounts of student debt.

To be fair though, my nephew is going through a CS program at a university and has asked me about some of his assignments. They're similarly trivial and the example code provided by the professors is atrocious. I like to think they're doing that intentionally, but I know they're not. I was disillusioned with the business programming course I enrolled in right out of high school back in the '80's and ended up finding a small state school with instructors who had real world experience for the rest of my formal education. Even with that, I've learned far more on my own and through work experience than I was ever going to pick up in a university. If a person isn't motivated to learn on his own, he's never going to be a particularly good programmer. Perhaps the for-profit schools just attract a higher concentration of people who are only trying to get into CS for the money and don't have the love of the art that you need to get to that level.

When I'm in charge of hiring, a degree doesn't really factor into my decision. I can tell if you're the sort of person who enjoys programming. I'd take a high school dropout over someone with a Master's, if the high school dropout had a substantial portfolio of open source code he could show me. Assuming the guy with the Master's didn't, naturally. If they both did, I'd want to hire them both, and I'd make a damn good argument to management about it.

Is the iTunes Store not to your satisfaction? It's always worked fine for me. I never notice the DRM.

Whut up, yo? Mostly moved to Twitter... You have an account... why don't I see you there much?

They were quite a bunch, eh? Fun times, if you were on the winning side!

The big difference seems to be that the northerners raped, pillaged, burned, then settled down and became reasonably good neighbors. The easterners (and by extension, the Normans) raped, pillaged, burned, and set themselves up as overlords.

Alas, the castle isn't really in habitable condition, even were I a rich lunatic willing and able to cough up the back taxes. Not irreparable, per the photos I've seen, but rather a ways from a turnkey estate.

You repost by posting again. You are allowed to do this.

My point, which appears to have flown above you like an exploding Hindenberg showering corposes all over (sorry, too soon?) is that if the entire world started focussing on a different terrorist target, terrorists would be unlikely to immediately think "Let's kill people in NYC" as their first thought.

And let's be honest, nobody would miss Tallahassee. Not even those of us in Florida. Rick Scott's an asshole.

Also Texas, while (obviously) having a lower population density, probably has more people in it than Manhatten. So diverting terrorists there would both make it more difficult for them (more work per person killed) and would ensure that if they did they do the world a few favors by getting rid of the largest number of loudmouthed jerks possible.

Look people. Can we knock it off with the "Terrorists attacking New York City" scenarios? If we're going to protect NYC in the long term, we need to start playing up the relative importance of cities we actually wouldn't mind being attacked.

Can you repost your scenario as an attack on Tallahassee, or Phoenix, or some city in Texas or something?

NYC is awesome. Sure, the inhabitants get a little arrogant from time to time, but you kinda understand their point. We need to divert the terrorists to somewhere else, somewhere where the country would benefit from a terrorist attack.

It seems likely that it ran out of fuel and crashed somewhere. A really surreal option I thought about was that all the passengers could have been in on it and wanted to go somewhere else for some reason. That seems very unlikely, but hey, if it turns out that's what happened, I called it!

Bah humbug. Well, no crashplan for me.

Probably best off to just hurl disk images at my web hosting**, since I have unlimited space and bandwidth. Well, some year when *I* actually have upstream speed worth noticing. :(

Shameless affiliate link:
http://www.1and1.com/?k_id=676...
10 years now and still happy as hell with 'em.

FWIW, it doesn't matter if Google buys a baby mulching building (all running OpenBSD, natch'...), starts selling your information to advertisers (I mean really, not selling services to advertisers that work more effectively because Google has information about you, I mean actually selling your name, address, and fetishes to anyone who wants to advertise with them), arranges a Presidential assassination, blows up the Empire State Building, and worst of all, builds a private monorail to ferry employees between San Francisco and its offices.

Even if Google does all of those things, Android is still open.

This story is not about whether Android is open. It's about whether Google is putting pressure on its partners to ensure they stick with Google's vision about Android when distributing it, and likewise whether Microsoft are doing what they've done since the dawn of time.

Is Google right to this? Probably not. That said, the backlash seems far greater than it ought to be, probably because of a combination of anti-Google shill campaigns of late, because people expect Google to be better than this (nobody expects this of Microsoft which is why it's not a shock), and because several other things they've done lately with Android, such as pushing GMS, which were actually aimed at ending criticisms of Android for being "Fragmented" have been closed and against the entire perceived ethos of Android.

Also their search engine is worse than BIng these days, and that's not because Bing is any good.

Android? It's still open. Ask Amazon. Ask CyanogenMod and the non-commercial phone modding community. Google can't, and probably won't try to, close it. They will continue to try to control it, understandably, but the cat is out of the bag.