cgoddard

That's a great idea! Provide funding for movies solely with advertising! I'm sure that will result in no conflicts of interest that will severely compromise artistic vision and reduce people to no better than buying machines. </sarcasm>

I'm all for free flow of information and such, and the abolition of software patents and other substantial types of patent reform, but this kind of naive radicalism against all IP protection dilutes any reasonable demands for patent reforms and makes any activism look like a joke.

When you make a movie you can fund it and distribute it as you please. But it's extremely selfish and arrogant to want to benefit from other people's expensive endeavors, for which they are requesting a small fee to view, and give jack shit in return. By viewing the material you are admitting that there is at least some potential value in it, but by refusing to pay for it you are basically saying the movie studios and artists and writers and others can go ahead and close shop already, because you don't consider their business model viable and refuse to contribute anything.

I agree nice entitlement complex you have going there.

It's really amazing he raised that much money so quickly, with so many in the higher tiers as well, especially since the higher tiers of funding are still a donation and do not provide any equity in the project. I suppose the original art wouldn't be worthless though!

Aversion doesn't necessarily have to reflect an underlying natural law. In the case of killing, indiscriminate attempts to kill would threaten personal fitness, because there is a good chance the attacker could be killed in turn. This risk becomes more prevalent as tribes and societies develop to increase the fitness of their members. Indiscriminate killing within ones tribe would threaten group fitness, and so a viable groups members would need to kill the indiscriminate killer to increase chances of their own survival. Groups that do not act in this way suffer a big fitness penalty, and would not last very long.

Fit humans will not kill others of their tribe, but one merely has to look at the vast history of warfare to realize that there is no similar aversion or restriction on killing outside of one's tribe.

Educate yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_Libre

If they don't want to contribute any coding work back to the community at large, then let them start from scratch and build something they have full control over. I don't see why the open-source community should have to accommodate them if they're not going to contribute back to that community.

There would definitely be a downside commercially if porn were to be declared uncopyrightable (not that i think it has any chance of happening). Sure there might be amateur free porn that would still be made, but there wouldn't be many production houses that would stay in business if they no longer received profit from the sale of their work.

Many smaller production houses run on extremely tight margins, and after making sure cameramen, models, and everybody else gets paid, there is not much capacity to lose money on distribution and still remain profitable.

You would no doubt seeing at least smaller porn production houses closing. I would hope at least the people who at least believe in the utility of porn enough to distribute it would see this as a bad thing. Anti-pornography crusader types would likely see this as a victory.

Even if they excised the old methods from the code, hopefully no one is linking to jQuery trunk or something as their primary library. The old versions would still be around. Just some simple work might have to be done to update a web app to using the latest versions of jQuery.

They could deprecate the old methods and still keep them around as long as makes sense. There's no rule that deprecated methods have to be gotten rid of during the next major revision or anything.

Anyone else unable to access the article? Could the content provider be so kind as to provide the content here in the thread, or get the page back up again?

Not only did Curebit copy 37Signals design in this case, they also essentially copied the source code. If Zynga was somehow able to decompile another game's source code, change the assets, and then sell it as their own, it would be just as wrong and potentially illegal as what Curebit did.

There is extremely strong evidence for a genetic basis to intelligence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

Though other factors come into play, environment, education, etc., we are not all gifted with the same faculties, and it is ignorant to claim otherwise.

The discount is a nice thing for students, but there are plenty of non-students in the US and especially other parts of the world where dropping a few hundred dollars on software that makes their computer work is a major burden.

Given the large distribution of the Windows OS (this isn't boutique software with a small customer base), it really doesn't make much sense that it's so expensive. If the price was lowered significantly ($50 maybe?), I think MS would see piracy numbers go down and sales go up more than enough for them to remain profitable.

Why are customers being made to jump through hoops that do practically nothing to deter actual infringement?

What's more laughable is that a minority decide to pirate a piece of software, and everyone gets punished. No, actually, in large part only the people who chose not to pirate get punished. How far does it have to go before people realize the whole strategy is absurd?

How does exclusivity add any value to a piece of software? The utility and productivity that I get out of a piece of software is in no way influenced by how anyone else obtained it. Sure, I might be bitter that I didn't also break the law and obtain an illegal free copy of my software, but that's really just sour grapes.

And in business if the value I'm able to produce with software is governed more by my exclusive ownership than my skill with it and other professional skills, then it's probably a good idea to find another line of work.

Huh? Microsoft has a very tiny hold in mobile computing. Android is Google.

Haskell must be on the slow road to failure. Maybe in another 20 years it will be gone for good. :-)

At least internally Rails 3 is a lot less crufty and hackish than Rails 2. If you ever tried writing your own plugins and such to deal with certain internals there is a lot to appreciate about Rails 3.

From a general use perspective, Rails has always been designed with a focus on intuitiveness and trying to eschew unnecessary configuration. Whether it succeeds on both fronts is a matter of opinion, but considering the types of configuration options it provides I think the team has done a pretty good job.

Rails is a pre-built web app architecture. Of course it is always going to be quicker and have less of a learning curve to just throw together your own simple app architecture from scratch. But if the app you're building isn't trivial, in most cases it's going to save you a lot of time (in not reinventing the wheel or getting caught in common pitfalls) to go with the prebuilt time-tested community-supported architecture.

I wouldn't think Rails compares too poorly to the PHP MVC frameworks. Sure if you're building just a simple sort of website with maybe a few forms go with framework-free PHP, but for more complex but somewhat standard web apps if you forgo the framework (for Ruby, PHP, etc.) it is usually a mistake.

There are more lenient wiki providers out there, like Wikia. Whether these services will be around for the duration remains to be seen.

Writing also doesn't factor into the main combined math / verbal score. It is considered separately and is on a completely different scale.

Peripherally related is really stretching it. The way I understood chrismealy's argument is this:

Biological essentialist arguments were previously used to explain the disparity of men and women in law and medicine. Now that we know that those arguments were critically flawed and did not reflect reality, we should be very hesitant to support similar arguments being used to explain the lack of women in STEM disciplines.

Been using Unity and natty for a few weeks now. The only feature I really miss from the gnome interface right now is the ability to add / move / remove toolbar widgets. Has anyone figured out if it's possible / how to do this in Unity?

Overall I feel a lot more productive with Unity. The numerous super- functions are really helpful and nifty. I especially like the super- 1-9 for positioning/resizing windows on the current monitor.

I've had the 11.04 beta installed for a few weeks now, and though there have definitely been some bugs that have come up, even the beta of natty has been really stable overall, much more so than some of the previous Ubuntu releases.

It's no big deal if you don't mind having a few partitions on your system. Personally I have a large partition for my /home directory, and smaller partitions for testing out new releases, distributions and such. If one of the releases is/becomes unstable, you can just select your old reliable release in the boot loader and get work done on that. It has worked out really nicely for me.

Actually for small values of n, an n^2 sort can be quicker than an nlogn sort, depending on how it is implemented.

Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol(apostrophe_should_go_her...

You could strongly argue that collecting clickstream and other user browser session info via a toolbar is not a form of web robot (crawler, spider, etc.), and thus robots.txt does not apply.

Our office uses Netbeans for Ruby on Rails. It has worked quite well up until now.

Sources? It's nice to just throw out percentages but where is the data to back this up?

I run into the same problem when trying to submit any unicode data through ActiveRecord. I will try this fix and see if it helps.