Amazon as Political Pulpit

Check out the Amazon reviews for Spore, the new Will Wright game. 2,016 of the 2216 reviews gave it 1 star for the heavy-handed DRM. I use Amazon reviews heavily and I've never seen protest brought to the reviews at this scale before. Let's see if people take notice.

TorrentFreak points out the following:

DRM doesn’t stop people from pirating a game, on the contrary. It only hurts legitimate customers since the DRM is removed from the pirate version."

There are lots of philosophical reasons not to buy things with DRM. For me, the practical reason wins out. I'd rather deal with having to store music CDs and not play some potentially awesome games than deal with losing my data due to short-sighted DRM.

Alex's Scala Talk at C4[2]

al3x gave a talk on Scala recently at C4[2] and it hits a lot of the high points as to why we're using Scala at Twitter to build back-end services. I've been programming in Scala seriously for about a year and a half now and it's positively ruined me for plain Java.