Why are people suddenly embracing this argument that piracy isn't theft?
People work to create music just like people work to mine the earth to produce coal. Should one not get paid just because what they're producing can't be physically held?
It depends on what kind of relationship you have. Traditionally, and what seems right to most people is a relationship with a level of commitment towards the other. I'm not saying this is always true, but that level of commitment does have benefits, usually resulting in a stronger relationship because of the trust developed.
>The installation process may take a while (several hours.. or less)
It depends on what you're talking about. With relatively fast internet (I have 20Mb/s), I can have a functional box up with my favorite DE in just an hour or so. It's true that I configure things here and there for the next couple days as I need them, and each configuration is simple and only takes a second or two, but several hours seems a lot longer than the average install to me.
And karma should only be from comments. I don't understand why someone has downvoting power just because they stumbled across and posted a popular story on HN.
Like the guy who submitted the story for Steve Job's death, now has over 1k karma simply from posting a link to apple.com at the right time, and from nothing else. How does that qualify him to downvote over me, who has been thoughtfully posting comments here and there for nearly a year now?
I'm not really that concerned. I don't care about karma, really. I just think it's a very stupid system.
It's true that there's always risk involved with advancing technology. Faster, better and more capable phones are better at doing good things for you, but it also makes them more capable of doing bad things to you too.
This is a little off topic, but I can't stand sites that make me click 'next' 10 times just to read their article.. It instinctively makes me not want to read it.
If I remember the same incident that you're talking about, it was a single file that had to be manually removed, and the fix was displayed right on the home page of http://archlinux.org for months..
What do you mean by 'minimal'? If you're talking about wine and flash, there are 32 bit builds available to be installed in 64 bit.. But that's the way it has always been.
My thoughts on why I would want to mod something very popular is because I would almost immediately have a following if my product is good. Also, I'd be able to create a mod that has functionality that I desire, and I'd get the satisfaction out of using it. And lastly, I don't know if this is always true, but it certainly makes you feel more elite changing the behavior of someone else's code rather than my own. There may be other reasons I haven't mentioned.
I can imagine that this makes the laptops much more sturdier. This is why my last 2 laptops have been without CD drives. I just bought a $50 external, and I've been having a hard time understanding why more manufacturers didn't make optical drive-less computers.