If you can't beat them, destroy their revenue stream. It's the same reason Google released free online office software to combat Microsoft and why Android is free. It's just good business sense.

Programming itself isn't so much a science as it is the application of one, but the theory behind writing compilers, understanding languages/grammars, as well as mathematics behind all of it are quite a bit different. The name is kind of a holdover from a time when you very well may have had to write your own compiler and language to get anything else done. A lot of colleges also offer software engineering degrees now which are more focused on software development and less on the theoretical aspects of computers.

Anyone who's really serious about gaming that has a Mac is probably going to run Windows. Even though Mac support is probably the best it's ever been, there are a still a lot of games that don't support Mac at all or are sub-standard ports.

Certainly not, but writing an actual article about anything of importance would require actual work, where as even mentioning Apple is sure to garner all manner of clicks as both fans and haters crawl out of the woodwork. Next there will be complaints about a lack of competition on the inflated costs of streaming services.

I draw the line at mechanical ability. If video games required none, you or I could probably compete just as well as anyone else on the stage, but that's clearly not the case, especially if you've ever played some of these games. Just because these individuals have limited their athletic prowess to the hands does not put it in the same realm as chess even though it's closer to it than it is to rugby.

To further make the point, are bowling, golf, darts, billiards, or auto racing sports? None of them require much in the way of athleticism, yet they are all considered sports and have professionals who can make a living engaging in them. Which of those, if any, are also on the chopping block?

The sensible compromise would be to start making all signs contain both metric and international units and gradually transition to using metric over the next hundred years. Gradually start integrating it into curriculum at schools and eventually most people will be using metric with the international units still being left around for the old folks that don't care to bother.

I don't expect that we'll completely get rid everything though. American football can stick with yards and bars can keep selling pints, but let's get the big stuff out of the way or at least start working towards that.

I'm a little skeptical about that. People like to claim that they were improperly banned all the time, but usually once an actual human looks into it the issue it turns out that the person complaining has left out a lot important information that explains why they were banned. Granted, there are a few cases of unjustified bans, typically due to disabled gamers using special hardware that gets them flagged, but a lot of it is people getting busted for cheating and then trying to rally the community behind them for whatever reason.

It's not a controlled experiment, but it could be called a case study of sorts.

Really though, this kind of thing should be publicized. It draws attention to the issues with science reporting and hopefully the people who latched onto this take a little time to look into what they're reporting on and avoid sources that will publish practically anything.

It also lets consumers know which journalists they may want to be more skeptical of when choosing what the read or believe.

That sounds like a really, really inane conspiracy.

It's crime mixed with idiotic politics that come as a result of politicians trying to look tough on crime rather than determine how to solve the actual problem. The prison system doesn't help do much in the way of reforming anyone so a lot of people just go back to crime again. When you make a lot of victim-less activities illegal is it really any wonder that you end up with a lot of criminals.

Not really sure what locking up the nation's poor has to do with preventing some kind of revolution, whatever that's supposed to mean. Realistically it would be much cheaper to pay poor people $25,000 a year to just stay at home than it would to lock them up, which is vastly more expensive.

Is that really different than any other thing as a kid though?

I'm pretty sure that at one point in time I wanted to be an astronaut, but only before changing my mind because I wanted to be president, which only lasted about a week before I wanted to be a dinosaur.

I really don't understand it either. If the government entity receives no unfair treatment and has to play by the same rules as every other company, there's no reason why a local municipality shouldn't be able to collectively decide that they want to take a crack at creating something better.

It seems that some people are more anti-government than they are pro-market or have become so accustomed to making the same argument that they're not even bothering to look at the issue at hand.

At least it makes sense for the politicians to oppose it. They probably get all kinds of brib^H^H^H^Hcontributions from the companies that are paying for these monopoly rights.

Are you kidding? These same people will be back again, which means they have to buy all new copies of the game to get a fresh set of keys which is even more revenue for Blizzard. I imagine that a lot of them are accounts to farm and sell gold or other items so it's not as though they're just going to close shop and go elsewhere when there's still a demand for their services. One could argue that there's even more money to be had right now if the number of sellers has seriously decreased so there's a lot of incentive for these people to get back in the game.

While in the long run it would be better for them to develop the capacity in their own country for these kinds of endeavors, this still does benefit humanity and the space industry as a whole and it's oil money far better spent than Saudi Arabia, which seems to dump a lot into financing extremism and human misery.

I dislike the ridiculous copyright laws as much as anyone else, but does it really matter much in reality? The internet has made it so easy to access all manners of information and the average person really doesn't care much about copyright laws as far as their own personal use goes. Much like more and more people really don't care about others smoking pot or two men getting married, I think we'll eventually reach a point where the general population will collectively not care about personal piracy and it won't be cost effective for the record industry to try to enforce any laws.

I suspect that within 30 years most of the music labels will have ceased to exist as we currently know them. They have no real purpose any more and creating and publishing your own content is only going to get easier and cheaper as time moves on. I would imagine that we'll also see payment systems mature a lot as well and it will probably be easy to cut out the big sellers like Apple and Amazon as well because it will be no less difficult to transact directly with the artist. They'll probably exist, but mostly as agents to handle some of things that the artists don't care to oversee themselves.

I wouldn't say it's hard to code well either, but it may take some individuals a lot of time to reach the point where they write elegant code. I think the same is true of writing as well. The average person could become sufficiently skilled to produce useful documents.

The hard part is being able to design really great software or meaningful written works. I'm more than capable of learning the writing skills necessary to produce a novel, but honestly I don't think I could actually write one that anyone would consider worth reading just like there are a lot of people who can learn to write nice, clean code, but can't envision the software that should be created or how to construct the algorithms to reach that end goal.