I think you missed the half-decade under Sun's stuardship where Java moved quite slowly between 1.2 -> 1.5. A language evolves to suit its community, and if it doesn't shove out the latest buzz word to the populace immediately, then I'm fine with it as long as they get to it eventually. Most library based tools have been out years before Sun/Oracle decided to standardize on a given set, which is 100% FINE. Let the trail blazers blaze trails and the standards follow. The aternative is building OSI model or maybe X.500 and expecting the world to change for them. Let a dozen interesting implementations develop and then combine the best parts of a few into the 'defacto' implementaion.

How is this post even relevant? The only way a cop will know how and who's door to 'bust down' would be through your ISP, and be damn sure that the ISP knows which IP's are being used by whom. Centsational much? I mean, one of my neighbours could be downloading child porn as we speak so I could randomly be arrested for absolutely no reason.

Well, that crazy American would be a defacto terrorist in such cases, but *shrugs*. I'm more concerned with people that are legitimately crazy becase they may not be on any list and just randomly snap on go on rampages. The best way to mitigate the 'random crazies' is to encourage mental health checks much akin to health checks and to take the dangerous toys out of their hands. But lets be frank, in America neither of those things will happen.

Apple subsidizes the OS in the cost of the overpriced PC, so it certainly isn't a free product. Plus, they charge for upgrades further sallowing your argument.
People who aren't of the pirate variety sure do pay for Windows 8 when they build their DIY kits. Most are probably gamers or PC enthusiests at this point, but people still do build PC's from parts. And of course essentially every new consumer PC runs windows and still hasd a healthy sales record. I'm sure many will also use Linux like myself but to assume that Windows 8 (or any edition) can't be given away is very narrows sighted.

DEC 94-97 had what? A not so popular PC compatible platform outside of graphics maybe, a low market share UNIX, and a DOS which was a good DOS, but still DOS in a windows world.

Windows still dwarfs all other OS's in the market space of consumer PC's. Consumer PC market has contracted, but contraction doesn't mean collapse. No Tablet on earth has been able to convince me that Tablets are replacing the PC; they're augmenting and bleeding soft corner cases certainly, but not replacing.

The world certainly needs both companies, even if Mozilla simply exists to keep companies honest, and Microsoft giving competing products and services companies a bar to step over. Microsoft could easily be in business 20 years paying out fat dividends without any significant product 'development' effort at all. Their market is very entrenched, and much like UNIX, some shops just can't justify moving off the the platforms given the amount of sunk costs +mintainance vs. replacement.

I'm pretty sure there's precicely 0 laws in place that makes it illegal to record criminal actions by a person or person's in public or in their private residence, but by all means dig one up and prove me wrong.

How precicely is this tracked? Are they forced to cast their votes on premesis? In which case I'd be sure to carry a tape recorder for discussions of this 'coercion' and sue their fucking asses into oblivion. Remember, technology works two ways.

Regardless of how much you've been indoctronated into thinking corporations are above the law and blah blah, sue them with good cause and see your justice system work. There are laws to protect you. Stop bitching and throwing your arms up in the air every time you think "well who cares? They'll just find some loophole to screw us over anyways". That Attitude just perpetuates the actual reality of a population detached from responsibility and hence authority.

Which is precisely why so few developers per capita program in the languages any more. If tooling isn't making one's life easier year after year, you're becoming a drag on the industry. I'm sure you'll be quite happy driving your fully manual car decades from now when dual clutch cars own the highways, but most people won't care about how archaic your ride is, or how superior your belief in it is either.

If you want to freeze your development platform into somewhere in the mid-80's, that's your right, but the industry has moved on, and effeciency of development has long surpased most CLI based tooling for anything non-trivial. I wish you all the luck in the world though.

Division of labor my friend. Would you rather the alternative being that all developers need to understand deep knowledge of the environments they're running on potentially conflating the cost of writing for your platform by double? I didn't think so. Not every developer needs to know about every inch of code that exists in your corporate hierarchy and libraries, infrastructure, etc.. as long as SOME PEOPLE ARE, are easily accessible, and willing to field questions as needed.

Trust me, from a guy who's dealt with COBOL and Java, they're nothing alike in either corporate philosophy or boat-anchor of coding. For better or worse, Java and C# are essentially analogs in terms of what you can 'do' with them. Java sucks more in UI's, and some syntactic sugar that makes your life easier, and C#/.NET lacks the trillion toolkits used in Java for pretty much any common need. Many popular Java lib's are ported to .Net, but still a boat load you'll only find in Java land for now. Lets not labor the point. There will be a millions fan boys to jump on the point, but on a language stand point, they're so close that it shouldn't matter.

PHP is a simple language for beginners and it got its entrenched status because some novice PHP dev's wrote some great sites / tools which people have organically grown around. Its a lousy language, and a very specific use case. I've never used RoR, but sounds about the same but in a more sexy buzz word.

Erlang like all functional languages universally are very useful for their very limited number of business areas where they rock, and enevitably the evangelists of these languages always trump out how they're great for everything and the kitchen sink, but we all know they aren't, and will continually be relegated to areas where they shine. Hybrids like Scala have a chance, but frankly I'd hate to sit down and listen to a dev lead's meeting in a scala shop lay down the laws on when to use strictly functional no matter how broken it makes the code, and when to just use other paradigms that probably just work better, simpler, and faster to develop.

Population per sq. KM:

Rank Country/Region Density
(Pop. per km2)
1 Singapore 7301
2 Hong Kong 6396
3 Gaza Strip 5045
4 Bahrain 646
5 Bangladesh 1034
6 Palestine 711
7 Taiwan (R.O.C) 646
8 Mauritius 631
9 South Korea 505
10 Lebanon 475
11 Rwanda 407

Its hard to find a place in the west bank that wouldn't be around something of importance, and many many people. You may as well say that Hamas shouldn't set up missiles anywhere, because invariably any blow back will guarantee human fatalities. Just submit nicely and live in your holes while your friendly neighbourhood rulers do the same.

Because essentially all of that virtual money sitting in the banking system (unless you're exceedingly rich) has been very well insurred against losses, and has decades of technology and policies to help reduce 'people losing their entire life savings' or 'banks losing all their depositor's cash and now they're going belly up'. Bitcoin has literally no protections for prevention of all your value.

So if you lose your crypto key (dropped $1mil on the ground on the way to grandma's house - one reason BitCoin can't be equated to real cash) or if your bit coin repository gets robbed (akin to bank robbery but without the gov insurance), or the owners steal all your money (gov insured for certain levels), or the bank simply goes bust due to insolvancy (gov insured for certain levels) you have completely different levels of assurance that your wealth is 'safe'. If you deposit $1mil into the bank of fly-by-night, you only have so much protection for the ' being stupid with money' lever, but for people of more modest means where their money is essential to their livelihood, protections are in place to support them.

As much as you can pay your taxes in pesos, yes!

Money talks and no matter how much you huff and puff about useless semantics, the world will move on and accept e-sports into the cultural fabric like so many new forms of expression and entertainment before them.

DOTA in one form or another has been around since Warcraft III. League of Legends is close enough to DOTA that most pro's can swap between the two if they ever chose to. Strarcraft and its predecessors have been around since Starcraft 1, and most knowledge carries over. These people are used to rule changes, as generally every new game patch has the potential to introduce radically different play styles to succeed. Counterstrike and games like it haven't evolved significantly in style since the beginning of FPS's, so no worries there.

So absolutely, games change, but typically the games that are picked up for long term, high reward e-sports competitions are ones that have longevity.