>> It's that Adobe wants you to pirate the crap out of CS6, because they know they won't get money from you anyway.

Interesting. I've heard this thing before, with Photoshop and Windows too. Is there any evidence for this?

Microsoft have the technical capability to deactivate pirate installs of Windows through WGA. Instead, they choose to display a nag message and disable software updates. Microsoft spent a ton of money developing a really sophisticated anti-piracy system, but decided against using it to prevent piracy by end-users. To me, that speaks volumes about how piracy fits into their business strategy.

>> The U.S. Senate has already passed a bill that will make >> the devices a requirement, and the House is expected to >> approve the bill as well.

I'm not very well versed with the political process in the US but why aren't these bill ever discussed (or voted on) before they are passed.

Doesn't the public get to vote on these important issues?

(By the way, I come from a country where I don't get to vote on individual bills. Just thought things were slightly better in America.)

What about making them delete user profile data after they unregister and not just hide it?

One of the listed changes is "Work with the DPC to identify an acceptable retention period of data from inactive or deactivated accounts". Another is "Continue devoting engineering resources towards improving the system that irrevocably deletes user accounts and data within 40 days of receipt of a deletion request".

Both of these have due dates of July 2012.

I believe the EU is planning on updating the Data Protection laws, including giving people the right to actually delete their data.

cf. http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=MEMO...

Much faster! They should really switch to this.

Brilliant. Brought my HD-555 alive.

I'm not sure why WSJ thought these old arguments deserved attention.

(It's not even funny. Like this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pbEjOH7t0Q.)

Depends on how you define waste. One might want a PhD because of the learning involved. Not everyone cares about money.

Oh wait, but, it's The Economist.

Looking at the prices of the kindle editions of the below books,

Distributed Algorithms ($100) - http://amzn.to/glJVKv Algorithm Design Manual ($61.72) - http://amzn.to/f9G0KD

They are about $10 less than the physical book. Doesn't it cost them far less to produce, store, transport a digital version? I wonder how much of this goes to the author.

Hmm, by the way, he's not supposed to hold the phone that way.

Irony in action. Wonder if it's intentional.

Agreed. I like this post but HN is not the place for it.

I apologise. I was uhmming and ahhing about whether or not to post it. I felt that whether or not it's genuinely a HN-type discussion, particularly the on-topicness of it.

As penance for those that didn't like the first post, I've posted some Erlang tutorials here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1912062

In the end I went for it for two reasons. Firstly I'd say it's arguably on-topic at the moment, given that the top comments still have comments from the other thread. I think a couple of weeks from now and it wouldn't be, but while it's fresh in people's minds who participated in the original discussion, I felt it was a well written piece that gave some good advice (and perhaps some not so good advice for all situations).

More importantly, from http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html I read this:

If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

The discussions on the original thread talked a lot about what people would/did do, but a lot of people didn't seem to understand the risks as an adult. I felt that people would enjoy this, but that some wouldn't.

So I apologise to those that don't like it for posting it - I understand entirely where you're coming from, but I posted it for those that took part in the previous discussion. Hopefully it'll run it's course and we can all go back to talking about Erlang again.

Relax. Men of any sort cannot resist the topic. And if they could, the story would simply disappear.