Easily solved... just set the last one to go off first.

No.

Atheism does not mean 'no god', it means 'without god'. It describes a person who does not include a deity in their worldview, and behaves as if there was no god.

An agnostic claims that certainty is not possible due to their being no way to reach a state of certainty. Myself, and the vast majority of atheists are also agnostic, in that our position is that there is no way to be certain, but we exist as if there was no deity.

You will however, find theists that claim to know for sure.... this is the essence of irrationality.

If Facebook had included third party code I would expect them to abide by the terms of the license, commercial or otherwise.

I find it slightly harder to get all 'wavy fist' when they build something that someone else merely claims to have thought of first.

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