Aceticon

Yeah, you're right - you're saying that it's possible in a properly functioning Democracy to have an independent state funded media, not that the UK is a properly functioning Democracy.

I just reacted to you posting a link to the BBC's very own bullshit on their impartiality (a link which doesn't make sense in light of the rest).

I think it makes sense that people who don't have actual experience in making projects in a specific language won't be aware of details such as the value 0 being the default in a certain kind of field in a certain language which makes it a good flag for "data unknown".

This is not a problem specific of teenage programmers - it is natural for just about everybody to not really know the ins and outs of a language and best practices when programming with it, when they just learned it and haven't actually been using it in projects for a year or two at least.

What's specific to teenagers (and young coders in general) is that:

• They're very unlikely to have programmed with COBOL for a year or two, mainly because people when they start tend to gravitate towards "cool" stuff, which COBOL hasn't been for 4 decades.
• They haven't been doing software engineering for long enough to have realized the stuff I just explained above - in their near-peak Dunning-Krugger expertise in the software engineering field, they really do think that learning to program in a given language is the same as having figured out how to properly use it.

Code is not a physical thing that spoils with age.

All that backs that sentence of yours is your uninformed opinion.

Mate, from reading the comments of this no-brains, he or she doesn't even know how to program in a professional capacity, much less have even the slightest clue of the scope of such a project.

That one is literally a mindless Trump/Elon fan wading into waters way, WAY, WAY beyond his depth.

That's like claiming that North Korea is a Democracy by pointing out that they're the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

You want to see how "impartial" and "ethical" the BBC is, go check out their coverage of Jeremy Corbyn during the campaign to oust him as leader of the Labour Party some years ago (curiously done with the help of Israel-linked Jewish groups accusing him of anti-semitism, which is very much consistent with what they did here and their vastly different reporting of what's happening in Palestine depending on the source being Israeli or Palestinian), most notably the news program were they had as background a picture of him doctored to show him wearing a Soviet hat or how they spread the slander that a Jewish Holocaust Survivor was an anti-semite for comparing the actions of Israel with those of the Nazis (specifically, they claimed Corbyn was an anti-semite for sitting in a panel in a conference when somebody compared some actions of Israel with those of the Nazis, said somebody being a Jewish Holocaust Survivor).

And don't get me started on how they use framing of everything as having only two-sides to silence non-mainstream voices.

The BBC is a Propaganda outfit same as, say, Fox News, they're just a posher version of it, all about "opinion making", controlling information and uneven presentation (just go check at how they present things differently in the Gaza genocide depending on the source), rather than in-your-face bullshitting.

You might want to re-read my posts a couple of time and think about it a bit harder, if the conclusion you derived from what I wrote is that I want to gatekeep the posters.

It makes her an expert in advocacy and politics, not science or engineering.

Obviously advocacy expertise is no less worth than engineering expertise or science expertise, just like arts expertise is no less worth than any of that and ditto for plenty of other kinds of expertise in complex areas.

However, the "salesmanship" kinds of expertise are already the some of most widely celebrated and rewarded by present day society, hence my point.

Extreme Racism is a chronic mental problem, not a mental health crisis.

Don't take this the wrong way but from the list of achievements she sounds very much a Politician/PR-person/Lobbyist specialized in the area of Space Exploration, not an Engineer or a Scientist.

Still beats Beer-belly Brad by a long distance (probably not hard), but is such a person really worth celebrating in Science Memes?

You're not the only one.

Whilst I do have a small collection of games in Steam, my collection of games in GoG is about 30x larger, because I prefer buying from GoG when I have the chance.

As the old saying goes "Possession is 9/10 of the Law" - when the installer of a game is in your hands (kept in storage media under your control) such as with games in physical media or offline installers downloaded from GoG, even if they wanted to take it away from you, they would have to take you to Court for it, whilst if the installer of a game is in somebody else's hands (in Steam's servers or in GoG's servers if you only ever use their launcher and don't download offline installers) they can take it way from you (even what happenned was that they just mistakenly locked you out of your account) and now it's your problem and you have to throw yourself at their mercy to get what's supposedly your stuff back and if that fails take them to Court (which for most people costs more than the games are worth).

It's hilarious that people think "Steam is great" because they don't often lock people out of their game collections or remove games from people's collections and when they do and people throw themselves at their mercy to get it reversed they're generally understanding, when Steam themselves were the ones who created a system where they have all the power and you have none, it's just that so far they've not purposefully abused it and are generally nice when their own mistakes cause problems which one wouldn't have in a different system - they're comparativelly better than most other stores because those other stores are so shit (except GoG, IMHO), but they're still worse than good old physical media when it comes to consumer rights.

Absolutelly, use Steam when it's worth it for you, just do it with your eyes wide open, aware that you're chosing to be at their mercy because the system they designed for digital game sales makes sure all customers are at their mercy, so they're definitelly not your buddies, just (so far) nowhere as abusive as most faceless companies out there.

PS: Back to the post of the OP, amongst all the digital stores with "it's not really yours" systems, with all the power over gamers than entails, Steam are by far the ones that least abuse it (I think they never did on purpose, though some people have been locked out of their accounts and couldn't recover access to them) so comparativelly are way above the rest, especially Amazon as demonstrated by their practices when it comes to digital books.

Nobody would maintain it for him for free if was illegal.

Sorta.

The legislation that applies to physical copies of copyrighted materials is different and comes from the time when the only physical copies of copyrighted materials were paper books.

Whilst strictly speaking you are buying a license for both, for physical media it's quite a different format of license with quite different conditions than for digital media.

The physical media license is implicit, standardized (the same no matter where you buy the media, the publisher or even the game) and associated with the media (i.e. ownership of the media means having the license) which means that it's transferable without requiring a 3rd party intermediary (transfering ownership of the physical media means transfering the license that is associated with it).

Digital games licenses, on the other hand, are not standardized and vary from store to store, publisher to publisher and/or even game to game (the usual is to have to accept the terms the store presents you, which are not at all an industry standard set of contract terms, much less a legal standard, and to properly judge them one would require legal help). They're all very explicitly personal (associated with the buyer) and them having or not any of the buyer rights one has in the implicit license of the physical media, is a crapshoot (generally each store has it's own unique licensing agreements, with sometimes unique elements for certain publishers or games). Most notably, it's very rare for them to be transmissible (it hugelly depends on the store) and even then it requires a 3rd party to approve it (generally the store). As far as I know, there is no consumer license for games digital media which has the same or more rights for the consumer than the implicity license for physical media and only commercial licenses (which cost thousands of dollars) will give you more rights than that.

Things like EULAs are pseudo-legal attempts at circunventing the implicit license of physical media, which is why they're not valid in most countries (they're deemed a one-sided attempts at forcing a change of the implicit contract terms of the sale, after the sale has been concluded, and hence have explicitly been judged as having no contractual force whenever those things went to court in most of the World).