"Exactly what are "excessive taxes"?"

Taxes in excess of those required to fulfill constitutional mandates. Easy.

"Because once you start cutting revenue you have to start cutting programs. And once you start cutting programs you run into the problem that SOMEONE thinks that that particular is not "excessive"."

Yes indeed, this is how dirty politics works. Everyone votes for the whole pile of pork in order to keep the one program that actually benefits them personally. The weight of all the unproductive expenditures drags down the economy as a whole and makes the nation poorer, but the 'elite' who are already rich and well connected will still manage to get richer by diverting the lions share of those expenditures even while the rest of us struggle to keep our heads above water.

The only solution is to kill all the pork in one swipe. Most people will give up their own slice, as long as everyone else does the same simultaneously. But no one is going to willingly give up their slice, however pathetic, without getting a refund on the rest of the pork at the same time.

"Unless you are doing something completely novel, don't reinvent the wheel."

Exactly why I said I would think about looking for the library first instead of the language.

"If by chance this library doesn't have the performance you need, it will be easier to tune it for speed as compared to starting from scratch."

False dichotomy. Performance tuning is not something you just pick up overnight like a new language can be, it's serious stuff. If you have to do that yourself you might as well do the whole job and forget about the crappy library. Find one that is already optimized for the tasks that your app will spend most of its time and resources on, then use the most convenient glue to make it work.

A lot of people will propose a language because it is their favorite. Others because they believe it is very easy to learn. I will give you a third line of thought.

I would not look for a language in this case, I would look for a library, then teach myself whatever language is easiest/quickest to access it. I would try to profile what you are building, figure out where the bottlenecks are likely to be (profiling your existing mockup can help here but dont trust it entirely) and try to find the best stable well-designed high performance library for that particular type of code.

"Especially garcon. That's just a french word. If any one in a restaurant calls for their garcon they're either incredibly stuck up or are taking the piss."

Eh, I would argue that it occurs more than often enough in English to count as an English word, particularly since it does have a distinct (though related) meaning from the French word. He's not (unless I badly misread him) using it in its French meaning but in its English meaning - it's a word that would be used by an idiot who considers himself a snob, or more likely in a parody of someone that others see as such. In this case, I believe he was indeed 'taking the piss' with it in a sense, but not necessarily in the sense you meant.

I never said anything about 'easily.' It's a very difficult problem. I am not saying there is a perfect solution either. But they arent even trying.

There are a lot of inter-related issues here but specifically the article is talking about botting. Basically botting just means automating repetitive tasks in the client. It's a very natural and predictable desire for anyone playing a game that involves a lot of repetitive tasks to find some way to automate them on the client-end, and if the client is a PC then the more technical players are going to find a way to do that. There is no technical 'fix' for this and acknowledging that is important. It cannot be fixed it can only be worked around.

Now we could go off down the decades long history of workarounds, but I will try to skip to what's important. You see, the main damage that botting does to the game is to disadvantage the people that dont do it - they find that they progress so much slower than the ones who do that they get disheartened and quit. The authoritarian game admin will reflexively respond to this by prohibiting the use of bots - but this NEVER improves the situation. The technical folks whose advantage he is trying to disrupt, are also the least likely to be caught violating the new rule. It's the other gamers that the admin is actually trying hard to retain who are most likely to somehow stumble into the world of botting, slip up and get caught, and then banned.

A better solution, in general, is to allow it and make it easy for all players to do, so that they are on a more even playing field. Because most of the burnt out players arent going to be stressing on botting qua botting, they are stressed on the fact that other people are doing it and they cant!

Now on a game with any sort of role playing feel to it, there is still another problem - bots running around skilling up or making money or whatever and not responding to you really blow the whole immersion thing. But once we have focused more narrowly on the problem there, it is not intractable. What we did on my old Mud was legalize 'at keys' botting (where the client is running a script, but the player is still near enough to see the screen and respond if needed) and only outlaw afk botting.

That worked great on a system with ~300 players and ~4 immortals on at any given time, but WoW may well be running with far fewer admins. Again, to save money. And look, I got no problem with them wanting to save money and make a profit, but do you have any clue how much money they rake in on this thing? It wouldnt kill them to hire a little staff.

"Your botting software is nothing but run-of-the-mill malware"

Umm, no. Run of the mill malware by definition is acting without the informed consent of the user. This botting software is running at the will of the user. So the comparison is utterly specious.

"Why is it so hard to write addon software that conforms to Blizz's ToS?"

Why is it so hard for Blizzard to write a system that does not effectively penalise those who obey their rules?

Now I have years of experience running multiplayer online games and I appreciate as you may not that the answer is actually quite complicated. It's not a trivial thing to do, but then again, Blizzard has raked in enormous sums of cash on this game, more than enough to have done it right and many times over. It's an enormous profit-centre and like all the big companies these days it seems to believe that it has a divine right to maintain that profit without working for it. They would rather write unenforceable rules and invoke state force as a bandaid than try to fix the problem because it's cheaper - at least for them, at least in the short term.

The state shouldnt allow itself to be used in this way, however.

"Clearly, what they demonstrated was that the mice would go for the item with the highest density of calories & fat."

Yes, indeed. "Researchers" have "proven" that food is addictive.

So is oxygen, btw. Just say no. Think of the children.

So you are saying that bulk freight is faster than overnight air? Come now.

Obviously there can be tradeoffs between wide pipes and fast pipes for different applications. If you are trying to move a large number of sandbags across the country and speed is less important, you want bulk freight. But not because it's "faster."

I never actually got annoyed enough by the static icons to be bothered figuring this out myself but apparently there is a fairly lengthy snippet to add to hosts to effectively block facebook at this point. Check out http://superuser.com/questions/544789/why-cant-i-block-facebook-using-etc-hosts-on-mountain-lion

National Security is the number one cause of National Insecurity. *

(Robert Anton Wilson gets credit for that, not I.)

"That is because the parent is more interested in being their kids friend than their kids parent."

Do you suppose that might have something to do with the fact that laws have been changed around the world that make it a criminal act to discipline a child physically?

Not going to deny that idiot parents might use that abusively, but good parents who used a strap of leather or a birch sapling on the rare occasion when you got completely out of line were the regular thing when I was a kid - now these people would be jailed and their children put in foster care.

You're missing my point.

I dont have to be gay to be inspired by Alan Turing. And I dont have to be female to be inspired by Ada Lovelace either.

Just a shot in the dark but was it OCAML?

"Her accomplishments continue to serve as an inspiration to women throughout the world."

Not to women, but to people of both sorts throughout the world.

Who wrote this tripe? Oh, right, an AC.