I can't believe my brain did that, but yea, I didn't know what 'scale' meant so apparently I didn't even notice the word and think "what does he mean?".

There's probably a union of voice actors in order to prevent the industry from using what is essentially free labor, thus resulting in the loss of jobs for however many thousands of people. Just because you can find someone willing to work for free or dirt cheap doesn't mean it's good for society.

I don't think people who use Ubuntu are more savvy than Windows users. In my real life experiences the only people I've seen who use Ubuntu don't even know what Linux is. This is pretty skewed though because I hardly ever meet anyone who uses anything other than Windows to begin with. In the online world, if I judge experience and knowledge by the posts on forums I would say Ubuntu users are the least capable of any group I've seen. This, again, is going to be biased and skewed because Ubuntu has a lot more users than other versions of Linux, and I don't go to the Ubuntu forums. Which means that on general Linux forums this is the case, but for all I know all the tech savvy Ubuntu users either 1.) don't use forums, or 2.) mainly stay on the official Ubuntu forums.

Just pointing out that in this case the accountability of paying someone program for you comes from the fact that they are employees in your company. The "fly by night" scam argument works if you are outsourcing the development, but IBM/Novell/Redhat are all contributing there own resources to the kernel development, which is why they can ensure higher quality than some random Joe programmer they found in the yellow pages. (no offense to any random Joes who may be reading this and program :P)

First, congratulations on being a new dad! Second, I don't see why it's so hard for people to understand the concern and curiosity that you are talking about with asking questions. Everyone just assumes that if we question what something is going to be used for and how it's going to affect (grammar check) us that we automatically are against it and are a bunch of loony conspiracy nuts. If I had children and they came home with a permission slip to wear a heart monitor while in gym class I would want to know exactly what the OP wants to know, is the data being stored and tied directly to my child? If not then yea it's no big deal, a lot of the exercise equipment in the high school I went to had heart monitors built in so you could keep a personal log if you wanted. I just wish more people would realize that skepticism does not equal opposition.

Considering Time Travel is already possible it seems this poll is broken.

This may actually not be far from the truth for Windows users. We tend to look back on all memories and remember only the fond parts, or exaggerate how great the past was. That combined with the fact that most of the Vista hate was due to the OS being released when it wasn't ready and full of bugs and bloat will cause people to look back and remember how it was now. Rosy Retrospection I'm not a Windows user but I do think that Vista has come a long way since its release, my Windows fanboy friends praise the fixes Microsoft has done to it with the service pack and the following patches.

At least until genetics research gets to the point where they can modify the dog's genes and improve them in the lab. This is pretty awesome, It's the first cloning story I've heard that was positive and didn't end with disfigured sheep. (i haven't been following the progress on cloning so i wouldn't know if this is the first success story or not)

I think short of a widespread boycott there's nothing that can be done to stop this. Microsoft makes so much money off the constant remakes of games like Call of Duty and Madden that they aren't going to change anything. I'm willing to bet the amount of people who own an xbox with the xbox live service just to play those two games outnumbers (by a lot) the amount of people who will show any kind of pressure on this decision. The real victory for indie developers will be to release games on platforms that don't discriminate, like the computer for instance.

I would like to see some investigation into the claims that the publishers are pressuring Microsoft to do this, not that I doubt it's happening, I just think it would make for a good public hanging.

I see a trend forming...it's rare I listen to music anymore, and when I do it's out of my very small collection of about 10 cd's of music created before any of us were born. Talk radio suits me just fine in my car, though I do get weird looks from people the first time they get a ride from me since it's considered "old people's radio" I guess. *shrugs*

On topic: I'm glad this guy is getting an actual chance at real legal defense, and I know it's popular to bash on lawyers but stereotyping an entire community is bad. Our history is full of large groups of lawyers working for the public interest because it's the right thing to do. Most organizations offer the bulk of these public rights defense free of charge.

That is just plain wrong. To think... I loved you Amazon. At least I feel better in my decision to stick with good old paper for non public domain books and to just use my PMP/computer for reading the classics.

Cases like yours are where I support piracy, if they aren't offering you a viable legal solution then downloading the content is fine in my opinion. This still doesn't excuse the fact that the guys in the article were trying to make a profit off of Dish networks content and services, that type of use is not Fair Use. (I like the weird content Joost has, but I agree a lot of it is crap)

You are missing my point. I am against them trying to make a profit off of someone else's services. If they were just cracking the encryption for fair use acts (what most of us here consider fair use I mean) then I wouldn't care. But these guys were doing this in order to sell it to people who just didn't want to pay for the television service. If they didn't want to pay for the television service they should just get an internet connection and use the LEGALLY available free streaming sites such as Hulu or Joost etc... I am in full agreement that the DMCA is a violation of individual rights, but I think these guys need to be punished for whatever legal term is used to describe the selling of someone else's services without their permission.

Downloading something off the Internet is different than reverse engineering a device for the purpose of selling it for profit without the copyright holder's permission. A lawyer should explain the technicalities of the two because I don't know the details enough to try and explain.

I'm wondering what the qualifications for being a dumb ass are, I'm willing to take you to court when one of them wins to find out. This qualifies as a unilateral contract since everyone knows the Internet is serious business so I hope you have lots of money on hand since I'm pretty good at twisting the English language to my benefits :p