Aside from the fact that you do pay tax on your potatoes, potatoes and cannabis are quite different types of products.

Where do you draw the line? When *does* the government has 'business' dealing in the production and sale of a product. From your post I understand that you don't think they should get involved in potatoes or cannabis, how about firearms? radioactive material? human organs?

If you believe that there is at least 1 industry that the government should regulate, and at least 1 that it shouldn't it just becomes a fairly subjective matter of where you draw the line.

I am not from Amsterdam but I have family there, so I am there fairly often, perhaps I can help.

Your question depends on your definition of 'quasi-legal'. Cannabis is *not* legal in Holland. However, they have made a decision not to prosecute small time offenders. This means, a blind eye is turned to possession when the amount is very low (personal use amounts). They also grant licenses to owners of 'coffee-shops' to sell cannabis with some fairly tight regulations. I believe the idea behind this is that, as has been discovered in basically every other country on earth, people want to smoke a joint from time to time, and it is better they get it from a regulated (and more importantly, taxed!) business, rather than some guy on the street who will almost certainly try to push the more addictive stuff on to the customer for higher (tax free!) profits.

However, what is not tolerated, is massive scale, cannabis farming which is then sold on for huge profits (without tax being paid, are you spotting a theme here??).

The Dutch are an eminently sensible race. Probably my favourite bunch of people. They are smart, direct (this comes across as rude at first, but once you get used to it, it's quite charming!), and very business minded. They actually are quite liberal, but they are also completely aware of how much extra gold goes in the coffers from all those tourists who you will see sparked out on a public bench at 10AM.

People will smoke weed, people will pay for sex, it simply cannot be prevented in any society that has the slightest freedom (or isn't batshit crazy religious!). The dutch say.... ok, get on with it, pay your taxes and don't make a nuisance of yourself and you are fine by us! I reiterate... eminently sensible!

And some did go home. That was irrational.

A paid day off with a passable excuse, sounds very rational to me.

"Seriously, when has BIG Oil and Defense sued thousands of kids on the basis of intellectual property (non-tangible resource)?"

I bet there are thousands of kids who would have *wished* they would have been sued by the entertainment industry, rather than killed by the implements of the 'defense' industry to support the interests of the oil industry.

Being sued probably sucks, being bombed probably sucks more.

IntelliJ IDEA is a little better still I think, but it has (sadly) been declining in quality whereas netbeans has been improving. Also, IDEA is commercial while netbeans is free as in beer, so it has that going for it too.

Eclipse is a mess.

Me! Actually most developers I think.

The reason we think that (almost) everybody else's code is crap is because much of it is. The mistake that we make is to assume it is crap because the original coder was an idiot, when in most cases it is crap because of unrealistic time pressures placed on the developer, or some basic mistake in the foundation that acts like a ball of crap that radiates outwards.

I have seen quite a few pieces of open source code that I would regard as awesome in terms of code quality (not in a way that is too subjective either, good naming conventions, good structure, good comments etc), these are the projects I contribute to. People pay me to wade through a quagmire of crappy code, when I do it for free, I want to work with the good stuff.

I suggest that you would be better to say... "Show me a developer who understands *why* everybody else's code is crap"... generally it is not down to idiocy.

That is a matter of opinion, I would argue that you are killing the person for the same reason that you are putting down a dog who attacks humans, it is not punishment, they are just simply not safe to have around. There is something wrong with them that cannot be fixed.

This has never made any sense to me.

If you take an old and terminally sick pet to the vet, they are able to 'put them to sleep', quickly and painlessly. Does this process not work on humans?

We are able to put people into such a deep sleep that we can open them up and switch their organs over, the person having this done to them feels nothing at any stage of the process. How are we not able to apply the same process, but simply end the life of the person that has been rendered into this 'virtual coma'? I do not know about the lethal injection used for executions, but I am assuming it does not go that smoothly if experts would choose hanging.

All of this stuff sounds like it *should* be very easy to achieve. So I suspect that the reason that (in some countries) we persist in running electricity through people etc, is because we believe they *should* suffer a little bit. If that is the view somebody holds, then they are entitled to it, but they should say it, and so should the state sanctioning the execution.

I live in a country that does not have capital punishment, but I believe that it is warrented in certain cases (not going to express my criteria here), but I believe it should be used because that person can never be allowed to roam free, and letting them rot in prison is an expensive and pointless endevour, but I see no need to cause physical pain during the execution process.

So were the WTC attacks justified, as long as the attackers had the view point that American interests were harming them personally?

Seems that they took that view, (which is highly subjective), and acted violently, with no sympathy.

even broken or misspoken english can be meaningful

I am not a linguist but I have read that this is one of the main advantages of English when spoken by non-native speakers. English is a language where you can make quite a hash of the grammar and still be reasonably understood. Apparently this is not the case in many other language, I cannot know for sure, but it is what I have read.

I am currently in India, and English standards here are pretty good, the educated people will have much more problem with my accent than the language itself but if I speak slowly and clearly (I have a strong London accent, which is generally not *clear* to anyone outside of London), they will understand 95% of what I say. Even the uneducated get the gist of things, with a few well placed gestures.

Where did everybody go?

I am not a expert on the process of game development, but it is possible that what you propose would actually be *more* expensive. If the games companies can reuse their research, graphics libraries and game engine software and use it to produce a multitude of similar games that presumably saves money. If they have to re-design, re-draw and re-engineer every title they produce I would think that would be the more expensive option.

How many sequels to the final fantasy series have their been now?

Personally, I think that is rubbish.

The pain response has been around for quite a while and is designed specifically to say to us... "That thing you just did... it was dangerous and damaging, DON'T do it again!!". I cannot believe that toddlers are somehow hardwired *not* to follow this piece of sensory advice. I am not a student of this subject, but it just makes good logical sense that there is a part of the brain (active at birth) that does the job of avoiding the repetition of actions that previously generated a painful response.

For this reason, I support so called 'corporal punishment' as a tool for parents to hijack this process to teach kids to avoid behaviors where the end result might otherwise not simply provide a quick 'sting' (like running out into the road), or behaviors that break more complicated rules (like stealing). You certainly cannot reason with children this young and expect them to understand, but you can hijack a basic evolutionary mechanism and use it to your own (and the child's) advantage.

Of course, there is a huge difference between a quick smack to the bottom to instill a sense of danger that is mentally linked with a given action and actually beating children in a way that causes lasting damage. The former is effective, proactive parenting, the latter should be punished to the full extent of the law.

IBM would do well to drop the monstrosity that is Eclipse and focus on Netbeans if this deal goes through. Eclipse is a dreadful product, the UI looks like it escaped from the late 90's and they have a tendency to redefine concepts in systems like CVS and Subversion. Netbeans, on the other hand has come along leaps and bounds in recent years. It is almost at the point where I am ready to ditch my (commercial) IDE (IntelliJ), which has been declining in quality in the last few versions, and switch to Netbeans for my development.

However, I would code with a spinning disk and a small magnet before I used Eclipse...

"Im sorry, I can't take your call right now, but if you leave your name, phone number and message, I will get back to you as soon as I am out of Beta...."