timwiseman

Generally, the DMCA could limit a copyright holder's claims against a website for user generated content to the takedown notice. But the person who posted it can still be fully liable under copyright law. The DMCA does not provide protection for them.

I think it is very rarely possible to blame anyone for the suicide of another. Aaron's death was tragic, but it was not the prosecutor's fault.

With that said, if this event is something that causes society to carefully evaluate things like outdated computer crime laws and the prosecutorial tactics used in this country than that may be a good thing both for the country as a whole and for his memory.

"The law should be the same for everybody and should NOT be applied selectively."

It depends on how the selection is done. If a prosecutor declines to prosecute because the law breaker is of a particular race, rich, politically powerful, etc. then that is an abuse of discretion.

However, we want prosecutors to be selective when it comes to saying that someone might have been justified even if the law as written doesn't explicitly acknowledge the justification (or acknowledges it but as a factor for the judge to consider). Speeding and running red lights because you are impatient and reckless is a different matter than speeding and running a red light because your passenger is bleeding profusely.

We also need to give prosecutors some discretion just to manage the case load. Unless we are willing to spend a lot more on both prosecutors and the court systems, we want them to be able to say "I will focus my time and attention on this murderer even if it means letting that shoplifter go with an extremely favorable plea bargain or even unpunished."

Solving your own problems can be a great source of inspiration. But if your goal is get your project widely used, you need to make sure others share that problem.

Sometimes asking around about pain points in other peoples lives/businesses can also be very fruitful

A beautiful comment and I think you add a lot of good thoughts. I must respectfully disagree with one point though: "my job is not programming. My job is delivering value using programming.

Semantics."

I'm not sure. More than once I have gotten lost adding features no one wanted because the process of doing it interested me, or I spent hours optimizing a routine because I just knew it could be improved even when what my users wanted was a new feature and the performance was acceptable.

When time is limited, focus on adding value through programming, not programming for its own sake or because the problem is interesting.

I prefer to lean towards overcommenting, and I prefer that developers whose code I will have to work with later do the same.

But as you say, they need to be good comments, and comments that either describe intention or explain something in the language that might be rather obscure can be very useful.

It depends on what you mean. I am a law student now, and while my perspective may shift when I graduate, I have had some tangential involvement in projects that that help people, that is extremely rewarding.

Financially, the market as a whole looks less secure and perhaps less lucrative than it was in the past, but that matters less for people not driven mostly be finances and the compensation for some of those graduating ahead of me is not unlivable.

It seems there is a disagreement as to what constitutes depth. If you want a "Sandbox" then most old-school RPGs will feel very shallow. You have numerous choices, but exploration and interaction outside those choices is limited.

On the other hand, if you want control over the story, many sandbox style games will feel shallow. Batman: Arkham City gave you a great sandbox with tons of things to discover and the story was fantastic. But your control over the story was minimal, limited to pretty much whether to do a side mission or not. You had absolutely no choices that affected the core story at all. Infamous 2 was similar. You had a lot of area to explore and interesting side missions, but you had only about 3 real choices and they lead to only 2 endings. The story was deep, the sandbox was wide, but your control was minimal.

I think there are great games on both ends (and in the middle) of this spectrum, but "sandbox depth (or width)" is very different from "story control depth".

I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is the courts would see a distinction.

Kickstarter goes out of its way to try to make sure people understand that it is not a preorder service, and many projects include a "risks" section specifically talking about how it could fail.

There would be a clear case for fraud if the people asking for contributions just took the cash and walked. But in the event of a good faith effort that failed, I think the court would find that the contract was probably upheld. The possibility of failure was always there and what was promised was the effort.

This is an insightful comparison, but its significant to know that it is not actually a preorder.

When you preorder you are entitled to demand the product or your money back, but with kickstarter if it fails after a good faith effort you probably have no recourse. With most preorders (not all, but most) the product is near completion when you put in the order, but with kickstarter that product is often little more than plans at the point of pledging. It is similar to a preorder, but the differences matter.

This is true to a degree, but there are ways you can use multiple tools mixed and matched.

For a simple example, I might write my prototype in Python. After profiling I might decide to rewrite a couple of inner loops in C (or Cython). I might tie it to SQL Server as a datastore and use T-SQL in the interface.

Entirely fix it? It can't. Limit it? Certainly.

When they have a law that seems on first reading to say what the employer says it does, then the employer can show it to the employee to gain credence and the law itself will confuse any employee who does a little research without going further.

More than that, the employer may not realize they are misrepresenting it when the law seems to say something. They may be misusing the law in good faith. Something that will happen less often with clearly written laws that are not heavily interpreted in the common law.

As always you bring great insight into this, but what your reply does not mention is that the average laymen knows none of this.

Having such a law on the books means that a boss, computer service provider, etc. could show a laymen this law, even let them look up the law themselves and then threaten to have someone prosecuted for things which may be proper (or at least not illegal). The person being threatened would be able to verify that the law was real and without having a lawyer to explain the full situation may feel they are in a very bad bargaining position for whatever demands the other side makes.

As the court said, "We shouldn't have to live at the mercy of the local prosecutor" but neither should people without lawyers have to live at the mercy of those who could use such a law to threaten prosecution for negotiating purposes.

I do not believe we want such a system even if it were possible.

Many things involve context (it is illegal to murder someone, but a killing in the context of self-defense is often not murder). Even where context is not explicitly recognized by the law, we want judgment and discretion to exist (speeding because you are drag racing is very different than speeding to a hospital with a bleeding passenger.)