You're thinking of Thalidomide.

So, the only reason you pay your taxes is because you wouldn't be convicted as a criminal if you didn't?

You're kidding me right?

I suppose you're happy to take advantage of the benefits of state society when it suits you but when it comes to actually paying for those benefits you'd rather not?

Ugh, typical freeloader.

Please go read The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond. It will give you a *HUGE* insight into how and why state societies function the way they do, even if those ways often seem unfair (Often they are, in other cases they're not).

Actually, no, executing them on live TV would not prove a deterrent at all.

A fair bit of research has been done and it seem that by and large the idea of "punishment to deter" is invalid.

If someone commits a premeditated crime, then they don't do so on the supposition that they will be caught and punished, they do so on the assumption that they will not be caught and will get away with it.

I'm going to guess that the GP meant that he would like to be in a relationship with someone who works in the same field, not necessarily someone he works with at the same company.

All of them, or just yours?

Great summary.

For me, Java the language is disgusting whereas the JVM is wonderful.

...someone comes along and tries to re-invent the wheel and gift us with the ability to write in a single "unified" language that crosses the lines demarcating server and client.

Except it's inevitably a pile of hacky shit that is founded on a basic faulty idea.

I made the jump from PHP to Python years ago and I do not miss PHP.

PHP is certainly easier to get a web application up-and-running with if you know nothing but beyond that it's a mess of a language that makes maintaining a clean code-base far more effort than it should be. It's basically scripted C for the Internet and not in a good way.

Which is not to say Python is the holy grail. There are a lot of things I don't like about Python, including some of the ones you mentioned (Non-trivial whitespace still annoys me) but on the whole it's a better language than PHP and the amount of libraries and support available is good.

At the end of the day, I'd rather be writing web applications in Python than PHP.

Way to jump to conclusions. I'm not exactly a fan-boy of Hangouts. All the options on Android are pretty irritating in my experience. Lately I've been using Hangouts just because I got sick of the LnF of the other messaging apps I've used.

The latest version of Google Hangouts already solved this issue.

Next to the area that lets you enter text for your message is an icon that can be tapped to select whether or not you want to message to be sent via Hangouts or SMS. The problem here is that Apple are treating iMessage as being synonymous with SMS, something which is not actually the case in reality.

This change to Hangouts instantly made it more usable as an SMS application for me (All it's missing now is message search)

Mosquitos are parasites.

Like most parasites, they're not a particularly valuable part of the food chain.

Buying, installing and playing a game with Steam is just easier than downloading it from some torrent tracker, applying a crack and then struggling to find cracked patches as time goes by.

I don't pirate PC games any more. I can afford to pay for them, I feel good about spending the money on them and I don't feel like I'm jumping through hoops to get what I want.

For me, Steam is good enough that I wish a similar solution was available for TV and Movies (Unfortunately, due to the various network and studio deals this will never happen but you can always dream...)

"Some" of the same games is about right.

GOG is great for old games and the odd indy title but there catalog simply does not compare.

I love old games, but I also enjoy playing games made this century and in this regard GOG is simply nowhere close to the depth of Steam.

Agreed. Steam makes it a lot easier for me to manage my game collection.

GOG is nice but I personally wish they had a proper client. Sure, it's not like many of the games on GOG receive updates and hence need some of the features provided by Steam but I personally enjoy the organisation aspects of Steam.