seriously wtf else is sony going to do? if they do nothing and the next hack is a serious one everyone will point the finger at how they did nothing.

This isn't about necessity, this is about legal reality. Producers of IP DO and still have RIGHTS themselves too. They over extend themselves, they do reprehensible acts to try to enforce those rights, but, never forget that rights with consumer goods go both ways. You have the right not to run DRM content and they have the right to put out DRMed content.

There's more to an election than who wins. Policies aren't determined simply by the identity of the candidate winning. There's a difference between winning by a wide margin, and winning by a narrow margin. And, it matters if a third-party candidate gets 10% of the vote. It means that the major party candidates are going to have to pay attention to the policy views that drew that much attention.

Consequently, I don't think people should vote for "the lesser of two evils." They ought to vote for the candidate whose views most closely resemble their own. If people actually voted based on their beliefs, rather than on this weird game theory where one assumes losing, maybe we'd start to get some approximation of democracy.

Why would you not know what the library call does? Presumably it's documented. Knuth might help you how the library call works, but more likely you'd refer to Knuth to write your own version of the code. And, as Josh Bloch argues, rewriting tried and tested code is a mistake.

Individuals that knowingly violate that law have no right to turn around and complain that the law is unfair.

Yes they have. For example, when the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was in effect, anyone who aided a runaway slave by providing food or shelter was subject to criminal penalties. However, breaking that law was absolutely the correct thing to do, and so was speaking out against it. Why should righteous law-breakers have to choose between one form of opposition or the other? What right did wicked supporters of the law have to insist upon such a choice?

This is an extreme example, but it counters your position.

Youtube 1080p videos still require some buffering on my 5mb connection. Did I mention they're compressed 1080p? It's pretty compressed video, but it's still compressed, and only in stereo. And only 30fps. Some of us have screens that support larger than 1080p. Some of us have computers that can handle 1080p at 60, or even 120fps. Imagine if Mozilla couldn't complain about which compression method we use because everyone simply had enough bandwidth to stream uncompressed video.
 
  I, for one, welcome our 1080p+, uncompressed 120fps streaming video lords

SMT is probably one of the best architectural features you can get in terms of complexity of implementation vs speedup. It isn't trivial by any means, but far less hazardous (get it?) than an OoO back-end or speculative execution.

yeah, but apple will only kick you on the left ball. :)

Thank you for your insight and tireless efforts to promote Open Source and protect the rights and interests of all FLOSS users and developers. I think you're one of the most well-reasoned and balanced leaders in the FLOSS world.

But the principle cannot without your publicly funded education simply because of something you said about him. Free speech does not mean freedom of consequences, but it does mean freedom of consequences from the government, which the school is a part of.

And what possible difference would that make in the general case? If people spent more time actually fixing bugs and paying attention to usability issues than trying to recode sections that are working perfectly because 'the current solution is not elegant enough', a lot more software would be a lot less frustrating to use.

I hate to point this out to you, but "saw the movies as adults" means "saw the movies as adults", not "saw the movies as [over thirty] adults [and then saw all six at once]". Had the OP meant that, I assume that's what he'd have said.
 
So either he needs to learn to write, or you need to learn to read. I suspect the latter based on the rest of his post.

I'm not saying once you do the estimate based on past performance you dont add risk. Do you have a new team, is this a new language, new customer, etc. Take all the risks and for each estimate how long it will take extra if that risk actually occurs. multiply that by the probability of the risk occurring. If the risk is over 50% then remove it from the risk table and add it to your baseline schedule. Sum all these risk probabilities and present this with your original estimate. So your original schedule with factored risk is your total estimate (because some of the risks will happen). Also your total risk must be bigger than the longest unfactored risk to ensure you can cover it.

This method of task estimation is standard in all industry - there's no reason software cant be estimated in the same manner.

Last spring, Twitter had 6 million registered accounts and 14 million users. Even if both of those numbers doubled, they'd have fewer active users than Farmville. Heck, even if they trippled, they'd probably have fewer active users than Farmville.

Meanwhile elsewhere... Scientists in the Soviet and China replicate the exact same research for no other reason then that it's not available when they could instead be working on something more useful, like improving on it. Doh. People! Try to cooperate. Getting into space is hard enough as it is, try to forge some info-trade agreements. Perhaps GPL the bitch as a sign of good will - it's not like the US is using it for anything much now. Also, China does not give a good god damn if they lock up their spies. They're golden on people, maggoty with 'em, if you want one they'll give you a spare one just in case.