Exactly! People forget that its not necessarily *what* the art is but rather who did it first. There's a boat-load of abstract art I could replicate and arguably improve upon but it doesn't make it note-worthy because I wasn't the front-runner. This guy made a statement (as much as I think its crap) and was the first to really do it, he deserves the credit for it and any copycats afterward are just pissing in the wind.

THANK YOU! I'm seriously sick of this entitled attitude where a company/person/group puts tremendous effort into some system only to have a chunk of users go "WHY CAN'T I USE IT THE WAY I WANT THAT WASN'T INTENDED FOR!?" If you don't like Google+'s rules then stay off, its not a necessary service by a long shot and if you're so damned concerned about privacy wtf are you doing with Social networks in the first place?

Or:

They *don't* have sensative data stored on networks accessable to the internet. I certainly believe its possible for a NATO web server to contain 1GB of documents... The same kind of crap that you find on publicly owned company intranets, documents and documents of rambling and meeting minutes and useless garbage stored because they're being transparent to the public. For all we know at this point Anonymous *hacked* a bunch of files that were accessible by a internal search engine to the site.

I worked for IT to a company that had a client using keyfob entry. After a while part of my job became finding 'griefers' who would call in frequently with random excuses about how they lost their keyfob, or left it at home, or at work, or at the dog house, or whatever and needed a "temporary passcode" to override the system. (Yes that's possible). People simply refuse to accept the need for security. You give them a simple (and secure) method and they start to game it because they find it inconvenient.

You'd assume that 15% have an immunity based off of the title "Snail Discovered...."

The better part is how they complain about firefox hogging memory by looking at their Task Manager. Its like they'd prefer 40% of their memory to sit idle instead of caching useful data. "Firefox is taking up xMB! That's horrible!" but as soon as the memory is required elsewhere its released and available. I don't want 4GB of memory wasted on my computer sitting idle.

"students need applicable exercises to show them why this stuff matters."

The students destined to be coders find this out on their own. As for the others I find a lesson plan that works backwards is best. Show them a functional product then show them the components that someone had to make in order for it to function. So show the kids where that circle they learned to draw the week before is in a massive UI environment.

"When we'd talk after class as juniors in college we wondered if we really knew anything at all, because it felt like we didn't."
You didn't know anything, and never should pretend that you do. Staying humble is one of the only ways I keep myself sane sometimes.

"Now, before they can walk, they have 3D games, music players, Facebook and all other forms of social media. I'm not saying it's all bad, but, where is the drive to get someone young interested in computing?"

Then the solution would be to engage them in those things:

• Write a simple mod on the Source engine
• Write a phone app for their iPhone/Android/Blackberry
• Write a plugin for mediamonkey or the like to categorize music
• Write a facebook app

Force the students to get involved with the community and let them choose if they want to dive in deeper or not. In my personal experiences as a student I hated Java because of the community but found home with C users who were more friendly (I was young and ignorant to the fact that one forum can be friendlier than another). Let them dive into an academic forum for phone development or what have you and you'll find students doing work on their own time to bring to school and tinker with.

And that's sort of another thing facebook has going for it. As crappy as the API is most developers looking to cache in on the social networking scheme see a greater opportunity tying in their idea to facebook rather than trying to compete with it.

Correct me if I'm wrong but hasn't there already been 2 or 3 "Next Big Things" that facebook beat out? The problem isn't innovation, capabilities or style, its that everyone is on facebook becase... everyone is on facebook. Sure you might get a hipster-esk crowd to jump to the new one to say "I was there BEFORE it was cool" but unless the masses follow suit it is doomed to fail quickly.

The only way out of the loop that I see is someone deriving a new business model to maintain themselves while struggling to steal facebook's popularity. If that's the case then it likely wont be a coder to innovate the idea and we'll see this whole winkle-burg toss up again.

The real issue is more simple than that I think. By stating (with reasonable probability) that they commited the crime they probably give the feds enough to gain a warrant. With that warrant they'll confinscate PCs/hard drives and scrub them for the factual evidence that will/willnot lead to a conviction.

I think this is a *whoosh* moment.... but I can't quite tell.

I'm not an apple dev or user so I'll blindly agree with the point you make regarding licensing. But you CANNOT tell me straight faced that Apple did not rip off the name & logo.

The modern gaming industry is very very young.

Quite personally I find myself expressing some of the view points from the article but see it from a different angle.

I'll fully admit my university was under-par. I came out near the top of my class and was one of the 25% of the graduating class that landed a job immediately (I actually had multiple offers). What I felt coming out was that all the work that *I* put into university was what caused my "successful" outcome. I try to stay humble and credit those who were there along the way (profs/peers) but I still often feel that it was a direct result of my efforts as to why I ended up where I am.

Having said that if you take that view point and twist it, it can sound as if I think I am here solely as a result of my own actions which is not true. I see many people in my field who share this view and as a result make the leap forward and say that their university had nothing to do with their success and their own drive would have landed them in the same position they are in now. Keep extending the argument and you come full circle to the idea that "college was a waste of time" which is more often then not very untrue.

Now the only real argument that I have against this view when people take it that far is to ask them what they've accomplished since graduation besides a job. Can they tell me they've continued to learn multiple programming languages or other related items at the same rate? What about practical applications of knowledge? What have they to show for their months/years post-degree? The obvious factor that I see people missing is the motivation that peers and others around you provide in the university or education environment...

/rant