Yes. A couple while I was still at school, some commercially published and some for the Java4k contest.

Only about 25 years ago. We'd had the family computer (Amstrad CPC6128, a gift from my Grandad) for a year and I was bored of all the games. The manual had a big chapter on BASIC, so I decided to make my own game. It was an absolutely rubbish game, but everyone has to start somewhere.

If there aren't clouds you probably won't see much anyway. According to SETI the estimated peak rate in London is 0.2 meteors per hour.

The original name is Greek. Petitio principii is a translation of the Greek into medieval Latin; given that most of the few people who learn Latin today learn the classical form, its use is an invitation to misunderstand. The English phrase circular reasoning, which you also use, avoids that problem.

US federal law has a concept of personal privacy too. Just look at HIPAA. So unless you see that as part of a slippery slope into censorship, your position needs a bit more exposition of where that slippery slope starts.

Bad decisions, maybe. Bad legislation? They've prorogued Parliament unusually early because they've run out of things that the two parties in the coalition can agree on. They might not manage to find any legislation to push next year.

Google isn't *publishing* information, it's just indexing information (web page) already available elsewhere (on 3rd-party webservers).

But the law isn't about publishing information, it's about processing information, and that is defined to include storing it. The meat of the ruling is that the fact that someone else has a good reason to process information isn't per se a good reason for you to process it.

If you have one software shop doing everything from embedded to client-side web then you need a bit more than 3 languages, but most places specialise to some extent. And even if the company isn't specialised, its individual teams or studios often will be.

I think you're in violent agreement with the post you're replying to. If you tell someone "Use a phrase rather than a word", they will come up with a grammatically correct sentence, which probably even makes sense at a semantic level. Tell them to use Diceware, and they're selecting randomly from a dictionary.

It's supposed to say sherparification: it's based on the same principle as getting a Nepalese guide to carry your water.

It's not quite that simple. You also have to avoid companies which might be bought out by an American or multinational company at some point in the future.

By the Amiga 500 they'd improved. All I had to do was put a rubber hot water bottle (filled with cold water) on the power supply to act as a heat sink.

I've never heard Samuel L. Jackson say that, although I have heard him say, "English, motherfucker! Do you speak it?"

It's an abbreviation for "margarine", which is a butter substitute. I don't know what it has to do with powdered alcohol, though.

Clearly the person who wrote the RFC understood that answering a heartbeat request with a size different than its payload was a potential problem since the behavior was specified.

The person who wrote the RFC also wrote the buggy code, so it may not be quite so clear.