Facebook is the result of one guy seeing some potential in anothers idea. Then being too gutless to develop it yourself (which I don't understand since you are in school) and request money upfront so that if it fails it isn't a total loss. Then after realizing the potential revenue, desperately attempting to get the other guy to cancel the contract. I'm surprised that Ceglia didn't cry foul when Zuckerberg requests a 50/50 split down from 80/20 and the next day the site is live and working. WTF?

Will facebook still be around in 4 years? I half expected something else to have majority share by then

The real problem is that people think it is OK to pirate stuff. Here are the most popular reasons:

1. They put DRM in there, thus the pirated version is better and I am entitled to steal it.
2. The game is too expensive, thus I am entitled to steal it.
3. I wouldn't have bought it anyways, thus I am entitled to steal it.

All of these are bull. No one has any right to steal anything that doesn't belong to them. There is a deep moral issue here with a good chunk of people on the net. This extends to torrenting movies and other entertainment. I don't see why people are so cheap. Even at 60 dollars a video game is about what it costs me for gas in a month or groceries in a week. It isn't exactly expensive. Anyways, maybe the only solution is to get rid of internet annonominity and allow publishers and developers to report pirating offenses to the police. And yes I am a game developer.

I half agree. I don't see how you can say that this piracy detection fails occasionally. What is your reference? I'd guess there are two points of failure. The code would be something like: steamId = Steam.GetSteamID(); reference = Steam.GetGameOwned(steamId) if(reference is false) { print funny error } So where are the points of failure? If the steam id is incorrect (not actually the users id, which could be caused by memory trampling) then this would point to a greater flaw in the Steam API or the game itself. It should be fixed regardless. The only issue here would be a permanent ban on the incorrect user. Even in this scenario the chances of a random 64-bit number actually being a valid Steam member ID are fairly small. The second would be checking if the game was purchased. Same causes as above. Another problem would be hackers hacking the game to generate a random number, or forcing the returned steam ID to be that of someone who has purchased the game either by using a set of fixed numbers or somehow polling the Steam databases itself. Or they could simply skip this code segment all together. Unfortunately there is nothing permanent that can be done to prevent privacy by "catching people". The real issue is with the morals instilled in people. It is far too common for people to think it is OK to steal digital products.

While browsing for adult entertainment: "Why not try 'Big Black On Campus', watched 5 times by your sister Grace."

After some cool-down time I guess my post above was a little harsh. I don't know the details of the settlement and haven't been in a situation like this. I change my mood from annoyed to indifferent :)

Didn't it say any SONY PRODUCT? That is a fairly wide range.

I'm a little annoyed by this. I'm guessing that Geohot's lawyers encouraged him to accept the settlement. I would guess that either Sony wasn't confident that they could win, or they just wanted to scare other modders (those that would keep up with these articles). The comments along the lines of "way to be nice Sony" on the blog make me angry. I was really hoping that if Geohot had won this lawsuit, general ownership rights questions would begin to favor consumers across all electronic devices. I actually own a Samsung blu-ray player that advertises Netflix, DIVX, and other compressed format support and the player currently supports NONE of this due to firmware updates. Samsung suggested buying their more expensive hardware as a solution to this. Back to Geohot. What a missed opportunity. It looks like he begged people for money to fight Sony, but then decides it isn't worth both the financial and time effort. I count this as a win for SONY.

Although I like the conclusion this report comes to, I would have to argue that most people just want to spend zero dollars. I'd point to digitally broadcast shows with commercials injected. See most major broadcaster websites and cruncyroll. Even though you can watch these television shows for free, people choose to download torrents of them for the following reasons: 1. No commercials 2. I want it now 3. Higher quality Those are all great reasons, but people fail to realize that they are not entitled to these. Id say that in most cases piracy isn't either a legal failure or a market failure, but instead a moral one on behalf of most people.

If this is true, then we can assume that he is an authorized developer? I thought only publishers could get a hold of debug units.

I'm not sure on the policy of where you live, but where I live recyclables like plastic bottles are currently being buried because there is no demand for them. These materials are sold to manufactures so that they can reuse the materials. If there are no buyers than the items are stockpiled. If there is no room in the stockpile than the recyclables are buried.

Really funny. Ah the memories.

They should try to make a standard for tablets. I think the chance of moving the laptop industry to this is small...the removal of the screen didn't look very user friendly anyways. I agree that the amount of waste produced is tragic though, Mayne they should try to make a standard for tablet screen size, and then design screens that attach to tablets with a standardized port. Then at least screens should be able to be salvaged.

I'm ignorant when it comes to web programming. When creating games using HTML5 do developers need to be more concerned with code stealing than with Flash? There are already many duplicate games on the web, will this further compound the issue?

This is messed up