I think you misunderstood his comment. While what you say is true, the marginal reward he's talking about is competitive advantage over those not cheating. If you cheat and nobody else does, you get an advantage over everybody. If you cheat and everybody else does, you get no advantage. The more people cheat the less advantage there is to cheating compared to everyone else.

That's not taking into account the other societal problems that rampant cheating creates, though, and I think everyone can agree that everyone would be better off with no cheating.

Hundreds or thousands of engineers working on something and a technically unimportant piece slipping through the cracks?

I would expect it to be a lawyer who's not embedded in the engineering department and didn't see the need or even realize the potential of checking a service pack. Taking into account that this probably isn't their primary version of windows, and it seems pretty easy for this to legitimately slip through the cracks.

Just like capitalism/free markets, when done correctly it's great and absolutely vital to the welfare of the nation. It's when things are taken too far that we have problems.

She's not. She made the choice to believe instead. Too many atheists, people like you and Dawkins, act like assholes about their lack of religion, and that's one of the reasons she chose to believe in her religion.

I agree with that, but many of his quotes are insulting, not disagreements. First of all, he paints all religions with the same brush. Some religions actively encourage scientific inquiry, some religions tell you to question your faith, and some discourage inquiry and questions. Taking them all the same is insulting, and saying that religion is actively damaging to the world is insulting as well.

Dawkins is a smart man, but I think he actively damages relations between atheists and theists. I have a sister who would be atheist but she doesn't want to be associated with people like that. I know many other people who are atheist, but don't take on the label because of how antagonistic atheists like Dawkins are.

prove whether the operating system will halt

One of the few applications where proving that it will halt always leads to a bug being filed.

From the article I read elsewhere, the Motorola purchase is what caused the drop in profit. If it weren't for that purchase they would have been more profitable, although still not as profitable as wall street had forecasted. So, while the purchase itself might cause some concern, the numbers alone shouldn't.

Now, as to whether the purchase of Motorola is a sign that Google's on the decline is an interesting question.

Of course it is, but that doesn't mean it's not a problem. If it's a 60/40 split, that's defensible. If it's a 95/5 split, then we've got a problem.

That doesn't say anything about how it's stored in the database.

Or just smile big when you're on camera. Seems like facial expression is a pretty glaring deficiency for facial recognition software.

Clearly it's not there yet, but we're already doing something that could be considered telekinesis.

Actually, the poll finds the exact opposite.

Just like that. The summary was saying that its success came from a critical mass of universities teaching it, which is just wrong.

Python. That's a language that's being driven by developer adoption, not businesses or schools. Using it as an example of traditional success is ridiculous.

I think a useful distinction is what makes good software. If it runs the world, I think there's a strong argument to be made that the software is good.