Now, I like decent mass transit, but come on, let's be realistic here. For intracity transit, you're not using high-speed rail anyway. People generally avoid it because, even during rush hour when an 11-mile trip takes 25-30 minutes by car, using the light rail system will be 50-60 minutes. (Actual numbers from an actual commute!). Only in places with truly miserable traffic does mass transit - even the most effective mass transit - begin to become competitive.
Actually, for cities that are 100 - 300 miles apart the train is quicker.
Flying that sort of distance might only take 45 minutes, but there is so much pissing about at either end it ends up taking loads longer. Over here you have to check in an hour early to go through security, then it takes them 30-40 minutes to get the bags out and send them round the conveyor when you land. That makes it close to 3 hours. As for driving, most places have speed limits of 70Mph so that averages to more like 60 and a 200 mile journey still takes close to 3 hours too.
Every week I used to take a train 200 Miles on Friday and it it does city center to city center in just under 2 hours, with no pissing about at either end. I can buy the ticket on the web, carry all my bags on with me, then get off and go straight out of the station. This is a shit British train which can only go at about 125Mph, but it almost never hits traffic as it can be controlled centrally so actually stays close to that. Imagine how quick one of these Chinese bad boys could do the same journey?
Once you get above 300 miles like some cities in the states then things are different but for a lot of journeys on the same coast trains could save a lot of time. Train is never going to replace the airplane for speed on longer journeys, but on short ones it can be loads quicker. It also saves having to do 4 hour drives which suck if you have been working 8 hours before hand.
Why do the Europeans* have better roads and faster trains than us? Maybe there's something to that "socialism" after all
You in the states probably have better roads, but you are simply not interested in trains as these are mass transit. Mass transit means people sharing a method of transportation and that is too much like socialism for the states. You prefer the idea of market forces prevailing, which is what happened when most transit car systems, the closest thing you had to railways at the time, were bought then run into the ground by GM.
The big flaw is that internet celebrity doesn't pay nearly as well as drug smuggler.
Actually I bet it pays miles better. The people doing the actual smuggling are not the people who make all the cash, that goes to the people who control them. The actual smugglers are probably just immigrant workers who have been thrown back out by border security so many times that they get to know the least patrolled routes in.
The wage differences in the developing world are far less significant that the union rules GM needs to deal with. In a highly automated factory the machines and materials become a far more important cost component relative to the workers. Honda has started several US factories and pays a decent wage without the overhead of a unionized workforce.
And the main benefit of not having a unionised workforce seems to be an ability to pay a lot less:
The Big block V8 line is being closed. The Tonawanda Engine plant still makes smaller engines. But there aren't positions for the V8 guys, so they are all laid off. So not as bad as I originally stated. Doesn't make it any less painful for the area though.
The unfortunate reality is that as the cost of goods transportation has become cheaper it has become harder and harder for workers in the developed world to compete with the developing world where people will work for 10c per hour. There are also the issues of health and safety laws but those are a pretty minor expense compared to the actual difference in cost of living and hence wages.
In this modern world the only hope for the developed world is in jobs that require a high level of education. Any job that can be learned via an apprenticeship has moved abroad as the company paying for production decided they could take a hit on the poorer quality that was produced initially based on the cost savings of not paying a western developed wage.
Unfortunately that as much as us in the developed world would like to exclude certain countries from our markets there are people in charge of large corporations and on wall street who benefit the most from the current system that will fight this as it is not them being put out of work.
Come to think of it, whatever happened to that Europa lander they were planning which was supposed to bore through the ice?
As soon as you do this you risk contaminating what is underneath so you have to do this incredibly carefully. Last I heard it was on hold until they had figured out how to do it such a way that they did not introduce any contaminants in the process. They are looking to use a lake under the south pole for practice:
Chase opened its contest to any charity whose operating budget was less than $10 million and whose mission "aligned" with the bank's corporate social responsibility guidelines.
Which basically reads as: Any charity Chase corporate management do not like is not seeing a dime.
Am I alone in thinking that whoever Bennett is, I have no interest in his vague ramblings?
It does not matter if you are alone in having no interest in read this, what matters is if I am alone in finding it interesting reading. Nothing can appeal to everyone the best you can hope for is to appeal to some, maybe even a majority but not necessarily.
Most people are able to simply read what interests them and ignore what doesn't, why cant you? Must every article on slashdot go through your own personal approval?
Apple made the decision to dress up generic PC hardware and plunk their OS on it rather than staying with hardware that set them apart from their competitors and made tying more acceptable. The only thing that truly separates a Mac from a generic PC these days is the software it runs. Companies like Psystar showed that by using generic PC hardware to run Apple's product. If Apple wants to be a hardware vendor, that is fine. They just need to choose what their product actually is.
Of course the problem is that then they could not benefit from economies of scale and by mass produced parts to the same extent. It would also impact their ability to run x86 code a native speed.
I am not saying Apple are legally or morally in the right, I am just saying it is obvious why they have chosen the path they have when the CPU makes up a large part of the expense of new PC regardless of the architecture.
Given the political statements on her laptop, one wonders what kind of provocation she might have tried with the guards. I don't believe that justifies their reaction, and wouldn't be surprised if they are disciplined (which will, of course, generate zero coverage outside of Israel), but most rational people understand that baiting Israelis is a rather dangerous sport.
Damn right, this is the country that has been said to have a policy of shooting unarmed civilians by one of its own army snipers.
"Sergeant Wahid Taysir, the sniper who killed Hurndall, has already said a policy of shooting at unarmed civilians existed at the time."
Ok, the guy in question may have been saying this just to save his own skin as he was on trial for murder, but the large number of people, including children, killed in Gaza last year does make you wonder if maybe he was telling the truth.
So, it sounds petty, but I think it matters a lot. Your work environment and the attitudes you deal with are absolutely going to influence the results of your work. I'm going to argue that the bottom line for the company really does want me to wear my headphones, and if you can't at least ponder the possibility that I might be right... you're not really understanding your technical business.
To be honest, I agree with you. Where I work we all socialise alot together, have a media centre PC in the office and when we work late frequently bring in a Wii or a choice of DVD's to watch while we wait for a client to decide if the release we have just down outside office hours is a go or no-go. But I worked in far worse places in the past and I have heard plenty of horror stories from friends. Every year our last day before Christmas is spent playing computer games in the office.
I did say in one of my previous posts I would never like to work in a code factory where everyone gets there own cubicle and is expected to spend 8 hours straight staring at there own monitor. I would leave pretty quick, but I would do my damndest to work like a daemon while I was there and then tell them that it was the environment that sent me packing when I had my exit interview. I would try and be as nice as possible about it so I could still have a reference, but if they asked they would certainly get an honest answer. This is really all you can do in this situation if you boss digs his heels in, so you still have to work while you are there or try and explain that big gap on your CV if they think you were dragging your feet and hence get shitty about your reference.
And you'll never be able to resell them. And, if Steam decides to ban you, you lose access to your entire library. Even if you're banned because someone stole your credit card, you have no recourse.
So how does someone stealing my credit card get me banned exactly? Do I keep my steam password in my wallet? Or is because some cretinous thief tries every credit card they steal on steam in case they have an account? I know this would theoretically work but please, if you have my credit card you have a limited amount of time to extract as much cash as possible, if you then take it home and log in to my steam account by emailing Steam support then the Police now have a lovely electronic trail to follow. That is such a collossal risk I very much doubt anyone would bother unless they really wanted to see what bars look like on windows.
I know many people bitch about steam banning them, but I have a sneaky suspicion they do one of the following which I never do:
1) Download a game hack (Actually this only gets you banned from online gaming AFAIK)
2) Try and resell or buy a resold game on ebay (Not sure if this gets you a ban, might just mean you wasted the money if you bought it)
3) Lose their email address, username, password and previous bank account details all at the same time (not really a ban, you just lost the account).
You might argue that these things should not get you banned, but I don't really care. I do not plan on doing 1 or 2 (even for that Operation Flashpoint crap I recently purchased) and 3 is impossible. If I lost my email account, username and password I would still know my previous credit card number from a statement, or by asking my bank.
The people I do sometimes feel sorry for are people who use some wierd bit of PC optimisation software they do not understand or buy a game on ebay only to discover the reason it was so cheap was that it was previously used by a hacker. I know it is a bit harsh but as an honest net player who has never cheated I realise that if they bent the rules in any small way for niavity then the cheaters would just exploit this. Anyone who has read anything about trying to bypass should know that humans are often the weakest link and the social engineering can often net the best results.
And this is incurable? I bet if you ever had to live in an environment where background noise was constant you would soon start sleeping. Try joining the armed forces, when you have to spend 6 months living in noisy dorms and doing hard physical work all day you could have a shell go off next door and you would not wake up.
All your petty excuses could soon be sorted out if we still had national service. Not that this is a reason to bring back national service for everyone though.
It could very well be the Israeli government with their finger in this pie.
Maybe, but then again the ISP's could just be doing this to maintain a reasonable level of service to people who do not use P2P.
The fact is that when you rent a ADSL service from any internet company as an individual you are not buying dedicated routing and guaranteed bandwidth. The figures they quote for bandwidth are maximums, not minimums. With this in mind they can do whatever they pretty much like.
If you do not want to be subject to this you can subscribe to an ADSL service that offers minimum guaranteed bandwidth. These do exist it's just that they are horrifically expensive because very few people need them.
Actually it's not the fines or enforcement. It's training. Every police vehicle I've seen has a laptop mounted on the center console. Every time I see a cop driving around they have one hand on the keyboard and constantly glance back and forth between the road and the computer.
I am guessing you are from the states. Here in the UK we keep our police in pairs when on patrol in vehicles. This means the guy in the passenger seat can use his radio or whatever, the driver can concentrate on driving.
The parent poster is spot on though, there are very high fines for driving while on a mobile but the police are reluctant to throw the book at motorists for it unless they happen to be behind you for half a mile without you noticing and hanging up.
A similar thing happened to me at a previous employer (around January 2007). The desktop he gave me to use was a Pentium 3-era beige box that had a tendency to bluescreen at inopportune moments.
Any company that was well run would just replace it rather than require you to bring in your own laptop.
The lead programmer, who had been present at the aforementioned meeting, later told me that no such concerns had been raised.)
So did you ever find out who was telling the truth and why the other one was lying to you? Sounds intriguing but you should probably be glad you used to work there rather than still do.
Must be nice not having attention deficit issues, but many coders do, and controlling auditory background is a necessity for them to get any work done.
Believe me when I say I used to be terrible, but it was not doing me any favours at work so I had to sort it out. It was mentioned to me in an appraisal as being something I needed to work on so I did.
You have to remember programming involves quite a bit of personal thought and some people are more efficient when there is a stability in terms of ambient sound.
And you have to remember that if you are going to do something professionally for 30 years you are sometimes going to have to do it in conditions that are not your ideal. The people who do best are the people who can maintain long term productivity regardless of the office next door having builders in, the person who normally answers the phone is off sick and you still have to get the project out the door as a team.
I know you might prefer to listen to music, but remember that is only a preference. If it becomes an essential part of your daily routine then you are not doing yourself any favours.
On the other hand, conversations are something I can't help but respond to, especially when it's a question. Even worse, a questions of a technical nature regarding computers.
Learn to concentrate, its a valuable skill. I know it is incredibly hard at first, but it can be done. The first step is to not respond unless someone asks you a direct question. If someone in your vicinity just asks a general question, then ignore them and carry on with your work. You might have already been distracted and listened to the question, but this is the first step and you have to not answer. This is about breaking the habit of responding to things you do not need to and the first bit is the hardest. Once you start viewing these things as annoying distractions from your work rather than welcome distractions you will find blocking them out easy.
I used to always be the first to answer the phone in our team, and the first to answer general questions to the room. Nowadays you can ask me a direct question and I can still tune it out and not actually hear what you said if I was not looking at you right at the start. It is truly amazing how nice it is to be able to just block out all background noise unless I want to hear it. It also helps you tollerate annoying co-workers much more easily, you simply forget they are next to you in no time.
As to original topic of programmers all being forced to not wear headphones, that is just something we all have to deal with. There are so many development houses where this is not allowed that you just have to deal with it unless you are going to spend your entire life at one company under one boss (not realistic). I suppose you could always ask the question at the end of an interview but that might come across as a little bit petty.
I personally would never like to work for a cubicle style company where there is no interpersonal contact. I like being able to talk to another human being occasionally. Sometimes when a colleague talks to me, i have to politely say I really need to concentrate, but sometimes it is nice to spend a few seconds reminding myself that I am a human being not a coding machine. The recommendation for people working in front of computers all day long is that you do take regular breaks and stand up periodically so why not also walk across to one of you colleagues who also looks like he is doing the same thing and have a quick conversation.
Remove? Why remove anything, instead just start afresh.
I generally only change my kernel config when I buy a new PC or add new hardware. If I am building a new PC I start with a vanilla kernel source and then go through enabling just the functionality I need, and screw all those modules I just build it in unless it has to be a module. This may result in kernel that does not fit on a floppy disk but why would I care? it doesnt fit on a punched card either.
I know this takes time, but it is a good way of learning a bit more about how Linux works.
They're being "nicer" than any other multi-billion corp I can name.
This is the most insightful part of your post. I personally so them doing plenty of stuff that I consider to be "evil" but so do all companies that reach their level of success. When I look at the company on balance they are still more aligned with my morals than any of their competitors in search. If there are any other search engines that produce the same quality of results and have a more friendly attitude please post some links (not yahoo or bing please, joke posts not needed).
There have been maybe ten stories about Google becoming "the evil empire" in the last week or so. It seems to be a running theme right now.
It will be for some time as well, they have just been too successful too quickly and without absorbing enough of the corporate crony-ism that they should have done. This has resulted in them coming out on the "wrong" side of the fence on some key issues like net-neutrality.
The whole way they floated on the stock exchange in the first place pissed of a lot of corporate america as well since they tried to make it a level playing field for people buying in. Normally Wall Street like to get first dibs then throw a few scraps out to the public. This means that the people who block vote the shares the investment banks own then get a hefty say in running your company.
Google has done too many things their own way so they have made it known that they are not a team player in corporate land. As result of this there have been many people sitting around waiting for an excuse to try and get their own back. They now see the Microsoft - AT&T sponsored "Google is bad for privacy" campaign as a way back.
Remember - The reason nobody wanted to buy their search engine in the first place was because everyone else in the market preferred the idea of making us only see the results that paid the most. I do wonder whether the other search engines have actually changed their minds permanently, or if it is just to keen users happy while their biggest competitor still shows quality results.
Blizzard haven't really fight against the private servers good afaik, and why would they - anyone who has ever tried any of them knows how crappy they are.
The sad part here is people who might for cheapness reasons to play on those servers instead and think the game is crap, while in fact the server just sucks.
This is exactly why Blizzard would try and shut them down, they reflect badly on the game as a whole. I know you could say only stupid people would think this, but stupid people can still post there opinion to the internet:)
Incidentally, you can sign up for experts exchange and get access to the answers without paying. You just need to sign up as an expert and post some useful answers that help other people regularly.
The paywall only applies to people who only want answers without ever giving any back. I know they make you dig a little on the site to find out how to sign up for free, but real experts generally are quite good at digging out answers so should not find this too hard.
I'll rebutt the dollar bill analogy as well. When someone downloads a movie, they can watch it privately without telling anyone, so there is no consequence to the outside world from the act of privately watching a pirated movie.
Actually, you have still cost the company who made the movie the value of one rental. You might say that this does not apply since you would never have paid, but if that is really the case then why did you spend the time watching it? You obviously had a certain level of interest in the product in order to invest the 2 hours of you time, so why not pay a small amount to cover that enjoyment you received.
Remember, if nobody ever paid to watch any movies or play any games then people would stop producing them in their current form. As much as I love Linux and free software, I recognise that somethings simply do not work as free software. I have been looking for an open source first person shooter for many years, and I have never found one that compares with the paid for products produced by the likes of ID, IW, etc.
You just repeated my argument against distribution, not downloading. Two different things, two different sets of arguments.
Remember, without someone to distribute copyright works illegally you would not be able to download them illegally. Are you saying that someone posting a game to the internet and giving it away free should be prosecuted and yet you who knowingly benefited from their illegal act should not?
Also, how do you download paid software for free without indulging in a certain level of distribution? The Pirate Bay? Bittorrent? This involves you sharing the torrent as you download it? Or do you limit your software so that it never uploads a byte? On many torrent sites that counts you as a "leech". They often boot users whose ratio goes below a certain level. All of this forces people who download copyright works, to distribute them as well.
Distribution and downloading are opposite side of the same coin. Without one, there can be no other. And saying that you should be able to download something but the person providing you with that download should not be able to is a ridiculous level of hypocrisy. If you were not downloading it, they would not be distributing it.
Intellectual property is a bankrupt and indefensible notion.
I am not so sure about this. If I spend many hours thinking of very novel and original way of doing something useful, should I not be able to live off the resulting earnings for a while before the person who did not invest any time in the idea can just copy it and undercut me? Since they did not have to invest the time in its invention, their costs will be lower so I cannot compete on that basis.
In my ideal world I would freely share all my ideas for the good of mankind, but unfortunately the good of mankind does not pay for a roof over my head and put food in my belly. Until it does I want to be able to do something I enjoy and earn money for it, since this beats earning money for doing something I hate.
Many people often answer this with the service argument, but this does not always work. Some things simply do not suit the software as a service model, especially computer games since many people are resistant to pay for play.
I cannot help but think that until we have abandoned the concept of money, then we will always have to allow a certain level of IP protection to someone who invents something original. So the real debate should maybe become about how much IP protection there should be and how long it should last.
And as a final note, I am just going to rehash one of Richard Stallmans recent points: That the whole GPL and open source concept relies on copyright law. Without the law of copyright and IP then some private company could just take any open source product they liked and then sell it or a derivative product for a profit.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, I like decent mass transit, but come on, let's be realistic here. For intracity transit, you're not using high-speed rail anyway. People generally avoid it because, even during rush hour when an 11-mile trip takes 25-30 minutes by car, using the light rail system will be 50-60 minutes. (Actual numbers from an actual commute!). Only in places with truly miserable traffic does mass transit - even the most effective mass transit - begin to become competitive.
Actually, for cities that are 100 - 300 miles apart the train is quicker.
Flying that sort of distance might only take 45 minutes, but there is so much pissing about at either end it ends up taking loads longer. Over here you have to check in an hour early to go through security, then it takes them 30-40 minutes to get the bags out and send them round the conveyor when you land. That makes it close to 3 hours. As for driving, most places have speed limits of 70Mph so that averages to more like 60 and a 200 mile journey still takes close to 3 hours too.
Every week I used to take a train 200 Miles on Friday and it it does city center to city center in just under 2 hours, with no pissing about at either end. I can buy the ticket on the web, carry all my bags on with me, then get off and go straight out of the station. This is a shit British train which can only go at about 125Mph, but it almost never hits traffic as it can be controlled centrally so actually stays close to that. Imagine how quick one of these Chinese bad boys could do the same journey?
Once you get above 300 miles like some cities in the states then things are different but for a lot of journeys on the same coast trains could save a lot of time. Train is never going to replace the airplane for speed on longer journeys, but on short ones it can be loads quicker. It also saves having to do 4 hour drives which suck if you have been working 8 hours before hand.
Why do the Europeans* have better roads and faster trains than us? Maybe there's something to that "socialism" after all
You in the states probably have better roads, but you are simply not interested in trains as these are mass transit. Mass transit means people sharing a method of transportation and that is too much like socialism for the states. You prefer the idea of market forces prevailing, which is what happened when most transit car systems, the closest thing you had to railways at the time, were bought then run into the ground by GM.
The big flaw is that internet celebrity doesn't pay nearly as well as drug smuggler.
Actually I bet it pays miles better. The people doing the actual smuggling are not the people who make all the cash, that goes to the people who control them. The actual smugglers are probably just immigrant workers who have been thrown back out by border security so many times that they get to know the least patrolled routes in.
The wage differences in the developing world are far less significant that the union rules GM needs to deal with. In a highly automated factory the machines and materials become a far more important cost component relative to the workers. Honda has started several US factories and pays a decent wage without the overhead of a unionized workforce.
And the main benefit of not having a unionised workforce seems to be an ability to pay a lot less:
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/laborprof_blog/2007/10/neal-boudette-w.html
The Big block V8 line is being closed. The Tonawanda Engine plant still makes smaller engines. But there aren't positions for the V8 guys, so they are all laid off. So not as bad as I originally stated. Doesn't make it any less painful for the area though.
The unfortunate reality is that as the cost of goods transportation has become cheaper it has become harder and harder for workers in the developed world to compete with the developing world where people will work for 10c per hour. There are also the issues of health and safety laws but those are a pretty minor expense compared to the actual difference in cost of living and hence wages.
In this modern world the only hope for the developed world is in jobs that require a high level of education. Any job that can be learned via an apprenticeship has moved abroad as the company paying for production decided they could take a hit on the poorer quality that was produced initially based on the cost savings of not paying a western developed wage.
Unfortunately that as much as us in the developed world would like to exclude certain countries from our markets there are people in charge of large corporations and on wall street who benefit the most from the current system that will fight this as it is not them being put out of work.
Come to think of it, whatever happened to that Europa lander they were planning which was supposed to bore through the ice?
As soon as you do this you risk contaminating what is underneath so you have to do this incredibly carefully. Last I heard it was on hold until they had figured out how to do it such a way that they did not introduce any contaminants in the process. They are looking to use a lake under the south pole for practice:
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-driller-02b.html
http://www.innovations-report.com/html/reports/earth_sciences/report-11000.html
Chase opened its contest to any charity whose operating budget was less than $10 million and whose mission "aligned" with the bank's corporate social responsibility guidelines.
Which basically reads as: Any charity Chase corporate management do not like is not seeing a dime.
Am I alone in thinking that whoever Bennett is, I have no interest in his vague ramblings?
It does not matter if you are alone in having no interest in read this, what matters is if I am alone in finding it interesting reading. Nothing can appeal to everyone the best you can hope for is to appeal to some, maybe even a majority but not necessarily.
Most people are able to simply read what interests them and ignore what doesn't, why cant you? Must every article on slashdot go through your own personal approval?
Apple made the decision to dress up generic PC hardware and plunk their OS on it rather than staying with hardware that set them apart from their competitors and made tying more acceptable. The only thing that truly separates a Mac from a generic PC these days is the software it runs. Companies like Psystar showed that by using generic PC hardware to run Apple's product. If Apple wants to be a hardware vendor, that is fine. They just need to choose what their product actually is.
Of course the problem is that then they could not benefit from economies of scale and by mass produced parts to the same extent. It would also impact their ability to run x86 code a native speed.
I am not saying Apple are legally or morally in the right, I am just saying it is obvious why they have chosen the path they have when the CPU makes up a large part of the expense of new PC regardless of the architecture.
Given the political statements on her laptop, one wonders what kind of provocation she might have tried with the guards. I don't believe that justifies their reaction, and wouldn't be surprised if they are disciplined (which will, of course, generate zero coverage outside of Israel), but most rational people understand that baiting Israelis is a rather dangerous sport.
Damn right, this is the country that has been said to have a policy of shooting unarmed civilians by one of its own army snipers.
"Sergeant Wahid Taysir, the sniper who killed Hurndall, has already said a policy of shooting at unarmed civilians existed at the time."
Full Article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/jan/30/israel
Ok, the guy in question may have been saying this just to save his own skin as he was on trial for murder, but the large number of people, including children, killed in Gaza last year does make you wonder if maybe he was telling the truth.
So, it sounds petty, but I think it matters a lot. Your work environment and the attitudes you deal with are absolutely going to influence the results of your work. I'm going to argue that the bottom line for the company really does want me to wear my headphones, and if you can't at least ponder the possibility that I might be right... you're not really understanding your technical business.
To be honest, I agree with you. Where I work we all socialise alot together, have a media centre PC in the office and when we work late frequently bring in a Wii or a choice of DVD's to watch while we wait for a client to decide if the release we have just down outside office hours is a go or no-go. But I worked in far worse places in the past and I have heard plenty of horror stories from friends. Every year our last day before Christmas is spent playing computer games in the office.
I did say in one of my previous posts I would never like to work in a code factory where everyone gets there own cubicle and is expected to spend 8 hours straight staring at there own monitor. I would leave pretty quick, but I would do my damndest to work like a daemon while I was there and then tell them that it was the environment that sent me packing when I had my exit interview. I would try and be as nice as possible about it so I could still have a reference, but if they asked they would certainly get an honest answer. This is really all you can do in this situation if you boss digs his heels in, so you still have to work while you are there or try and explain that big gap on your CV if they think you were dragging your feet and hence get shitty about your reference.
And you'll never be able to resell them. And, if Steam decides to ban you, you lose access to your entire library. Even if you're banned because someone stole your credit card, you have no recourse.
So how does someone stealing my credit card get me banned exactly? Do I keep my steam password in my wallet? Or is because some cretinous thief tries every credit card they steal on steam in case they have an account? I know this would theoretically work but please, if you have my credit card you have a limited amount of time to extract as much cash as possible, if you then take it home and log in to my steam account by emailing Steam support then the Police now have a lovely electronic trail to follow. That is such a collossal risk I very much doubt anyone would bother unless they really wanted to see what bars look like on windows.
I know many people bitch about steam banning them, but I have a sneaky suspicion they do one of the following which I never do:
1) Download a game hack (Actually this only gets you banned from online gaming AFAIK)
2) Try and resell or buy a resold game on ebay (Not sure if this gets you a ban, might just mean you wasted the money if you bought it)
3) Lose their email address, username, password and previous bank account details all at the same time (not really a ban, you just lost the account).
You might argue that these things should not get you banned, but I don't really care. I do not plan on doing 1 or 2 (even for that Operation Flashpoint crap I recently purchased) and 3 is impossible. If I lost my email account, username and password I would still know my previous credit card number from a statement, or by asking my bank.
The people I do sometimes feel sorry for are people who use some wierd bit of PC optimisation software they do not understand or buy a game on ebay only to discover the reason it was so cheap was that it was previously used by a hacker. I know it is a bit harsh but as an honest net player who has never cheated I realise that if they bent the rules in any small way for niavity then the cheaters would just exploit this. Anyone who has read anything about trying to bypass should know that humans are often the weakest link and the social engineering can often net the best results.
I also can't sleep with conversation going on.
And this is incurable? I bet if you ever had to live in an environment where background noise was constant you would soon start sleeping. Try joining the armed forces, when you have to spend 6 months living in noisy dorms and doing hard physical work all day you could have a shell go off next door and you would not wake up.
All your petty excuses could soon be sorted out if we still had national service. Not that this is a reason to bring back national service for everyone though.
It could very well be the Israeli government with their finger in this pie.
Maybe, but then again the ISP's could just be doing this to maintain a reasonable level of service to people who do not use P2P.
The fact is that when you rent a ADSL service from any internet company as an individual you are not buying dedicated routing and guaranteed bandwidth. The figures they quote for bandwidth are maximums, not minimums. With this in mind they can do whatever they pretty much like.
If you do not want to be subject to this you can subscribe to an ADSL service that offers minimum guaranteed bandwidth. These do exist it's just that they are horrifically expensive because very few people need them.
Actually it's not the fines or enforcement. It's training. Every police vehicle I've seen has a laptop mounted on the center console. Every time I see a cop driving around they have one hand on the keyboard and constantly glance back and forth between the road and the computer.
I am guessing you are from the states. Here in the UK we keep our police in pairs when on patrol in vehicles. This means the guy in the passenger seat can use his radio or whatever, the driver can concentrate on driving.
The parent poster is spot on though, there are very high fines for driving while on a mobile but the police are reluctant to throw the book at motorists for it unless they happen to be behind you for half a mile without you noticing and hanging up.
A similar thing happened to me at a previous employer (around January 2007). The desktop he gave me to use was a Pentium 3-era beige box that had a tendency to bluescreen at inopportune moments.
Any company that was well run would just replace it rather than require you to bring in your own laptop.
The lead programmer, who had been present at the aforementioned meeting, later told me that no such concerns had been raised.)
So did you ever find out who was telling the truth and why the other one was lying to you? Sounds intriguing but you should probably be glad you used to work there rather than still do.
Must be nice not having attention deficit issues, but many coders do, and controlling auditory background is a necessity for them to get any work done.
Believe me when I say I used to be terrible, but it was not doing me any favours at work so I had to sort it out. It was mentioned to me in an appraisal as being something I needed to work on so I did.
You have to remember programming involves quite a bit of personal thought and some people are more efficient when there is a stability in terms of ambient sound.
And you have to remember that if you are going to do something professionally for 30 years you are sometimes going to have to do it in conditions that are not your ideal. The people who do best are the people who can maintain long term productivity regardless of the office next door having builders in, the person who normally answers the phone is off sick and you still have to get the project out the door as a team.
I know you might prefer to listen to music, but remember that is only a preference. If it becomes an essential part of your daily routine then you are not doing yourself any favours.
On the other hand, conversations are something I can't help but respond to, especially when it's a question.
Even worse, a questions of a technical nature regarding computers.
Learn to concentrate, its a valuable skill. I know it is incredibly hard at first, but it can be done. The first step is to not respond unless someone asks you a direct question. If someone in your vicinity just asks a general question, then ignore them and carry on with your work. You might have already been distracted and listened to the question, but this is the first step and you have to not answer. This is about breaking the habit of responding to things you do not need to and the first bit is the hardest. Once you start viewing these things as annoying distractions from your work rather than welcome distractions you will find blocking them out easy.
I used to always be the first to answer the phone in our team, and the first to answer general questions to the room. Nowadays you can ask me a direct question and I can still tune it out and not actually hear what you said if I was not looking at you right at the start. It is truly amazing how nice it is to be able to just block out all background noise unless I want to hear it. It also helps you tollerate annoying co-workers much more easily, you simply forget they are next to you in no time.
As to original topic of programmers all being forced to not wear headphones, that is just something we all have to deal with. There are so many development houses where this is not allowed that you just have to deal with it unless you are going to spend your entire life at one company under one boss (not realistic). I suppose you could always ask the question at the end of an interview but that might come across as a little bit petty.
I personally would never like to work for a cubicle style company where there is no interpersonal contact. I like being able to talk to another human being occasionally. Sometimes when a colleague talks to me, i have to politely say I really need to concentrate, but sometimes it is nice to spend a few seconds reminding myself that I am a human being not a coding machine. The recommendation for people working in front of computers all day long is that you do take regular breaks and stand up periodically so why not also walk across to one of you colleagues who also looks like he is doing the same thing and have a quick conversation.
How much do you actually remove?
Remove? Why remove anything, instead just start afresh.
I generally only change my kernel config when I buy a new PC or add new hardware. If I am building a new PC I start with a vanilla kernel source and then go through enabling just the functionality I need, and screw all those modules I just build it in unless it has to be a module. This may result in kernel that does not fit on a floppy disk but why would I care? it doesnt fit on a punched card either.
I know this takes time, but it is a good way of learning a bit more about how Linux works.
They're being "nicer" than any other multi-billion corp I can name.
This is the most insightful part of your post. I personally so them doing plenty of stuff that I consider to be "evil" but so do all companies that reach their level of success. When I look at the company on balance they are still more aligned with my morals than any of their competitors in search. If there are any other search engines that produce the same quality of results and have a more friendly attitude please post some links (not yahoo or bing please, joke posts not needed).
There have been maybe ten stories about Google becoming "the evil empire" in the last week or so. It seems to be a running theme right now.
It will be for some time as well, they have just been too successful too quickly and without absorbing enough of the corporate crony-ism that they should have done. This has resulted in them coming out on the "wrong" side of the fence on some key issues like net-neutrality.
The whole way they floated on the stock exchange in the first place pissed of a lot of corporate america as well since they tried to make it a level playing field for people buying in. Normally Wall Street like to get first dibs then throw a few scraps out to the public. This means that the people who block vote the shares the investment banks own then get a hefty say in running your company.
Google has done too many things their own way so they have made it known that they are not a team player in corporate land. As result of this there have been many people sitting around waiting for an excuse to try and get their own back. They now see the Microsoft - AT&T sponsored "Google is bad for privacy" campaign as a way back.
Remember - The reason nobody wanted to buy their search engine in the first place was because everyone else in the market preferred the idea of making us only see the results that paid the most. I do wonder whether the other search engines have actually changed their minds permanently, or if it is just to keen users happy while their biggest competitor still shows quality results.
Blizzard haven't really fight against the private servers good afaik, and why would they - anyone who has ever tried any of them knows how crappy they are.
The sad part here is people who might for cheapness reasons to play on those servers instead and think the game is crap, while in fact the server just sucks.
This is exactly why Blizzard would try and shut them down, they reflect badly on the game as a whole. I know you could say only stupid people would think this, but stupid people can still post there opinion to the internet :)
(See, told you so)
Incidentally, you can sign up for experts exchange and get access to the answers without paying. You just need to sign up as an expert and post some useful answers that help other people regularly.
The paywall only applies to people who only want answers without ever giving any back. I know they make you dig a little on the site to find out how to sign up for free, but real experts generally are quite good at digging out answers so should not find this too hard.
I'll rebutt the dollar bill analogy as well. When someone downloads a movie, they can watch it privately without telling anyone, so there is no consequence to the outside world from the act of privately watching a pirated movie.
Actually, you have still cost the company who made the movie the value of one rental. You might say that this does not apply since you would never have paid, but if that is really the case then why did you spend the time watching it? You obviously had a certain level of interest in the product in order to invest the 2 hours of you time, so why not pay a small amount to cover that enjoyment you received.
Remember, if nobody ever paid to watch any movies or play any games then people would stop producing them in their current form. As much as I love
Linux and free software, I recognise that somethings simply do not work as free software. I have been looking for an open source first person shooter for many years, and I have never found one that compares with the paid for products produced by the likes of ID, IW, etc.
You just repeated my argument against distribution, not downloading. Two different things, two different sets of arguments.
Remember, without someone to distribute copyright works illegally you would not be able to download them illegally. Are you saying that someone posting a game to the internet and giving it away free should be prosecuted and yet you who knowingly benefited from their illegal act should not?
Also, how do you download paid software for free without indulging in a certain level of distribution? The Pirate Bay? Bittorrent? This involves you sharing the torrent as you download it? Or do you limit your software so that it never uploads a byte? On many torrent sites that counts you as a "leech". They often boot users whose ratio goes below a certain level. All of this forces people who download copyright works, to distribute them as well.
Distribution and downloading are opposite side of the same coin. Without one, there can be no other. And saying that you should be able to download something but the person providing you with that download should not be able to is a ridiculous level of hypocrisy. If you were not downloading it, they would not be distributing it.
Intellectual property is a bankrupt and indefensible notion.
I am not so sure about this. If I spend many hours thinking of very novel and original way of doing something useful, should I not be able to live off the resulting earnings for a while before the person who did not invest any time in the idea can just copy it and undercut me? Since they did not have to invest the time in its invention, their costs will be lower so I cannot compete on that basis.
In my ideal world I would freely share all my ideas for the good of mankind, but unfortunately the good of mankind does not pay for a roof over my head and put food in my belly. Until it does I want to be able to do something I enjoy and earn money for it, since this beats earning money for doing something I hate.
Many people often answer this with the service argument, but this does not always work. Some things simply do not suit the software as a service model, especially computer games since many people are resistant to pay for play.
I cannot help but think that until we have abandoned the concept of money, then we will always have to allow a certain level of IP protection to someone who invents something original. So the real debate should maybe become about how much IP protection there should be and how long it should last.
And as a final note, I am just going to rehash one of Richard Stallmans recent points: That the whole GPL and open source concept relies on copyright law. Without the law of copyright and IP then some private company could just take any open source product they liked and then sell it or a derivative product for a profit.