Wouldn't work for one second, as soon as you implemented a rule like that, you would just end up with thousands of Indian 'Contractors'.

While I don't know for absolute certain, I *strongly* suspect that that data is collected and operated on. Most of the big sites are about so called 'collective intelligence', or collecting information about person A so that you can have a better idea of what you want to be providing to person B. This goes into what links are cicked, at which times of the day, how long people spend on a site or page etc etc. To have a function that is so incredibly explicit as 'This is crap, don't show me it again', and to *not* use that to refine future page generations would be deeply stupid, and stupid is one thing the guys at google aint.

"Just to play the devil's advocate, someone in the development community would say that the difference is that while a car's condition depreciates through use, a used game plays exactly the same as a new one. And there's a bit of truth to that."

Only for very small values of 'a bit'. The used car market and used game market are very similar, both drop in price because the longer the period of time that passes since the game/car was brand new, the more options the buyer has for picking up new, and supposedly better games/cars.

"Many developers seem to think that a limited use right should be priced the same as purchasing the game."

Eventually it will be because within 10 years or so the vast majority of media content will be streamed and licensed this way. You will hook your brand new console up to the network, pick your game from a huge list of options, your credit card will be billed for each hour that you play. This is the dream of the game development studios, same revenue, no production and logistics cost just some servers.

When there is no option, no choice, the rental model will be king. The model will be different, but I suspect that price will be fairly high.

Whether your parents were impressed or not, you were correct, but it really has nothing to do with my post.

The point is, there is no country on this planet that currently has a government that tolerates 100% free speech, in the purist sense. Some cultures are significantly more oppresive, but even in those, you could get away with things that would put you squarely under target in more free countries. Pro-islamic terrorist views, which would not be tolerated in the US, would be fine in... Iran for example.

If you live in a country where you can be charged with anything that contains the word, "Conspiracy", you do not have totally free speech. Then it is just a matter of finding where the line is drawn.

There is no free speech anywhere, just people that harp on that they have it and others dont.

There are certainly things you could say in the US that would mean that you would end up in jail. It might be for some other reason, but if you started publically praising the 9/11 hijackers (for example), you can expect the authorities to start looking into your business pretty closely. You had better be whiter than white. Most likely you would end up incarcerated (assuming you lived long enough to get there), for some other thing, and it is possible that the 'other thing' could be fabricated. None of this would have happened if you had kept your mouth shut. So in truth no real 'free speech'.

The difference between so called 'free countries' and oppressive ones, is how your rights scale on the basis of you not being an idiot in how you decide to use them. In free countries it is possible to make pretty much any point, and stay free of any serious persecution if you do it the right way, in the right context.

"There's this new language on the horizon, though - it "basically" makes programming a snap for non-programmers, and is likely to eliminate the job of programmers entirely except for a few high-level system engineering projects."

What nonsense!

Anyone that has coded for a living knows that it is not X years experience coding that is the important thing, it is X years experience debugging, eventually getting to the point where you see the likely bugs before they happen and debug 'premeptively'. Most programmers start doing this badly after their first year or so, when you get all the silly premature optimisations and such, as you gain more experience you improve until what you end up doing is writing relatively bug free, neat code, and you can quickly find the bugs that slipped through your mental filter.

Now you are telling me, they are coming up with a magic language that eliminates the need for this skill? A completely bug free language, where it is impossible to make a mistake? Because I am telling you, for 100% certain, that is what it will have to be. An experience programmer can find and fix a bug in a few minutes, a non-programmer will never find it.

1. Genetically engineer sperm from gay partner #1
2. Genetically engineer sperm from gay partner #2
3. ???
4. Profit

I think the fact that your mind went straight to... "throw them a few hookers" speaks volumes as to your character.

A case can probably be made as to why death row inmates deserve to be subjects in dangerous experimentation (I don't agree, but I can see a valid argument at least!), but the fact that you can just say... "throw them some hookers..", suggest to me that you might not be a million miles away, in mentality, from said inmates.

"(Yes I'm sure there's some top quality code coming out of India, I doubt most of it is written by the sorts of companies in this articlee)."

I am currently living and working in India in the software industry. Not on outsourcing but for a company building their own products using Indian developers.

I can tell you that there is some talent here, but it is *shockingly* hard to find. Good talent is hard to find anywhere, but sadly the Indian education system seems to be gearing itself up on a 'quantity over quality' basis. After interviewing your 5th 'senior developer' of the day that cannot tell you how to iterate over the contents of a list in their primary programming language, it takes all the effort you can muster not to jump out of the nearest window.

The practice of dumbing down education due to a shortage of available graduates is ultimately very self-defeating, but it is happening, and I suspect that it is India, *not* the west who is at the head of that curve.

Yes, and since we don't believe in human rights here in the UK, my slave doctor can just sit in his shackles and take my blood pressure until I see fit to grant him his freedom....

*sigh*

I wouldn't be immoral for me to accept the work, but it would be immoral of me to demand access to the liver so that I could use that during my 'overtime'

"So, is it bad if he uses that money to get the kind of treatment you and I can't afford?"

Always an interesting question. I would say yes, it is a bad thing. Not for Steve of course, but for what it represents.

Steve Jobs has large wads of cash as that is what we give people who prove themselves to be great assets to the economic system. No doubt, Steve Jobs is exactly that, but should your value to the economic system be the primary factor behind the level of medical care you receive? I would say no. Steve Jobs has no more right to the best standard of care than does somebody who has been in the police force, or a teacher (for example) their entire lives. In fact, I would say that anybody who has lived a moral, decent life should receive the same level of medical care, and that should be the highest available at the time. The only people that I would say might not deserve this are serious/career criminals.

It is easy to get confused in this matter because we are talking about Steve Jobs, who seems a pretty smart and decent guy anyway. How about if we replace Steve with Ken Lay, should 'Kenny Boy' receive a much higher level of medical care than somebody who choose to be a librarian rather than a 'business tycoon'?

You can probably guess I one of those evil socialist types ;o), but I come from a country where we have socialised medicine. It is certainly not perfect, but I don't believe that is a fault with the system, but a fault with the people running it.

Exactly! Add to that the fact that the surgeons simply needed to rotate Steve by 90 degrees to have all his internal organs shift to 'landscape mode' for easy access and I am sure the surgery was a breeze.

Can't get a trojan from an mp3, but you sure can from a cracked game!

You get them from retail games too.

or at least a cue to the recipients that the sender is on the look-out for fraud. ...not to mention a sterling indicator that it is a piece of mail worth tampering with.