This bit is more about our personal dissatisfaction with our lives, as the readers, having to do things we don't like for money. It's more about a dissatisfaction with the economic system and less about this mathematician, or ex-mathematician. This dissatisfaction leads us to react to any declination of money with shock. The real key to freedom is living with very little and very humbly such that we "work" less and live more enjoyably, where "work" is here defined as any activity done more for money and less for personal enjoyment.

Even Richard M. Stallman himself has suggested this:

"I live like a student, basically. And I like that, because it means that money is not telling me what to do."
-- Richard M. Stallman
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fsfs/rms-essays.pdf
Pg. 164

It's hard to argue for no antivirus at all, but at the same time there have been a large number of zero-day attacks such as the ones involving the flash vulnerabilities which antivirus did not detect. Sufficiently new malicious code which users are enticed to run has the ability to go unnoticed by up to date antivirus. While running no antivirus is probably a bad idea on principle, it's definitely becoming more marginalized as malware authors continue to develop a higher degree of sophistication in hiding themselves from it.

Best practice is probably to install some kind of antivirus, but treat the PC as if it has no antivirus and develop some Internet "street smarts" -- to put it succinctly.

The Engadget stub article states that Adobe is "cut out of the loop" of GPU acceleration on the Mac platform, and as evidence links to three other articles (also Engadget):

http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/28/adobe-on-flash-and-the-ipad-apple-is-continuing-to-impose-rest/
http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/29/adobe-ups-passive-aggressive-stance-on-ipad-while-apple-promo-f/
http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/10/adobe-got-7-million-iphone-and-ipod-touch-download-requests-for/

All of which seem to detail the battle to get Flash on Apple's mobiles, and not a battle for GPU acceleration on MacOS. It would seem to me that if Flash isn't GPU accelerated on MacOS now, that they could take advantage of OpenGL to do so.

Your typing skills are sufficient, make something beautiful instead of relearning typing.

The RIAA and MPAA are still powerful because people still buy products which support them. Check RIAA.org 's list of member companies if you're buying anything music related. For movies, it's a bit easier, but the member studios are nonetheless listed on MPAA.org as well. People need to stop complaining and stop buying to starve these guys of cash more effectively.

Don't post anything related to a major music company to a blog -- it's that simple. If you don't agree with the takedown notices and the lawsuits, do some research and stop endorsing companies who do that type of thing. Stop sharing it and listening to it, because without sharing nothing can survive in the Internet age. The problem is people like music, but they've been so psychologically damaged into thinking that music making isn't a perfectly able to be learned iteratively that they feel they MUST consume music produced by these companies, and that simply isn't true. We need new musicians to make music and find ways to make money off of it through inclusion in other products such that they don't feel the need to be marketed by malicious record companies.

Can anybody provide any real evidence that nut allergies are triggered by the "smell" of nuts? I don't think so -- as far as I know they have to be aerosolized in a cooking spray or finely crushed and thrown into the air as "nut dust". I'm betting this woman is probably just a hypochondriac who thinks she's being affected by smelling nuts when she's not. This article http://www.nationalpost.com/related/topics/story.html?id=2417934 mentions that her claim is backed up a doctor's note saying that she has a reaction when in the general vicinity of nuts, but other than that there's no real evidence for this.

Air Canada and other organizations should first order complete medical studies on people like this to get the facts before taking action. Clearly, the public needs more evidence because special treatment for allergy sufferers and public bans of nuts are getting out of hand.

A quick Google search reveals the beginnings of a Britannica article which also indicates that banning nuts is a bad idea since nut allergy deaths are not unacceptably higher annually than deaths from lightning strikes and bee stings, and because banning creates a climate of oversensitivity: http://www.britannica.com/bps/additionalcontent/18/35883327/Peanut-hysteria--or-is-it

Bono is from the old business model with overpriced physical products, so his comments are predictable.

This reviewer is definitely a reviewer I don't need to hear any more of. I shut it off after the first ten seconds. The ironic thing is the review itself is more intolerable than the movie it's trying to lambaste.

I'm going to have to say that the phantom menace is better than this review video. The reviewer's tone is so boring, so monotonic, that I can't watch more than 10 seconds of the video. George Lucas at least let me get to the end of _his_ film!

UIpdate from mmo-champion.com: "The next unlock will happen on January 5th, if each wing is unlocked after a month it means that we won't see Arthas before April but if I had to give my opinion I would say that it will probably be faster than that. The 4 weeks are probably here to let people test the rest of the content without focusing too much on raid instances."

So there you have it folks, they're giving themselves plenty of time to harvest those delicious greenbacks without updating the content at all. If MMOs are supposed to be constantly evolving persistent worlds, WoW now wins the award for consistently stagnant persistent world.

The "other content" they're referring to are the 5-player dungeons, but those will just get toasted by the end of the week.

If you want to remain playing WoW, you might want to consider putting a dent in Blizzard's coffers by cancelling your subscription at least until the new raid zone is fully released on normal difficulty.

Patch 3.3 is Blizzard's big squeeze for subscription cash before the next expansion. Each wing past the first wing of the raid dungeon is locked out on a real-time timer such that the dungeon incrementally opens. What's worse, is the final boss of each wing has an attempt count which also increases linearly as more wings open. All this is to forcefully stop well-coordinated teams of players from beating the dungeon quickly, and I don't just mean in one week. There are guilds out there who are capable of beating this thing in a couple months in about the 50th percentile of raiding guilds, but with the harsh attempt count on the bosses of each wing it will most likely lock these guilds out for more than that, keeping the subscription cash flowing longer than it needs to. To top it all off, hard modes won't be accessible until the whole dungeon is cleared, and when that happens, they're granting all players a buff to their statistics to make it easier to beat the dungeon. That last one is to deliver the psychological feeling of accomplishment to players who would have otherwise ended their subscriptions, in order to make it seem like the game is still fun for them to keep their subscription dollars coming in.

Blizzard has gotten so addicted to the high revenues that they're willing to implement game mechanics based around keeping people subscribing with minimal content updates. As a result, I've cancelled my subscription and I can safely say I won't be returning to Azeroth again -- ever.

As Auxis alluded to below, you can simply write a hack to tell the game that gameguard is running when it's not. These hacks are readily available for Lineage II (and I suspect almost every other game popular enough to warrant them), so all gameguard does is treat the gamer like a criminal while doing little to actually prevent unauthorized use.

Well their key must be in the executable somewhere if it works through some type of encryption. Find it, change it, and then make a fake steam server which unlocks the game.