The question is, how many creative works fail because they are taken down, based on copyright... I'd know several fan-made game-sequels, girl-talk, DJ Danger Mouse, bitter sweet symphony by placebo...

And I already thought "W00T! SOON WE'LL BE FLYING IN SUITS WITH SOME RADIATION"!!! Disappointment again... (this conclusion sounds like XKCD, doesn't it? I need hobbies...)

yeah, programming is a craft - just like building a house... and everyone knows: to build a house, you only need brick layers, but no architect...

I'd say they mainly need kickass marketers to sell the shit that their tinkerers will be producing... (yes, high schoolers are tinkerers - sure they want the so called "whiz kids" - I've been a whiz kid too, but today, as graduate computer scientist, I am embarrassed by my codes from high school...)

Apparently you don't have a CS degree, so why do you think you could even remotely understand what they are doing?

shure, kernelizations, branching-vector minimization, modelling things as graphs and using matching- or networkflow algorithms seems like bad programming, because these things need far more code than a simple backtracking algorithm (so these guys are wasting time and stealing money from their employer, right?). but these things make the difference between "applicable" and "too slow".

Without a CS degree, you won't even understand why.

or take parsers - you'd probably write very simple parsers. e.g. for configuration files of the form
property1 value1
property2 value2
you'd probably just extract the strings from a stream and do lots of if(str1 == "property1") { property1 = converter(str2);} else if(...

I'd use lots and lots of gotos, which would seem like bad programming to you (because you've been told that goto=bad), but I would have written it as an automata, which is FAR faster than your stuff (and for huge database programs, this is again the difference between "fast enough" and "to slow"). Using this technique I've written one of the fastest XML parsers there are...

In school I was considered a "whiz kid" and (from my wife) I know what a programming apprenticeship looks like (there is NOTHING that you don't learn in the first 3 months of the first semester of computer science studies). When I look back to my codes from school and add the content of apprenticeship - that would be a friggin tinkerer!

You can teach them to use iterators, to use hardcore object-orientation, derive classes, overload streams etc.
but to be really good, you need profound knowledge about thread-synchronisation, discrete math (esp. graphtheory), automatatheory, and complexity classes, because without these, you will unavoidably code shit!

your programs will be slow:
you will use backtracking (exponential running time) for polynomial problems (e.g. problems related to matching- or network-cut problems). You will not use branching-vector minimization or kernelizations (you won't even understand why you should use those and your programs for NP-complete problems will be to slow to actually use them and you won't even be able to recognize these problems). Hell, you won't even be able to understand why polynomial running time is good and exponential running time is bad...

your programs will have race conditions and mutual-exclusion problems
or don't you want to benefit from any further processor-developments? processor development means more cores at the same speed nowadays, so you need multithreadding or you are stuck at using one core (which will not improve speed anymore)

you won't model parsers as (pushdown-)automata and you will NEVER be remotely able to know whether your program is reliable (whether it works for all inputs)

you won't be able to distinguish a fast program from a slow program, so you won't even know the quality of your programs.

My wife works at a software company's support hotline today and just ask her: bazillions of problems with all programs except those from the graduate computer scientists...
If you really think that ALL major software companies pay so much just for fun, then you are out of your mind! They just know and value how much more quality you get out of graduate computer scientists.

IMHO this guy just tries to make "we are nearly broke and can't afford good programmers anymore" sound good to the shareholders...

Correction: The globalists found oil in Omaha and now distribute made up stories in the "liberal media" about weapons of mass destruction there, to get approval to start a war... also they meet in bilderberg to plan (nearly) complete extinction of mankind

well yes, I am Alex Jones. How'd you know?

So the father violates his sons human rights by destroying his dignity,
the son will probably be unable to live a normal life
and on top of that, the father pockets all the money
and uses it to quit working instead of using it for the sons college or something...

what an asshole!

DUH! They sell PCs with Windows...

Probably you shouldn't get something permanently on your body that might get you in trouble in tests...

apart from that: "e^(i*pi)=-1" and "knuth is my homeboy" and some chuck norris facts of course...

You forgot something: a big, fat "fuck you, assholes!"

They want people to settle, because this gives them lots of money for little effort. Having such an extreme precedent can be used to intimidate people so they don't even DARE to make use of their 6th amendment right. I call this legalized extortion!

These organisations ASK musicians, programmers etc. to give usage-rights to the people VOLUNTARILY. If you don't want to, then nobody is trying to force you!

god, how braindead do you have to be, to make such a fuss about a subject that you have nearly zero knowledge about? didn't these morons even read the friggin wikipedia article? or are they just too stupid or too far into their "internet=evil" fanaticism to understand it?

"My god has a bigger dick than your god!"
George Carlin

The RIAA doesn't really WANT that money (they never would have gotten $1.92M anyway), they want a precedent to intimidate other people so they settle (whether the claims are valid or not).

Never forget the RIAAs first announcement after the $1.92M sentence:

"THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU DON'T SETTLE"