And I disagree with that. Why would the expectation be to work overtime? My expectation is not to work overtime. My expectation is to be paid for the time I work, and then go home and not work (and not get paid for that time). I think it's a reasonable expectation. If the result of such a law is that I earn less money, I'm allowed to accept that and settle for a lower salary in return for my personal time. Maybe many people think like you, and maybe many people think like me.

But such a law would give me a choice. Yes, I could decide to work overtime and make up for the lower salary (but at least get paid for my work), or I could decide not to. Currently it's either free overtime or no job.

If I understand correctly, what you're saying is "the industry is bad, but it couldn't exist otherwise".

Isn't that the same as a factory that uses slave labour? If it didn't have slaves, it wouldn't be profitable and would fold. If the factory folded, you wouldn't be able to buy the ivory chess sets it was making. Paying for the skill required to make the chess sets is too expensive for the factory. Therefore it's OK to have slavery.

Slavery is great, but it was outlawed. Any company that depended on slave labour - folded. And that's a good thing. And we're still here, and we can live without ivory chess sets made by slaves.

(Note: I wish slave labour was gone from the world - it's still used in many parts of the world. But I'm not sure "the company would fold" or "if you live in this country you can expect to be a slave" are good excuses for it).

In other words, personally I could live without AAA titles made by slaves. There are a few game companies that somehow manage to make good games without killing their staff.

I guess you only buy bug-free software, then.

But seriously, isn't it better to see what's wrong and ask how the worse-looking risks are mitigated?
I guess the answer is about the general business culture, i.e. whether you're more likely to lose your job when the shit hits the fan if you say "I made an information-based decision and unfortunately the risk materialised" than if you say "I know nuffin'... they said there were no bugs".

Personally I'd get rid of a buyer who gave me the second answer, but I that's just me.

There's no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaints and its far too late to start making a fuss about it now.

I have a really important question about a piece of string.

Absolutely! That's why Google named their programming language "Go". They clearly know a thing or two about name searching.

Funny how the link is a Google link. Even when you try to avoid Google, you still have to do it through Google.

Come on, can't you just let someone be condescending without replying with a perfectly reasonable explanation?
He gets to feel superior, you get to mumble something about idiots and reading comprehension, it's a win-win in my book.

But you can't play 8-bit crap from 1984 on a Nntendo DS. Definitely worth the extra $400.

(Don't get me wrong, I was the right age in 1984 to really enjoy that crap. But it's 2014 now and I'm older and wiser).

Symmetric?

Real nerds use HTTPS.

Maybe they should outlaw death as well.

Whether or not you want to trust a card given by the government is one thing.

But if the government actively encourages people to encrypt stuff then there is greater awareness of privacy and encryption. It means that more people understand the concept of private/public keys and are more likely to generate their own keys and use them. They're also no afraid of encryption as a concept (and a question such as "how do I ask for their public key without sounding like a geek" doesn't exist). I think that's a positive thing.

Other countries actively discourage privacy - yes, you can encrypt stuff, but if you don't give us the password then you'll end up in jail and we don't have to prove a thing. And why teach the masses to encrypt? It's so much easier listening to communication in the clear, and we can even perpetuate the notion that if you encrypt your files or communication then you're clearly hiding something and you're probably a dangerous criminal/terrorist/paedophile, because normal people don't use encryption.

I'm wondering about the mainframe comment: does it mean that bug-free software was only ever written for mainframes? Because I'm absolutely 100% convinced that not all the software that runs on mainframes is bug-free, having worked on mainframes. Even IBM COBOL compilers had (have?) bugs, and they must have been tested by thousands of businesses.

The reason is that for software to be perfect it has to be either proven or checked against every possible input.

The first may be possible in some cases, but is very time consuming for anything other than trivial exercises (and almost no one is willing to pay for that).
The second is simply impossible and some "representative subset" must be used for testing. This means that the once-in-a-lifetime case could be missed.

The car analogy doesn't work here.