It just doesn't matter. You are expected to secure your wifi and not doing so isn't a blanket excuse. If it were then everyone would leave their wifi open and there would be no suits.

There is no law, legal requirement, or precedent (AFAIK) that one must secure your router.

Adding to that, there is no law saying the owner of the router is to be punished for unauthorized but illegal use of their network.

Otherwise, people who pirate on coffee shop networks would therefore get the coffee shop in trouble.

BTW, if you have the money, you can get your lawyer to convince the judge to have a jury, you can convince them that the router was hacked regardless of the letter of the law. Remember, in the USA juries can in most cases override the law if they want.

Though the loosing side can always appeal and I'm sure in this instant the MPAA/RIAA have the money.

That said, I'm more concerned about someone hacking my own network to do illegal activity to get me in trouble as I live in a very populous neighborhood. Though, its on of those situations where I just have to be faster than the slowest person to outrun the bear and there does seem to be open networks around me.

I'm not pro-piracy at all, its just that what you are advocating is that innocent people are guilty of copyright infringment if their networks are used unauthorized.

Apparently I not well enough right now to count... Please hold off on your public get well wishes.

Whether you love or hate what he's done in the industry, he's a fellow human being first, and I hope he has a speedy recovery.

Personally, I find it disconcerting when random strangers wish me well in times of sickness especially when its either done in front of other people or in a public forum.

One, it does not make me actually get better.
Two, it makes me wonder if I have to be hurt or sick to get noticed.
Three, if they really cared, they'd make me some soup or something instead.
Five, there is no need to do it publicly to make yourself seem like the next Mother Theresa. Send me a get well soon card in private as there is no need to broadcast your charity to others in some display of your holiness.

But seriously, people really shouldn't make a habit of publicly wishing people well they don't know or have emotions about. To be fair, you'd have to wish everyone on the planet well so unless you say "...and I wish all 6 billion people well!" at the end of your comment, then you're not really being nice to everyone else sick and dying (technically everyone has contracted mortality at birth).

BUT if you play them to the point where you can't pry yourself away from them, then you have problems.

I think the real issue is that things like playing video games excessively and heavy drinking is a sign of mental disorder, not the cause.

Basically the addictions themselves do not cause the problem but rather the person is in a state where an addictive outlet is required. Whether this over eating, drinking, gambling, hoarding, excessive video gaming etc etc, that taking the activity away does not solve the underlying problem.

In most cases a person with an addictive disorder will simply replace the behavior with another one.

Right, OPEC... I'm absolutely certain that our biggest petroleum source in OPEC, Canada, would side with Iran should we go to war. That makes perfect sense.

China might be unhappy as Iran is its leading oil import nation and such a move would cause their energy prices to skyrocket.

Of course, they could make up the difference by selling the Iranians weapons.

And on a side note, I have seen the lead developer of Paradox personally ban someone.

Your specific example notwithstanding, the wiser developers know full well that "nigh unanimous" complaints on a forum, in general, means "unanimous only among the people complaining", given the people who are happy with (or just don't mind) whatever "unanimously" needs to be changed aren't going to manically gush on and on about every bit of minutia they love about the game.

In retail, there is a saying that goes like this "For everyone one customer who complains, there are 2 who silently decide never to visit your store again so you best take care of the person who complains as you'll loose 3 customers instead of 2."

I think that forums do provide useful input, but it has to be filtered. If people do have opinions about certain items it means that they can be changed for the next major release, but maybe not at all in the way that what's said on the forum.

I think if an indie dev does not read his forums and personally respond to posts, he won't be an indie developer for long.

Yes, the dev should not personally moderate the forums, but they have to understand that they are going to have a small player base to start with because they are most likely a niche game and in order to continue sales it is imperative they have some response to concerns and quests by the community. If you alienate the people who have actually bought your product with a wall of silence, then they will think "this douche doesn't care that I spent $20 on his game... f' him!"

Now there are some people you aren't going to please at all no matter what you say and most of the time you are going to reply "feature was WAD" was as designed and "patch is forthcoming and will be ready when it is ready" but it shows that you are trying and that is good enough for some.

Also, as a small time developer you aren't going to have paid QA staff and 9 times out of 10, your player base is going to be the ones reporting bugs through the forums.

A really good (no longer small) company is Paradox interactive where it is not uncommon for a developer to respond to a post complaining about a game saying "That shouldn't be happening. Could you send me a save game so I can take a look for myself?"

And as far as niche goes... Paradox is very niche and they are going strong after 10 years because they are active in their forums and people really respect them for it.

Did't Microsoft already try this idea, but the other social networking sites have just left them in the dust.

Yes, but they did it the worst way possible.

Require a hotmail or MSN account. Require IE and for most of the usable features. Require the site hosting openID to use IIS and .NET stuff.

Also... It never worked.

There's nothing novel or technically interesting about Facebook. It is not the be-all and end-all of useful tools. It's a way to build a vanity page for people who are too lazy to learn HTML.

Hrm... I actually use Facebook as a news aggregating tool. All websites have a FB stream these days and it is an easy way to keep track of game development and patches as I'd rather not frantically hit F5 on some forums everyday to see a dev blog or patch notes that may only happen once a month. Its an easy way to stay informed of something in a "fire and forget" mode.

In fact, I'd say 25% of the info I read is from friends and the other 75% is from news feeds. Heck you can follow a Slashdot feed on there. And FB mobile is better way to view news feeds than most RSS feed apps and mobile browsers.

The typical home user rarely needs to do any really heavy number-crunching - the closest they get is physics in games.

For the past 5 to 8 years there has been a "rasterization vs. ray tracing" debate in the game developing and graphics community (with ray tracing in real time in games only being a theoretical pipe dream until recently).

If someone were to make ray tracing feasible, cheap, and practical for either a console or desktop PC, then yes... Home users will need that number crunching as Ray Tracing is a very embarrassing parallel task.

But that might not be for some time...

Technological advancement is peaking. The 20th century, the era-when-everything-happened is over. It was an aberation caused by huge amounts of cheap petroleum energy. With cheap oil depleting, the huge technology positive-feedback loop slows and stops.

Really now? What about nations which are not dependent on oil such as France, Germany, and Japan. Yes peak oil would most likley be a pain for international shipping, but nations who had the forethought to actually build nuclear power plants and decent mass transit systems will shrug and keep on going.

Plus there isn't any money. The banking system is fundamentally broken, nobody trusts that due-process rule-of-law applies to the financial sector anymore. And one-by-one all the industries in the USA are going down like the housing industry in a chain reaction. Government will frozen and powerless to do anything to stop it from happening.

Government? Whose government? Are we talking about? You talk as if the past 200 years of advances were primarily made by people who lived on Washington, DC's payroll.

The world will advance. It will adapt and it will progress... The statement you should be saying that the world will not progress should say "The United States will not progress, while China, Japan, and Europe keep going."

Its not like China is short on cash.

So soldiers are trained to be like teenagers? That is creepy.

Most soldiers are teenagers.

(At least the recruits)

Get a formal education and you get a much broader foundation.

That said, a car mechanic, a plumber, and house maid have better job security than college grad these days.

Give this book some serious thought:

http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com/

If I had a chance to talk with myself 20 years ago and tell them how to live their life I would say the following:

Join the military for a few years. You'll have health insurance for life.
Don't take on debt for college.
Buy a house early and pay it off.
Get a job that you cannot be outsourced from.

Yeah college is nice, but in 20 years from the point you have graduated, you might think different if you found yourself laid off from a job once though un-outsource..

Anyways... Not to ramble, but most knowledge jobs will be outsourced or contracted in 20 years and it won't matter if you have that piece of paper or not. Some guy in India or China will have your job because it was cheaper.

lets say all of my views and information is made up. i still have much more spine than you, since i have the guts to actually voice it myself, instead of posting anonymous like spineless cowards.

Maybe he was too lazy to log on or trust the terminal he was on?

Also, its not that hard to just make up throw away account. So simply posting as anon doesn't invalidate the poster.

Of course he didn't have a valid point but it had nothing to whether or not he logged on.