No, actually I think the real question is not whether anyone has lost anything to piracy. The real question is whether there is a net positive benefit to society from the current excessive attempts to stop that piracy. There I think the answer is no.

- Tom

There isn't much doubt that increased use of e-cigarettes would be a net gain for both society and general health. Nicotine vapor alone is much less harmful and smelly than smoking.

But there are powerful lobbies with an incentive to hinder e-cigarettes. The current push is to 'temporarily' ban them until exhaustive study is done.

- Tom

There is another myth that says just because something is mathematically unambiguous it also intuitively obvious. And yet the real implications may be lost in the complexity of the situation or problem. Comments can point out anything useful to the code reader.

Also, if you spend enough time staring at a piece of code you can usually figure out what it does. But that does not at all mean you can figure out what the programmer was really trying to do. His/her internt may have been quite different. You can also not figure out all the possibly erroneous assumptions made about the problem space at the time of coding.

Comments form a useful redundancy and sanity check. Being cutely terse in comments is as bad as the clever but incomprehensible code one liner.

You should add comments anywhere you can predict a reader may have a high probability of misunderstanding.

- Tom

I have my netbook using full system encryption with TrueCrypt, with KeyPass for a further level of safe password storage. I also now have an OpenVPN server at home I can connect through.

However before I set up the OpenVPN server I used an IronKey flash drive for safer and more anonymous web browsing. This is a flash drive with built in hardware AES encryption. It comes with a modified version of Mozilla Firebird set up to use that encryption to go through a private TOR network gateway set up by the company. A subscription is included free with the IronKey. It slowed things down a bit but seemed to work. http://www.ironkey.com/personal/.

- Tom

I think I remember an old magazine article (Dr. Dobbs Jornal?) where Patterson narrates how he used a cross assembler on the CP/M source code.

It was still a huge amount of work but I think that maybe does mean Dos is a copy, or at least a derivative work.

- Tom (not a lawyer)