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Comment Brazil (Score 4, Interesting) 683

I have lived in Brazil for quite some years now. Here the gap between rich and everyone else (there is no middle class here so to speak) is to such an extent that if you have money you are a target. This means that you must live in a gated community in constant fear that you or your kids might be kidnapped. You need to own a cheapo car so you won't stand out too much when driving around. Of course you will have a nice car too, but this is only for weekends or maybe travel to places where other rich people go. In the end it is easy to become a prisoner of that wealth that is supposed to make you more free. I would prefer to live middle class in a 1st world country than rich in Brazil. The sad thing is that the erosion of the middle class in the 1st world countries means that they soon might resemble Brazil, and this is not good, even if you are rich.

Comment misappropriation? (Score 2) 497

I would like to know if there are any connections between contractors and those awarding the contracts - ie Family ties, business connections, etc... in this day and age there is absolutely no way a website should cost this much. I team of around 20 proficient Web professionals should be able to make almost anything in around 1-2 years max, with a max cost no more than 10 million. Half a billion? Follow the money, this is at best gross negligence on the part of those awarding the contracts, at worst misappropriation.

Comment Ever heard of (Score 0) 42

don't look a gift horse in the mouth? Say thanks or just STFU. Maybe it's not the best it can be, but it is free and maybe, just maybe there is some hot source code under the hood that may fuel something you may laud in the future. Now run along and make something better or, as most of you couldn't code for two shits, go use instagram or some other spyware disguised in pretty UI.

Comment Re:Unfortunatly, they are required. (Score 1) 2

Completely true, there is just no way get around not having one especially if you are using open source apps like WordPress or Joomla and their accompanying plugins. I remember when I launched my site with Kunena forum for Joomla - in a matter of days there were hundreds of accounts created with names like "ASDHSGD123", etc and the board was flooded with advertisements. This dropped off a lot after adding recaptcha for registration, but still not completely until I added a spam filter... so there are either bots that can beat recaptcha or someone was manually registering, not sure.

Submission + - CAPTCHA - Are robots really a threath for your website? (wikipedia.org) 2

ertmania writes: CAPTHA was invented to prevent bots from adding URLs to their search engine, taking part in online polls, registering for free email accounts (which may then be used to send spam) and collecting email addresses and so on.
I can see a point in that.
Now a days everybody must have CAPTCHA to protect their website from being overtaken by robots? Your local Rabbit Welfare Association has CAPTCHA to prevent robots from signing up for the annual news letter.
Personal I find CAPTCHA annoying. When I, for the 20th time has been filling out some registration form and then guessed the obscured CAPTCHA image wrong, resulting in clearing the form, I get pissed.
It is often impossible to tell the difference between cC, wW, xX, yY and lI.
My point is: Don't use CAPTCHA unless it is necessary. Use some other kind of submission control or like in the rabbit case; don't use any.

Submission + - New research into creating Hydrogen gas from water using sunlight and rust.

selectspec writes: Despite being the most abundant element in the universe, creating Hydrogen gas here on Earth is a relatively expensive process. While Hydrogen can be cheaply produced from hydrocarbons like natural gas, extracting it from water has proved tricky with most methods being rather inefficient and impractical. Some new research has emerged involving a process involves nano-materials made out of rust (iron oxide) immersed in water exposed to sunlight. The process is 15% efficient in terms of capturing the solar energy, which isn't bad considering current generation photovoltaic solar panels operate around 20% efficiency.

Comment Re:This is what happens (Score 1) 224

If I make free software that looks terrible, and someone else pretties it up, complies with the terms of the license, and manages to sell a product, good for them.

Selling the product is not the problem, restricting the distribution is. Are you going to be happy if someone takes your terrible looking product then essentially limits it's distribution because they have just prettied up some css and images? What if this new product becomes more popular than yours, what if this new product starts making lots of money while your project dies in obscurity?

What you are saying is that it is ok for someone to essentially use all your hardwork and give you nothing in return, ie not allow you to use their work. Will you feel like continually upgrading your product while the person that can make pretty css and images makes a killing off it and you make nothing?

On the other hand if the images and css were GPL, you would be able to integrate the work back into your product, thus your enhancements would benefit the other developer and the other developers enhancements would benefit you. Basically you will then have a symbiotic relationship with the other developer as opposed to a parasitic one. It is my view that split licensed GPL / proprietary distributions are indeed parasitic, they take and give nothing in return.

I don't see a problem here. Especially when someone can take a free thing and add enough value to it, without writing code, that people are willing to buy a free product.

WordPress has decided to enforce their philosophy by restricting people who contribute a product that, some can argue, enhances WordPress. And restrict them from interacting with the WordPress community. That is a difficult situation, to restrict contributors because what they contribute isn't free.

I think you are confused about this. Nobody is restricting anyone from selling the product - WordPress actually hosts commercial GPL themes on their main site. The problem is limiting distribution, something I feel is wrong due to the reasons I outlined above.

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