My (hello) world brings all the boys to the yard,
And their like
It's smaller than yours,
Damn right it's smaller than yours,
I can teach you,
But I have to charge

Yeah, I really would forward the address of a 41 year old party girl to my personal account. Her experience and the thrill of catching a STD will clearly benefit my sex live.

Those examples were not meant to disprove the open source hurts artist argument. They were choosen to point out how new ways of distributing products generate new markets which are fought at first and become the prominent way of doing things afterwards.

This whole open source argument is stupid. But it is only one line in the TFA. It comes from a novelist and I never understood how writing a novel makes anyone an expert. So even open source seems to be a big red attention sign, I took the freedom to ignore it and comment on the whole situation. And we have seen this many times before. People being afraid of new technology make up bogus arguments and try to fight whatever they see as a threat.

It's called fighting against windmills (gegen Windmühlen kämpfen) and known since Don Quijote.

People that arrogant and uninformed will be either unemployed or dead (because of old age) in 10 years. It's the same story every time a new market develops. The people doing business the old way cry and scream while they slowly fade away, while the innovators take a big piece of the cake (e. g. ITunes Store, Amazon's kindle, ...).

/*
  * Sorry, had a couple of beers and no time to fix it, yet ...
  */ // Crappy code here

Sounds like Bastard Operator From Hell to me. But it could be the only defense against Incredibly Incompetent Manager From Hell.

Although this is /. and people are more interested in technical questions, for me the really interesting question is: How can they encrypt the "metadata" on broadcasts – including the assistive information used by deaf and blind people ?

I mean, this basically means all of the broadcast can be copied and used in any way imaginable except for the part of the broadcast which is important to the handicapped ? This sounds sort of immoral to me.

A crap, so I am philosophical, technical and diplomatic (in that order) but not seductive. That explains everything.

True, I just wanted to point out that most arguments here can be proven wrong by one counter example.

Nearly everything in engineering involves a tradeoff. So arguments leading to statements like language a is better than language b are nearly always wrong.

Also garbage collection is turned off in real-time systems not because of space complexity but because of time complexity. For real-time systems the important factors are the deadlines for given tasks.

Additionally, normally garbage collection does not improve the time complexity of an algorithm but the space complexity, because it avoids memory leaks and possibly fragmentation.

Ah, that must be the reason real-time systems disable garbage collection. It's just more efficient and outperforms manual memory management all the time.

No, bandwidth hogs normally use file sharing which is implemented with tcp (i. e. bit torrent).

The problem is tcp distributes bandwidth per connection. Someone using more connection gets a bigger part of the available bandwidth.

It depends on exactly what is encoded with this number. If it is a pixel in an image flipping one bit won't destroy the image. The same is true for video and plain text. Flipping a bit in a text file would change exactly on letter.

The problem lies in the encoding and the type of information saved.

If, for example, a binary format is used, there has to be a way to identifiy the borders of the different data formats. For information of fixed length, this can be done with counting. If the information has no fixed length, this can be done with byte stuffing.

If we want to save a linked list in a binary format using byte stuffing, we would take one byte and define it to be the new list character. Then we code the list in a way that our list character newer turns up in the expression used to save a list. Normally this is done by defining an escape character which tells us that the next character is not the special character used for byte stuffing.

For example, we want to save a list of sentences using ASCII and define the pipe symbol "|" as special character. The resulting file would look like this:

Hello world|This is a simple example|for the almighty interweb

Now, the only way the file would turn out to be unusable after flipping a bit is, if a bit of the byte used for the pipe symbol was flipped. Flipping any other bit would change the meaning, but the program would be able to load it anyway.

So it depends on what and how it is saved. For most media files flipping a bit would not render the file useless. For an account it probably would.

If the data is important, add redundancy, that is additional bits for error correction. If the data is not important, don't add redundancy because it increases the file size.

That is exactly the reason why compressed files are useless after a flipped bit. A compression algorithm removes redundant bits to decrease file size.

Some even cheap printers include some good rotary encoders and servos. This robot was build mainly from parts of old streamers and printers.

Google has created a technology to adress the shortcomings of an old standard and now, as the new one reaches it's final state, Google tells us to use it.

You're probably right about the Web 2.0 vs. Web 1.0 thing. But the rest of your post is just ignorant.

First, let's consider Moore's law. As it is based on the size of transistors it will come to an end. There is a physical limit to the size of transistors, just think about the size of an atom, for example.

Then your five usage categories for computers, namely calculations, entertainment, information retrieval, image manipulation, and word processing, are just wrong.

Computers can do exactly on thing, calculations. Every other use is derived from this. This aside let's look at your other four categories.

Entertainment - Sure this is one use, but nearly everything can and is used for entertainment. And entertainment was there long before computers so I don't see how this is a category for computer usage. Just think about books, theaters, sports, games and the like.

Information retrieval - You are right here, but you know database management is not the same as information retrieval. Information retrieval is a technology to retrieve information relevant to a specific topic. A database can be used for that, but database management is the technology used to optimise databases. Information retrieval includes crawlers to get the information, generation of an index, searching for relevant content for a given request, etc.

Image manipulation - This is just a subset of signal processing. Signal processing (including generation) comes down to generate and manipulate signals of arbitrary dimensions. If you are using 2 dimensions, these signals could be images, if you are using 1 dimension your signal could be an audio signal. So you are totaly ignorant to image generation, processing, audio manipulation, generation, processing, pattern matching, machine learning, ...

Word processing - This is true, I think.

Also you are forgetting about improving the efficiency in terms of energy consumption, lowering the entry barrier in terms of ease of use and cost, security, robotics, controlling factories, simulation (not for entertainment), autonomous systems and as pointed out before the most common use for computers, communication.

Therefore, as your assumptions are wrong, your conclusion is wrong. It seems you used a computer 20 years ago, never tried anything new and you are predicting the future with no imagination.

In computer science this is known as garbage in, garbage out.