In other news, Java is really slow and no-one would use JavaScript for anything serious.

This isn't all about what "you" would do, it's about what "other" people would do. People would still attempt crazy overtaking maneuvers and it's their mistakes that could kill me, not mine.

Especially as I'm one of those crazies who always does the speed limit on the nose right up to the signs just to irritate the hell out of people :P

I'm a two-bit, small time computer book author with just one book to my name so far. I love seeing my book get pirated. It's sold reasonably well for its niche (approaching 10,000 copies) but for the second edition I pleaded with my publisher to allow the e-book version to be free. Of the, say, 10,000 copies sold, only a couple hundred have been of the e-book edition, and I'm convinced that the wider exposure a free e-book would gather would result in increased print sales. When Seth Godin gave away the free PDF of his Ideavirus book, it led to me buying his various other books in print throughout the years. Doctorow is right that obscurity is a bigger hurdle than piracy, but I'm pretty convinced that even big name authors could benefit from extended reach thanks to freely distributed content.

My argument rests on people preferring paper to e-books, and I think they do. I sure do. Sadly, big name publishers tend to disagree, despite a number of convincing social media experiments, but over time perhaps change will happen.

Trademarks don't help "verify the trusted developer" much of the time. Consider a Linux distribution called "X Linux" - there are plenty of such distributions but Linus or other core Linux developers have not been involved with that specific distribution. Same applies for alternative implementations of programming languages like, say, IronRuby and IronPython.

"They are young girls, we can see from the photos. We think that perhaps they are not well informed about the rules," he said.

People are almost never well informed about the rules. When I left school, I didn't get a book of laws that informed me I'd have to pay tax (and how). The only reason I knew what to do was because I took advice from other self employed family members, so I've paid all my taxes throughout the years, no problems.

But.. a lot of people sell things at casual sales, barter services, and do things online without paying tax. It's wrong, but I have a little sympathy for them, because this stuff just isn't taught in schools and the authorities don't go to any lengths to inform people about taxation issues. I mean, how many regular folks who barter things pay the tax on those transactions? Most people I know wouldn't even realize they have to!

Sim City 4 is a great game, I still play it once and a while. They need something that had the gameplay of Sim City 4, but with some improvements in gameplay and real 3D rendered buildings.

Agreed, although to be honest, something like Sim City 4 that actually works would be a start. Sim City 4's Mac port is a shameful piece of software engineering - unstable, buggy, slow as molasses (on an octo core Mac Pro, no less). The PC version is better but has a tendency to fall over when your city gets really large.. and this is a 5+ year old game.

All that said, I'd definitely put down even, say, $250 for a Sim City 5 that delivered, but I doubt we'll get one any time soon.

I agree, and when that occurs there'll be a lot more payola, bribed reviews, and "product placement" directly into content than there is now. Sure, it already goes on, but it'll be rife if advertising revenues dry up.

Thanks ad blockers for making content even worse than it already is. Congrats!

All dynamic scripting languages are "uber ultra slow" then, by your measure. Ruby 1.9 betters or equals the performance PHP, Perl and Python 3 in the latest Alioth Shootout.

You replied to this twice over the span of a week? People.. :)

IBM is already a huge company. Market cap of $124bn. Sun won't make a dent. Market cap of less than $4bn. Yep, Sun is only 3% the size of IBM - it'd be like a dog eating a fly.

A Levels are a form of qualification that are typically earned after two years of study from age 16 to 18 (although they can be taken in later life, as necessary). Coupled with GCSEs (qualifications you receive when you finish high school at 16) they're the qualifications you use to apply to university.

The key point is that (until some recent law changes) high school (or secondary school, as we tend to call it) finishes at age 16 in the UK. I left school at 16 and went straight out to work, for example. It gets a bit confusing though because I have no A Levels (having left school at 16) but I could probably get on to an undergraduate course as a "mature student" due to the experience I have in my fields.

Definitely RTCW. Best online game I've played bar none - I got hooked into it for about a month solid. Sadly when I went back after several more months, it'd pretty much died. I've not found anything to come close to the gameplay (well, except Battlefield 2) and the way you get teamwork even from random folks on a public server.

Bad metaphor. You don't automatically buy anything by seeing an ad.

A better metaphor is going into a museum or similar tourist attraction (cathedral, art gallery, etc) and NOT putting any money in the donations box. It's not illegal, and it's not even going to get you kicked out, but it's rude, disrespectful, and will show up just what sort of person you are.

Funny when one looks at the statistics, but being that so many, many more people die of preventable car accidents and of heart attacks from eating too much junk food, why is it that the same expenditures aren't lavished on those areas?

You go on to say that it's based around the government's desire for "authority" but I don't think this is true - the government is not incompetent or evil enough for this.

I think people are genuinely more fearful of being knifed in the street, intimidated by threatening teenagers, and suffering burglaries, etc, than they are of dying of being obese or in a car crash. You're more likely to die of a heart attack or a car crash than getting knifed by an unruly mob, but it's the fears and desires of the populace that drives policies, not logic or statistics.

I am a big fan of CCTV and the like, but I have more immediate fear for the security of my family on the streets than I do for their health thirty years down the line (sure, I care about that too, but it's not such an immediate "we must do something" type threat).

This picture of Woz practicing doesn't show him as being particularly large. You get +100 virtual karma points from me for that Fantasia reference though.