The reason English is is widely spoken around the world is not just that England had a long period of aggressive expansionism. It's also because English is an extremely flexible and expressive language, with a rich literature - literally millions of texts, many tens of thousands of which are fine works of art. Of course, this is true of many other well-established natural languages, from Farsi to Mandarin. But it isn't, and cannot be, true of any new artificial language.

I'd guess it would take any artificial language at least a thousand years of hard use by millions of people before it could become a contender to supplant a natural language, and by that time it would have mutated into a natural language.

As an extremely experienced and decidedly wrinkly developer, I don't give a shit provided it's consistent. I tend to use tabs myself (yes, on UN*X), but if I'm modifying a file written by someone who preferred spaces, I'll use spaces.

I turn 60 this year. And your problem is?

Either you're good at your job (and if you've been doing it for twenty-five+ years you almost certainly are), or you're not. If you're good and experienced, you won't have any troubled getting an interesting job at a high salary. In my present employment, I was specifically recruited to mentor (and teach software engineering discipline to) a group of good but inexperienced junior developers.

When I was starting out in this game, thirty years ago, the person who fulfilled the role I now have in the team I was then working in was Chris Burton, who, as an apprentice, worked on the build of the Manchester Mark One, and who (after his retirement) led the rebuild of it. He was one of the best software people I've ever worked with, and he was already in his sixties when I met him.

Nothing breaks immersion so much as the player character being killed. Suddenly you're jerked out of your game world and you're just a sad individual sitting in front of a computer again. It is epic fail for anyone who's trying to build a world in which players are expected to become immersed to allow the player character to be killed.

This isn't to say I think there shouldn't be setbacks, and that they shouldn't be severe. Of course they should. You get beaten in a boss battle and you should expect to lose all your accumulated weapons, armour, loot. You should expect to be left for dead, and have to crawl until you can find herbs, salves, bandages or aid. It could even leave you with permanent scarring or disabilities which make future battles a bit harder to fight, or have an impact on what endgames are available to you. It should be an outcome which motivates you highly not to lose the next battle. If a non-player-character companion is killed in a battle, their death should be permanent, no matter how important they are to the plot. But you should not die.

If you die, it isn't you who have failed. It's the designer.

It could take on water or rock/gravel/sand/quarry spoil as ballast, so that isn't necessarily a very serious limitation.

First, don't think that I'm supporting spying on the general population. However, I don't feel it is the information that is bad, but what governments will do with it. For example, I don't see Google doing anything bad with the data they have on me. Yes, it's an invasion on my privacy, but frankly, I don't really care. What can they do? However, I can see governments abusing the data, especially given the recent IRS scandal where the government used information to punish groups opposing the president.

As for the "chilling" aspect of it, it's only a problem if 1) You know about it, and 2) You let it.

I can't say that a secret invasion of privacy limits my freedom in any way. How could it? I had no idea. That's not to say that it won't be used to limit my freedoms later. Everyone at one point or another is against the powers in Washington. Today, it's conservatives. In a few years, it will be liberals. Libertarians scare the bejeezus out of both parties.

You are confusing privacy with liberty. While I view I have a right to a certain level of privacy, it has no effect on my liberty.

For example, if I were to strap a camera to my head and stream my life 24/7 onto the web, am I any less free than I was before? No, even though I had given up 100% of my privacy. My liberty would only be limited if I limited it myself. For example, if i decided not to view porn because the camera on my head would broadcast it and the whole world would know that I'm into midget-barbarian porn.

Liberty is diminished, however, when that lack of privacy is used against you. For example, if the state puts a GPS on your car and sends you a fine every time you exceeded the speed limit, your liberty would obviously be diminished. Or if the state put a camera in your bedroom and arrested you for masturbating in an unapproved manner.

Privacy is nothing more than the securing of information. Information has nothing to do with liberty. However, it could be used to restrict freedom.

On this subject, a realtime (with historical replay) display of domestic solar generation in Germany. It's pretty impressive.

Five square metres of solar panel on every single domestic roof in the USA would produce a very significant energy change. 125 million houses * 5Kw is 625 gigawatts. Germany has 23 gigawatts of domestic solar panels, which, on a sunny day, is sufficient to power the whole country. Yes, obviously, it doesn't work twenty-four hours a day, or in bad weather. Yes, obviously, you need to find some way of storing energy, such as compressed air, hydrogen hydrolysis, pumped storage or whatever. None of this is rocket science.

Bottom line: the USA could power its whole economy, including road vehicles, on domestic solar panels alone.

I don't have a Rolex. In fact, I actually had to look to discover that it's a Tissot. It's been on my wrist for getting on for thirty years, and I have no doubt at all that it will go on 'til the end of my life without any problems. If, when I die, one of my heirs decides they want it, it will go on 'til the end of their lives, too. It needs a new battery once every three years or so, and it needs the date reset at the end of every month with fewer than thirty-one days, and, err, that's it. It tells the time. It just works. And I don't have to think about it.

If I amortised it over the time years I've had it already, it's cost me about £15 a year; if I amortise it over the time it's likely to be useful, that drops to about £4 a year. By contrast, a 'smart' watch - any smart watch, I'm not making a dig at Apple - will be obsolete in three years, so that's about £100 for each year you own it, or £2 a week. And I'd have to take it off every night to charge it, or if I forgot it would run out of battery just when I needed it most.

A reasonable quality mechanical watch is a very long way from obsolete; and, despite their price, they are very, very inexpensive to own, because you're only ever going to need one.

Thank you! Are you aware of any 'defensive publication' journal currently published I could send the idea to? If I publish it on my own blog is that legally enough, or do I need to have it on a flattened-dead-trees publication in some library somewhere? If so - what sort of library?

My current laptop, an ASUS ZenBook, is dying because it has a damaged power input port - the motherboard is cracked, and it is becoming increasingly unreliable. In the past year, two tablets in my household have died because the micro-USB ports which serve as their power connectors had ceased to work - presumably due to wear. And now Apple are bringing out a new laptop with just one port which is technically similar to a USB connector. How durable is it? How will it stand up to knocks and accidental falls? If that port fails, the machine is dead - and replacement of the port inevitably means soldering the motherboard, which is skilled and consequently expensive work.

The nature of a laptop which is used on the move is that it has a hard life. The Apple MagSafe connector is a brilliant design because it is not susceptible to wear and relatively invulnerable to knocks, trips and falls. I had already made up my mind that my next laptop would be a MacBook, simply because of the MagSafe connector. So I'm aghast at the decision to abandon it. It seems perverse!

Thank you, that's helpful. I don't want to patent it - I want it to be patent-free, so people (including me) can just use it.

It actually doesn't matter whether it's man made or not. If our cities and our farmland are going to be flooded and rendered unusable, we have to respond. Climate change could be 100% down to aliens from the Planet Bolg, and we'd still have to take action. Pretending it isn't happening, or claiming it's not our fault, is not adult behaviour.