This! It's relatively cheap. Leave access details with your solicitor, stipulating as a condition of being disclosed, that spend a night in the old Johnson place. To be extra secure you could leave half of the necesary information with your family, and the other half in a sealed envelope with your solicitor. If there is no old Johnson place, go for any similarly creepy and abandoned old house. The Scooby Dooesque antics will surely lift their spirits in what must certainly be a difficult time. Lead a good life, treat people well, and don't dwell to much on dogma for dogma's sake. I'll have a nice place awaiting your arrival.

I think you're arguing with people who define innovation as being something so bizarre that in order to satisfy their fetishised view of innovation, one must first design a universe from scratch. That's what my dad did, yet I wouldn't be so blinkered as to claim that original invention is the be all and end all of innovation. Airbus A320 innovative? Bah, it's just a big Comet with a few fancy gadgets. VisiCalc innovative? Has everyone forgotten graph paper and slide rules?

Jesus Christ! That feature is amazing, and this is the first I've heard of it. I owe you a beer.

But why wouldn't they pay for it? Is it possible that they would indeed pay for x product if they couldn't get it for free? Perhaps not in all cases, but I doubt all freeloaders would entirely abandon movies/music/games if unable to grab free copies. In a world where copying is prohibitively difficult, people would go back to how we used to be before the rise of file sharing: some people picking up bootlegs, and the bulk of people having to consume according to their spending power. Atari 2600 titles were relatively difficult to pirate, so at the time I either saved up allowance to buy titles, or more commonly visited my local game renting shop.

Open source has many definitions, not all of which require modified code to be shared, let alone server-side code. Such a licence would be unworkable for many enterprise uses, as customization or even just configuration could be an unacceptable disclosure of internal data.

I'm guessing price and access to a lot of existing assets. Last I checked Autodesk canned the free learning edition of Maya.

No, because he gives the impression of having a clue what he's taking about. Comparing percentages between developed and developing nations is plain silly. Let's say this year I'll pay you one dollar to shine my shoes, and next year I increase that to two. Wow, 100% salary increase. Next year I double it again to 200%. Wow, I get nowhere near that kind of annual raise. Guess I'll soon be the one shining your shoes. Wait, in ten years time you're still only earning 512 dollars per year, compared to my considerably higher salary. Also, your business model is not one that simply continue to scale up any more than a cleaner can expect to earn senior management pay by virtue of having mopped floors for a really long time.

Your post and those that follow reminds me of why, after all these years and many accounts, I still browse Slashdot. Kudos, my son. You'll be getting a pool in your heavenly mansion and full buffet privileges.

JC

And among the more ignorant fringe of my followers, the scientific term "theory" is reimagined as being equivalent to scientists shrugging their shoulders and saying "I guess so". If I wanted you guys ignorant I'd have left you in the garden.

Yeah, the rest of his suggestions have broad appeal, but a boot loader? I'm a geek, and so are plenty of people I know, and even for me this is a feature way down on my list. My phone is my phone - I happy running a locked down stock OS that's reliable. My computers are where I get my geek kicks.

You forgot to mention that Microsoft will be legally obliged to smash your windows. If you're going to pull non sequiturs out of thin air them at least go all of the way. I sometimes wonder why I ever bothered coming down there?

I think the mods missed your humour tags.

And so in 2012 began another chain of "you use x? I only need y!" discussion that, after being derailed by a man with little to add but grammar and spelling critiques, ended with some guy who controls his computer by making electrical contacts with a paper clip he found in a dumpster, getting feedback from the inbuilt speaker of his 386SX, and cannot fathom why anyone could justify the bloat of a keyboard and a monitor? Of course I always upstage him by pointing out that I had to create the universe before I built my first PC.

If crackers aren't using vulnerabilities, borne of either bugs or configuration issues, then what are they using? Some kind of magical abilities unknown even I'm unaware of? I think my son they you are romanticising crackers.

Honestly, that wasn't Me you had an experience with, and personal revelation is strictly a personal thing. There's no shortage of people in this world with "direct experience" of other gods (boo), aliens, sinister governmental agents, demons and whatever other junk they heard about on Discovery. And please don't equate belief in Me with elephants. Elephants in a zoo are an easily verifiable proposition and as such require little in the way of faith. I am pretty much invisible and will be whatever my believers want me to be.

When I intervene in this world I leave behind no clear evidence of divine action. For thousands of years people have felt the need to arm-up and enforce my will, or kill each other over minutiae. Do they not think that I'd be doing that myself if I really was bothered by women showing too much ankle or by guys who like it up the pooper? I was not made by humanity, but in the absence of clear instructions and a description of me, certainly my multifarious images are. The fun part is in dying and finding out what I'm really like, which incidentally in your case won't be too soon. Treat people right and don't get too hung up on the bowing and scraping. There'll be plenty of time to ask me questions when you're dead, and certainly at that point you want to have some pretty good answers when I ask "what did you do to make yourself and your fellow man happy?"