And you know what Mojang's opinion means at this point? Absolutely NOTHING. They can't tell their new owner to honor their intended promises, even if it were written into the deal. All they have to do is replace the boss with someone willing to change the company on Microsoft's behalf and POOF! It's happened with every other developer that's been bought out thus far that came out and said they were told/promised nothing would be changing.

Depends on how good their lawyers are. If they write into the contract a term that says that all rights revert to the original authors if the new owner violates such a term, then yes, they can force the new owners to honor those promises.

Replyng to undo faulty moderation

Okay, here's a link to the research paper from 2012.

Ebola may not be easy to transmit, but it sure as heck isn't hard to transmit. It's not pedantically known to be airborne, but it is believed to be spread by droplets (e.g. sneezes). There's a very, very, very fine line between the two.

And yes, I can provide citations if you'd like, but it's not like they're very hard to find with a Google search.

telling us the name, address and phone number of the human responding to the mail

I'm pretty sure Google is not allowed to give anyone's private information without proper court warrant, and I'm very sure that an email saying "I'm a Judge, honest!" is not a proper warrant.

Not replying to this email will result in a doubling of your fine.

Courts of law don't have the power to arbitrarily double the punishment because they happen to be feeling ornery. They can add contempt of court charges to the case, but it's highly questionable whether ignoring an e-mail - which can be from anyone - counts as contempt, especially when said e-mail seems to involve illegal action and blackmail.

The argument about committing crime being outlawed would be more convincing if basic copyright infringement were treated as a crime and was actually investigated and punished in some proportionate way by the authorities when it occurs. The reality is that copyright is in most cases a civil matter, which means that while the cumulative damage to a genuine victim can be significant, they are essentially responsible for their own protection, without any police or public prosecutors to help them the way a victim of say theft or fraud would have. And the costs of bringing an action to recover losses are disproportionate in most cases, because copyright infringement kills with a thousand cuts.

Also, we're talking about the EU. Everything your wrote about fair use doesn't apply here. We tend to have more specific exemptions to copyright in our national laws in Europe, often including certain special privileges for libraries because of their unique public service role, and that is the matter at hand.

What happens in low Earth Orbit and above is none of their business

Nice satellite you have there. Would be a shame if a laser beam hit it. Good thing I'm selling "insurance".

Those are all wonderful reasons for voluntary government certification: anybody who wants to can go to the government and get some government seal of approval; I as a rider can then make a voluntary choice whether that certification is useful information or whether I want to throw caution to the wind and ride with uncertified drivers.

But I, as Joe Driver, can't choose whether I want to share the road with a taxi driver who pulls 16-hour workdays out of greed or desperation. Unless, of course, some entity with sufficient power forces the taxi to take breaks.

And of course you're also ignoring the well-known fact that human beings are extremely bad at estimating risks. So no, you as a rider can't make an informed choice about whether getting a certified taxi is worth the hassle, especially since unlicensed taxi companies have every incentive to bombard you with misinformation, while bean-counters utilizing cold math can. So it's a choice between letting a preventable tragedy play out forever, or stopping it but possibly hurting someone's cherished delusions of grandieur.

What moral authority does the state have to stop consenting adults from forming their own contracts and doing business with each other?

Well, for starters, it's expected to enforce these contracts. Every legally binding contract has the state as a third party.

The treaty was stupid and anyone who signed it should be shot for gross incompetence. Simple fact is their are resources and unless we are one world communist country every damn thing in space will have a price tag attached.

No, every damn thing in space doesn't have a price tag attached, because they aren't actually owned by anyone. Or should I be able to simply declare the Moon my property and seek to extract rent from anyone who builds a base on it, possibly decades in the future?

The treaty exists to keep people and nations from getting into fights over claims on places they can't even reach.

Besides I'm German, and if I nad the capacity to mine gold on an asteroid I certainly woukd not 'land' it in a nation but in international waters.

I guess that's one way to make pirates leave cargo ships alone...

Why aren't the developers risking anything by putting their time in and at least demonstrating some ability to deliver?

Developers need to eat, that means they need day jobs to work on an unfunded game. That in turn means time spent developing it comes from their free time, which is already a precious commodity required for personal maintenance. So make that an hour a day at most for a sustainable rate.

Now, how many hours of development do you think even a simple game requires, even if we assume you're a renaissance man who can program, draw, compose, write, design levels, design characters, etc?

Apple's done a lot of work with Grand Central Dispatch (is that the right technology?) to help developers offload as much as possible to the GPU ...

You're probably thinking of OpenCL. GCD is a pipelining engine for enqueuing work.

We've done everything we can in our Active Directory network to overcome roaming profile issues. Even with folder redirection, you have a huge fat ntuser.dat for prone to corruption. Users' home folders on a server, with discrete text-based configuration files would be a dream.

Did you know that in 2014 you still can't safely put risking profiles on a DFS share?

Metro is dying before our very eyes. It has been deemphasized in Windows 8.1 and by Windows 9 will be little more than a fancy start menu.

For chrissakes, most suppliers if enterprise systems I deal with still happily ship you Windows 7 Pro machines, or at least heavily advertised downgrade rights. "Business class" systems still ship with Windows 7 preinstalled. The enterprise customers never bloody wanted Metro to begin with, and so act as if Windows 8/8.1 didn't exist.