This kind of thing is more complicated than that. At the end of the day, businesses only care about the bottom line. While it's true that hitting companies will also hurt their workforce in reduced work to be done (and be even somewhat paid for), sometimes it's the only way to drive the point home to those companies that the customers simply do not want to have this work done under slave-like conditions.

But then again, customers have to care enough to fork over the cash, in the form of so-called "inflated" prices. I'm not holding my breath to see that happen, sadly.

At the end of the day, the only language the manufacturing companies (actually, any companies) really understand and obey is written with numbers on their financial statements. Driving petitions, customer demonstrations, shouting on top of soapboxes and whatnot is all fine and dandy in the feel-good way but unless it also shows up as numbers on company finances, it tends to amount to... absolutely nothing.

I would suppose that if this kind of behavior was widespread, the people with money could simply stop give out loans to them? Or require heftier collaterals?

There's also talks about Source Engine being ported to Linux.

Now, I'm not really privy to how high-end game development works, so I can't really say how much the engine lets developers really keep their hands off of DirectX/OpenGL stuff, but I have let myself to believe that stuff really is handled mostly by the engine.

Ergo, if the engine handles the graphics stuff and it's ported to use OpenGL on Linux, it should, in essence, make Linux & OpenGL at least a little bit less repulsive choice for game devs.

The issue about 3D video drivers still stands, though. However... if people are able to put up with closed-source, proprietary stuff like Steam Client, Source Engine and the games themselves in the first place, they are most likely going to have proprietary binary blob drivers, too.

Note: I don't do much current gaming, I am only in near future going to switch all-linux, and haven't really had any experience how good or bad the binary drivers are. So take my comments with a grain of salt.

Wrong question.

I'd be much, much more concerned if the scientists will discover a working vaccine before this mutation happens in the wild, and to that end, SCIENCE needs to be done. Suppression of research is clearly harmful to this goal. So, I'd be asking the question: "And if said virus, having mutated in wild, killed your family, and the vaccine wasn't ready in time thanks to idiots who wanted to make it harder to discover with their security theater?"

And honestly, the way I see it, the harmful info is already out there. If the terrorists have a grasp of biology, and the resources at the level they would be able to actually do these things, the information that H5N1 can actually mutate into something this dangerous is enough. Suppressing this research is doing nothing else but letting the bad guys have all the weapons.

I could recommend this book too, but... Well, it certainly has some huge pros:

a) teaches a relevant language,
b) actually teaches some higher-level concepts like lists as they should be teached,
c) ...not to mention teaching the reader to actually think algorithmically
d) actually gives exact (as in really, EXACT instructions how to actually get the code run... Oh, how I would have liked a book like this when I was younger...)
e) it's available at no cost in HTML form

But there are also cons with that book, which might or might not be a problem especially since the intended audience in this case is 11 year old:
a) language is worded in a way that's somewhat "direct" and "in your face",
b) it also goes through the "drab" things first, and quite thoroughly too. On the other hand, there's a promise of teaching the reader to develop a game out there, so it doesn't leave motivation out... even if a text adventure might not be what 11 year old at this time and age thinks first when thinking about "computer game".

I'm not saying a 11 year old couldn't learn immensely much from that book. I would have liked to read it with a computer at my hands when I was 11 year old. But this is something the original submitter should make the final call on. Personally, I would think that it might be better to go through the setup and first two or three chapters together with the child and only then leave him get cracking at it by himself.

The thing with meatspace is that none of those intricate lock mechanisms or even house-thick steel walls really matter a damn (I have no idea who would end up footing the bill for drilling it, though) when they are faced with destructive power tools. Any amount of any physical stuff between the prosecutor and evidence is still just physical stuff that can be drilled through, not some kind of extradimensional wall of universe that simply "won't get punched through no matter what". On the other hand in cyberspace, with encryption, the supercomputer or two won't do shit against properly-done strong encryption, unless the three letter agencies have actually built that quantum computer already. The power of math behind encryption is exactly that nothing short of really impressive paradigm-shift stuff (the stuff that happens once or twice in a century, max) will undo it.

Honestly, I have seen more than few of my friends using android phone enter the grid swipe only once... and I think still remember every single one of them. I myself use the grid swipe too, but I also enter the PIN for my SIM card when I boot the device up. I consider the swipe the grid to be more of a "keypad lock" function than anything even resembling actual security from data confidentiality standpoint.

If I ever use my android device to hold anything really confidential (no, sorry, honey-bunny text messages with my girlfriend don't count in this sense of the word because, at the end of the day, no one really cares enough about those type of things [and our messaging is somewhat "innocent" stuff in any case]) I'm going to use some real measures like strong encryption. Until that day, I'm not going to be bothered and just keep good care of my device.

Now, how long do you think that it'll be until someone at the various copyright lobbies wants to force a macrovision-like drm technology in there just because someone might someday include video recording capability into artificial eyes?

Show them this: Rite of passage, and you'll save them some pain, at least.

On the more serious side, tell them to simply get cracking with maps, mods, skins, simple game programming (like asteroids/minesweeper/etc), scripting, etc.

I sure hope someone could tell me if these findings tell us if the stars will be right during the next 50k years... It would make me at ease knowing how much time we have left before the great old ones... unless, of course, they are coming soon. Even then, I'd like to have the information so I could make preparations (namely, leave this world.)

Shouldn't / Doesn't the time start running only when the work is published? I always thought that to be the case...