You're falling into the trap of confusing ethics and the law. Whatever you -- or I, since I expect we'd agree -- think of the ethics of the situation, so far I haven't seen anything to suggest their actions in not respecting keys used other than under the conditions they were sold with is actually illegal. The law with respect to digital purchases, DRM, and remote access/activation schemes may be some anachronistic dinosaur, but if it's the law right now then complaining about the action on a forum like Slashdot isn't going to change that.

I bet other civilizations failed to travel outside their star system because they devoted all their energy to trying to solve the Fermi Paradox.

Yes it is a form of "soft" censorship. So be it. We have to sacrifice some ideals to avoid living in a corporate waste-land. Tradeoffs tradeoffs.

You are free to tune out and make all that money worthless and put the people you want on the ballot.

What "works" for you or me doesn't necessarily scale to the rest of voters.

That's what they get for using double underscores in function names.

Paul Graham partially credits Lisp for making him rich via his store-site start-up, despite having viable competitors. The company that bought him out eventually converted it to a more conventional language stack for day-to-day maintenance.

The next probe will be Zombie 2.

The best "lone wolf" developers probably use something like Lisp and a high amount of math-like abstraction to crank out vast amounts of features in a short time.

However, a good team programmer knows how OTHER typical programmers think and read code, and writes code that is easy for them to navigate, digest, and change. Team programming is more like authoring a good technical manual, not clever gee-whiz tricks.

Indeed. My theory is that many of those mysterious gamma-ray bursts are civilizations earning a Galactic Darwin award.

"Hey look, we can create mini anti-black-holes in our la ~ ^ & [NO CARRIER]

Maybe, but for better or worse, the situation today is that Ubisoft is effectively empowered to "confiscate" keys acquired through illegitimate channels in violation of whatever terms of sale or licensing agreements those keys came with.

Now, you might argue that the law should be updated to address the rights of customers buying digital products in a more even-handed way. If you did, I'd be the first to agree. But even then, it's hard to see why those rights would or should protect someone with the digital equivalent of stolen property. If you wanted to legitimise reselling keys across borders as a matter of policy then you'd probably also need an explicit change so that DRM schemes attempting to prevent cross-border trade were prohibited and anyone operating them on a commercial basis was required to honour otherwise valid keys for any sort of activation or customer support purposes.

In that case, perhaps it's more closely analogous to paying someone abroad to buy something cheap and ship it to you, but then complaining when your delivery arrives that you got charged the import taxes your oh-so-honest supplier didn't pay.

Sometimes things that look too good to be true really are, but usually there's a catch. Seeing a deal that good and not checking thoroughly for the catch is just asking for trouble.

No, it depends on the type and frequency of the changes. Some change patterns favor case lists and some favor sub-classing (in terms of fewest lines/blocks/modules that need to be changed). I don't believe one is inherently more common than another. Selecting the "best" solution requires knowledge and experience about the domain, and/or a good "horse sense" of domain analysis.

Predicting the future is never easy.

There are some other complexities to consider, such as if a set-oriented variation-on-a-theme becomes more appropriate than a hierarchy for modeling variation, but that's a long topic.

Your viewpoint is too idealistic in my opinion to result in a practical difference. You are fighting a personal war that nobody else is attending, tilting at windmills.

My two semi solutions are to put a ceiling on campaign contributions (which the current Supreme Court is against), and to have federal-level issue votes, not just representative votes.

Is it possible to use a big disk for both blocking light and for diffraction, per target object? That way both parties can be right. Win win. (Pardon me for sounding like a PHB there).

Will "AOL" be painted on the disk in huge letters?

Those damned Patriots under-inflated the snow machine!