No, but it's easy to say that with the benefit of hindsight.

Nobody knew everything would turn out OK back before HL2 was released.

Aye. Crowdfunding is an excellent way to securing investment without the project being beholden to shareholders expecting a big payout at the end.

They do have private investors.

Yes, exactly. The other half of the article feels exactly the same: "PBS decided to kill the show, so LeVar is obviously wrong for wanting to continue anyway". It doesn't present an argument that teaching language is more important than creating a desire to consume books; it just appeals to PBS's authority.

But aside from the article's shortcomings, I do agree with their sentiment. You typically see Kickstarter pages explain what they need the money for in some level of detail -- who would want to give strangers money otherwise?

The idea of promoting literature to children is great, but that's just a mission statement. The entire pitch is frustratingly unspecific about what exactly they're making with their million dollars. I can take some pretty good guesses, but why should backers need to guess at that?

I haven't really checked out the Kickstarter -- Reading Rainbow doesn't tickle my nostalgia fancy as much as some people, so while I'm glad they have a chance to contribute if they want, I'm not really interested in it myself.

But when the history of this day and age is written, we're going to look back at Kickstarter as a candle in the darkness -- right now it's one of the very few ways in which "new media" is grappling seriously with the idea of figuring out how to get consumers pay content producers for content they want, rather than requiring content producers to figure out how to turn their creative endeavor into a convenient medium for advertising. The way some people want to throw it under the bus just because people are actually using it to make money rather than keeping it "pure" for the starving artist annoys me. I want people to make money off Kickstarter. I want more and more content to be made because it's what consumers want, not because it's how advertisers can reach consumers.

That's not what the message says, though.

> WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues

That is a perfectly reasonable thing to say if you are abandoning security software. Any issues discovered will not be fixed, so you should stop relying on this software for security.

Scroll all the way to the bottom

It says 'may', which is a responsible message if you're abandoning security software. Never know what the future holds; don't want to encourage people to rely on it if bugs will never be fixed.

You're ubinator. Unfortunately, you come home one day to find Mr. Binator in bed with some 20-something blond hussie.

The divorce paperworks sails through. Do you still want to be ubinator, reminded of that bastard every time you have to log in, or would you prefer to go back to umaidenname?

We both know where HR would stand on that one :V

That does not give you license to steal other people's content and profit from it.

If you want music but you don't want to purchase rights, there is plenty of creative commons licensed music available.

What's the point of that? You still need to worry about your own off-cloud backups and a contingency plan for when your vendor goes out of business.

All I know is I'm not building badass bird simulation engines.

> ii) Should search engines pay the scraped sites if they are charging to access their indexed data? probably some of the scraped sites has a specific license forbidding the search engine to sell their information in any way.

Any reputable search engine will respect robots.txt.