I've worked with scrum, and it sucks. It only works if people work together, are largely self-organising, and don't deliberately chuck roadblocks into other teams paths to get them off their own joblist.
I believe the latter of those in particular gives away pretty bad organizational problems, scrum or no. They would probably manifest themselves just in a different way if you tried to do things different on the surface.
Oh, and if management can largely get out of the way and not constantly interfere with the process, i.e. unilaterally adding stuff to the burn-down chart in the middle of a sprint!
Yeah, that can be a problem. The thing is, scrum isn't a magic incantation that will make your projects and teams work just by uttering it. You actually have to do it more or less properly for it to work. Your organization clearly isn't scrum-compatible if management is coming and adding stuff into your sprint backlog; so, if you can't or don't want to change that, don't use scrum.
If management insists on doing "scrum" but actually acts contrary to it, the management doesn't appear to understand what they're doing. Again, that'd probably cause icky problems, scrum or not.
I'm not really a scrum believer but have seen a few scrum projects, some of them better done, some of them worse, none of them really done properly as scrum, so I know how much it can suck if it isn't done right. I agree that the whole thing is somewhat loaded with buzzwords. But the better the organization and the team has actually adhered to the methods, the better it has worked.
I conclude that the top people should be the scrum masters, because if you bring in someone inexperienced to be a scrum master (i.e. a project manager), all your projects will go to pot.
I agree that a scrum master should have experience of project work, but he doesn't necessarily need to be a top developer. Also, a scrum master isn't technically just another name for a project manager. A scrum master doesn't make decisions; he's basically someone who makes sure that the team doesn't have to waste their time on unnecessary problems ("impediments") and that the whole thing doesn't break down into chaos.
Can't do your testing because of some network problem? Or you aren't exactly sure about a detail of the requirements? Bring that up in the scrum meeting and the scrum master should solve your problem so you don't have to interrupt your work because the scrum master will run the errand for you.
Did a meeting break down into an argument between two team members about an implementation detail? It's the scrum master's job to intervene and get the issue solved between the two rather than needlessly waste everyone's time in the meeting.
Got a design issue and you have to decide which approach to take? That's not up for the scrum master to decide. The decision should be made by team concensus, or if they don't have the expertise to decide, get help from an actual manager or expert from outside of the team (architect, or what you have).
I would recommend seriously reconsidering whether getting a better pipeline of events and allowing work to stretch past 'daily scrums' would be better.
I don't know exactly what you mean to say, but I think you've misunderstood something. A daily scrum is more of a status meeting. It doesn't mean that you have to switch tasks as a result of each meeting, though it would be good to have tasks divided into small enough chunks that you can usually complete them within a day or two.
No, just like GP said, a scrum master isn't a manager. Of course he can't decide to change the methodology since he isn't a leader with authority to make decisions like that. (Most likely questions like that aren't in the hands of the team either.)
If a scrum team is spending significant time in meetings because of "scrum", you aren't doing it properly. The daily meetings shouldn't take more than ~15 mins each. Yeah, it's easy to go over that if you start talking all kinds of unnecessary stuff in the meetings instead of being to the point, but it's part of the scrum master's responsibilities to take care that it doesn't happen.
Eat well, and realise that your mind lies to you about how bad things truly are.
Eating well and balanced is good advice. I'm not sure how far the way of thinking you suggest is going to carry a majorly depressed person, however; if you truely could believe that things aren't so bad simply by saying so, you wouldn't be majorly depressed in the first place. You may be able to feed yourself the idea for a moment, but it won't stick or solve anything in the long run.
It may help if you can rationalize far enough into the roots of the problems that you'll be able to believe that they aren't really problems after all, but that's a vastly different matter. That's what we have therapists to help with.
Life is about the experience. Enjoy every dirty, awful bit of it.:D
It's rather common in depression that you can't find enjoyment or pleasure in most things, including all those small things that people really should be enjoying. That exactly is a part of the problem itself -- not a cause but a major result of it.
And given that my taxes are paying these people's salaries (that is, you and I are "the company"), I'd really rather them not.
You're also, in the end, paying the salaries of people working at companies whose products or services you're buying. How is this different from that? Why would you accept employees of a company of which you're a customer to "steal their company time", but not if they're working in the government?
On the other hand, I'd think that most companies that have a clue wouldn't mind their employees spending a bit of time in something not related to work, at least if those people are doing jobs that require half a brain. You can't really be 100% productive for a full day in a job requiring concentration and thought if you don't have small breaks now and then. You may think you are, but your brain really keeps having them even if you pretend you are not.
I didn't like the "awesome bar" (is it really called that?) at first, but now it has become a killer feature. It has practically replaced short-lived bookmarks I used to make for sites that I'll likely want to visit again in the near future, because now I need only to remember something about the page title or the URL and I'll probably find the page again in seconds.
It's a bit slow, but not disturbingly so to me -- and my home desktop hardware is 5-6 years old. Of course that might also just mean I'm less sensitive to a little bit of slowness here and there...
The drop-down list in the location bar of Firefox 3 also shows sites from the browsing history that match what you've typed, either in their URL or the title of the page, so just refraining from bookmarking them doesn't help. If you've visited an amateur porn site and go on to type something beginning with "am" in the search box, it might show it.
Of course, if you're concerned about that, you should probably just delete those sites from the browser history.
With Ubuntu 9.04, also keep in mind that video / 2D / 3D operations are not accelerated because Canonical chose to use FLOSS-only drivers on this release. That means, your CPU works overtime to account for all of Ubuntu's fancy compositing. Apparently with Ubuntu 8.10 restricted drivers are still allowed, so you might want to consider downgrading.
What?
I'm (more or less) happily running the proprietary NVidia driver on my 9.04 system, installed through System > Administration > Hardware Drivers.
Of course it doesn't get installed by default, but it never did.
Wireless worked just fine from the day I installed Ubuntu on my work laptop over two years ago. Suspend works fine but required a tweak that would probably have been there if the OS had been shipped and supported by the hardware vendor. It's silent except when you put load on both cores of the CPU... at which time it does get noisy by design. Regardless of the OS.
The laptop happens to have pretty much all-Intel hardware, including the integrated graphics chip. When it was new, the rather poor battery lasted just a tad over two hours on Linux, and perhaps a little longer in Vista that came pre-installed. If there was a difference, it was in the order of ten minutes, not hours.
The bottom line is dead simple: the major problem isn't the way the OS itself but that you don't get the OS with support from the hardware vendor. Do you think Windows would fare particularly well on a PC with random parts, without someone taking care of testing it on that particular hardware and providing the necessary drivers, software and other tweaks?
No, it wouldn't. It's surprising that a random Linux distribution works even as well as it does on randomly selected hardware.
The real solution to the problem is to either make the interface between the hardware and software totally standard down to the detail so that the software doesn't need a detailed setup to run optimally on any particular hardware, or to get the OS with at least some kind of support from the hardware vendor, just like you do with Windows.
The former option is of course practically impossible. That's why the next time I'm buying a new computer with Linux on it, if at all possible, especially if it's a laptop. That doesn't necessarily solve the problems because the hardware vendor might well be oriented to "as long as it works", but at least it's a start.
I didn't RTFA but I'm a little confused by the argument that it doesn't make sense to port the game because you'd practically have to use a binary-only driver in order to run it. Who has ever run any id tech 4 games decently with an open source graphics driver? What is it that has changed since last time?
(I know someone got Doom 3 to "run" on the R200 or something like that but I'm talking about a reasonable level of performance without a total sacrifice of the graphics that the designers meant for the game.)
I guess I could count myself in to either of the factions.
My phone is four years old, based on an ancient Nokia platform, can't really surf the web, data connections are limited to GPRS, and it doesn't have a decent music player. On the other hand, it's easy and slick for calls, its T9 keypad is decent for texting -- unlike some other mid-range phones I've tried -- and I can tether it over bluetooth if I really, really need to check that mail or something. And it cost about 160 euros four years ago.
I have no urgent need to replace the phone, but if I did replace it for any other reason than it ceasing to work, obviously I'd want something more. If I got a device capable of being a general web device, communications platform, music player and whatnot, I wouldn't want to be limited by the details of its software. Its usefulness to me as a communications platform would be limited if it only allowed me to connect to a single IM service such as MSN and not other IM services or SSH, or if I couldn't have a decent IMAP client on it for e-mail; it wouldn't be that great a music player if it didn't play the formats I have music in; and if I could search the web and read e-mail but not copy and paste an address from e-mail into the web browser or a map application and switch between the applications with ease, that would be rather cumbersome.
If I go the route of doing all those things on a mobile device, I'll want it to be more or less a general-purpose computer limited not by such details of the software supplied by the vendor, even if physical size and hardware will always place practical limits. Having played around with an N810 before, the N900 seems intriguing in this sense. However, I don't desire to have all those things in my pocket quite enough yet to justify the price right now. Perhaps some day.
Until then, I'll stick to my old paradigm of just having a small device for making calls and texting.
EA published System Shock 2. They just didn't design it. I guess that's the key.
I don't think anyone should try making another System Shock game just because they want to make a sequel to the series, though. If someone were to do that, it would have to be because they happened to get a great idea and vision for building new things on top of the spirit of the original games. That's the only way I could see a sequel to System Shock succeeding, and you can't force such a vision, so "we want to make a sequel because... we just want to make a sequel!" is wrong, no matter who does it.
If you get an idea of what the crucial pieces of the original spirit are and how to retain them, how to tastefully bind the pieces together, finish the story, and bring in something new into the game in the process, then you can go ahead with figuring out who could implement those ideas well enough to make justice to the originals.
I'm particularly sceptical about sequels to titles like Populous which were originally interesting because they did something that was a pretty new concept in games at the time: in Populous, for example, it was the modeling of behaviour of relatively large populations, and giving the player seemingly great powers to drive those. (SimCity did something similar in that sense at around the same time, but I don't know of many other mainstream games that did.) Many of these games relied pretty heavily just on those novel ideas.
If you tried to make a new game now based on the same idea, it wouldn't be novel or exciting anymore. You'd have to make up a new and different concept in order to achieve a similar "wow" effect, but if it's going to be based on an entirely new concept and idea, why would you call it with the same name as an older title with a different concept, except for marketing purposes? That's a paradox -- you can't both be novel and retain the old idea. The only way it would make sense would be to use the original concept and develop it further so that it brings in an additional concept that is compatible with the original spirit but still novel enough *today* that it brings a new "wow" effect. I'm sure that's not impossible, but it's rarely seen, and probably rarely in the mind of people thinking up sequels.
I've seen really good sequels. System Shock 2 comes to mind, as do Civilization games. These sequels did exactly that: took parts of what was central to the spirit of the original games and built a game on top of it that brought in something else that made the combination interesting.
On the other hand, Populous 3 wasn't particularly interesting, IMHO, probably because it didn't have any particularly novel ideas anymore. It just shared the name and a loosely connected background story, neither of which made the original games interesting.
The logic is obvious and I'm sure you're correct about it, but it still doesn't make any sense. Based on the way you put it, I guess you agree.
A registry of sex offenders exists (supposedly) to keep track of people of potential danger to other people. If someone urinates in public and a fellow human happens to see a glimpse of his tool, I'm pretty sure that doesn't mean the person taking a leak is any more likely to rape someone than anybody else is.
But then, as other people and some of the linked articles in this discussion have pointed out, it's questionable whether even actual sex offenders are much more likely to commit another similar crime than any random person is, and you don't keep a publicly viewable registry of other violent criminals either, so I guess it's not even supposed to make sense.
I find urinating in public generally more or less offensive (much more so if it's done at a random corner on the street, not really so much in a concealed bush), and would really like the drunked idiots in the city to stop doing that on the street (yeah, it happens), but seriously, if it counts as a felony that you have to register as a sex offender for... someone has a rather weird idea of a sexual act.
And if this is true, is every piece of Windows software a derivative work?
Doesn't really matter for application developers if the Windows libraries, or tools for developing with those libraries, come with a license that allows applications to use the code by calling it through the published API without being considered a derivative, or something similar. (I can't be bothered to check if the licensing terms actually do state something like that, but I imagine they might.)
Note that being registered at the employment office as looking for work (which has the side effect of being included in the stats) is a requirement for getting unemployment benefits, so the figure is likely a somewhat accurate measurement for the number of people who are without work and aren't overly rich regardless.
Yes. Which is exactly why it's important that businesses don't get a big concentration of power compared to the workforce. You don't want to give a selfish agent too much power over the other (selfish) players in the same game. You want to keep the game balanced so that both parties can benefit and development can happen.
Surely any corporation would want all the power they can get for furthering their selfish goal of filling their owners' pockets, but that's a completely separate from the issue of whether it's a good idea to give them that power.
That only works legally if your friend's toolkit is a "major component" of the underlying operating system. Other than that, the GPL doesn't allow redistributing GPL-licensed code linked with GPL-incompatible code.
You can compile it with tools that are available for quite a few platforms, though, which is a little different than being restricted to software on computers from a single vendor. Having a computer is a rather fundamental requirement for most tasks involving practical computer programming (yeah, I know about Dijkstra) but having a specific kind of computer is slightly less so.
Slashdot Mirror
I've worked with scrum, and it sucks. It only works if people work together, are largely self-organising, and don't deliberately chuck roadblocks into other teams paths to get them off their own joblist.
I believe the latter of those in particular gives away pretty bad organizational problems, scrum or no. They would probably manifest themselves just in a different way if you tried to do things different on the surface.
Oh, and if management can largely get out of the way and not constantly interfere with the process, i.e. unilaterally adding stuff to the burn-down chart in the middle of a sprint!
Yeah, that can be a problem. The thing is, scrum isn't a magic incantation that will make your projects and teams work just by uttering it. You actually have to do it more or less properly for it to work. Your organization clearly isn't scrum-compatible if management is coming and adding stuff into your sprint backlog; so, if you can't or don't want to change that, don't use scrum.
If management insists on doing "scrum" but actually acts contrary to it, the management doesn't appear to understand what they're doing. Again, that'd probably cause icky problems, scrum or not.
I'm not really a scrum believer but have seen a few scrum projects, some of them better done, some of them worse, none of them really done properly as scrum, so I know how much it can suck if it isn't done right. I agree that the whole thing is somewhat loaded with buzzwords. But the better the organization and the team has actually adhered to the methods, the better it has worked.
I conclude that the top people should be the scrum masters, because if you bring in someone inexperienced to be a scrum master (i.e. a project manager), all your projects will go to pot.
I agree that a scrum master should have experience of project work, but he doesn't necessarily need to be a top developer. Also, a scrum master isn't technically just another name for a project manager. A scrum master doesn't make decisions; he's basically someone who makes sure that the team doesn't have to waste their time on unnecessary problems ("impediments") and that the whole thing doesn't break down into chaos.
Can't do your testing because of some network problem? Or you aren't exactly sure about a detail of the requirements? Bring that up in the scrum meeting and the scrum master should solve your problem so you don't have to interrupt your work because the scrum master will run the errand for you.
Did a meeting break down into an argument between two team members about an implementation detail? It's the scrum master's job to intervene and get the issue solved between the two rather than needlessly waste everyone's time in the meeting.
Got a design issue and you have to decide which approach to take? That's not up for the scrum master to decide. The decision should be made by team concensus, or if they don't have the expertise to decide, get help from an actual manager or expert from outside of the team (architect, or what you have).
I would recommend seriously reconsidering whether getting a better pipeline of events and allowing work to stretch past 'daily scrums' would be better.
I don't know exactly what you mean to say, but I think you've misunderstood something. A daily scrum is more of a status meeting. It doesn't mean that you have to switch tasks as a result of each meeting, though it would be good to have tasks divided into small enough chunks that you can usually complete them within a day or two.
No, just like GP said, a scrum master isn't a manager. Of course he can't decide to change the methodology since he isn't a leader with authority to make decisions like that. (Most likely questions like that aren't in the hands of the team either.)
If a scrum team is spending significant time in meetings because of "scrum", you aren't doing it properly. The daily meetings shouldn't take more than ~15 mins each. Yeah, it's easy to go over that if you start talking all kinds of unnecessary stuff in the meetings instead of being to the point, but it's part of the scrum master's responsibilities to take care that it doesn't happen.
Eat well, and realise that your mind lies to you about how bad things truly are.
Eating well and balanced is good advice. I'm not sure how far the way of thinking you suggest is going to carry a majorly depressed person, however; if you truely could believe that things aren't so bad simply by saying so, you wouldn't be majorly depressed in the first place. You may be able to feed yourself the idea for a moment, but it won't stick or solve anything in the long run.
It may help if you can rationalize far enough into the roots of the problems that you'll be able to believe that they aren't really problems after all, but that's a vastly different matter. That's what we have therapists to help with.
Life is about the experience. Enjoy every dirty, awful bit of it. :D
It's rather common in depression that you can't find enjoyment or pleasure in most things, including all those small things that people really should be enjoying. That exactly is a part of the problem itself -- not a cause but a major result of it.
And given that my taxes are paying these people's salaries (that is, you and I are "the company"), I'd really rather them not.
You're also, in the end, paying the salaries of people working at companies whose products or services you're buying. How is this different from that? Why would you accept employees of a company of which you're a customer to "steal their company time", but not if they're working in the government?
On the other hand, I'd think that most companies that have a clue wouldn't mind their employees spending a bit of time in something not related to work, at least if those people are doing jobs that require half a brain. You can't really be 100% productive for a full day in a job requiring concentration and thought if you don't have small breaks now and then. You may think you are, but your brain really keeps having them even if you pretend you are not.
I didn't like the "awesome bar" (is it really called that?) at first, but now it has become a killer feature. It has practically replaced short-lived bookmarks I used to make for sites that I'll likely want to visit again in the near future, because now I need only to remember something about the page title or the URL and I'll probably find the page again in seconds.
It's a bit slow, but not disturbingly so to me -- and my home desktop hardware is 5-6 years old. Of course that might also just mean I'm less sensitive to a little bit of slowness here and there...
The drop-down list in the location bar of Firefox 3 also shows sites from the browsing history that match what you've typed, either in their URL or the title of the page, so just refraining from bookmarking them doesn't help. If you've visited an amateur porn site and go on to type something beginning with "am" in the search box, it might show it.
Of course, if you're concerned about that, you should probably just delete those sites from the browser history.
where's the porn-block extension for autocomplete?
Or a porn-get extension with autocomplete?
With Ubuntu 9.04, also keep in mind that video / 2D / 3D operations are not accelerated because Canonical chose to use FLOSS-only drivers on this release. That means, your CPU works overtime to account for all of Ubuntu's fancy compositing. Apparently with Ubuntu 8.10 restricted drivers are still allowed, so you might want to consider downgrading.
What?
I'm (more or less) happily running the proprietary NVidia driver on my 9.04 system, installed through System > Administration > Hardware Drivers.
Of course it doesn't get installed by default, but it never did.
Wireless worked just fine from the day I installed Ubuntu on my work laptop over two years ago. Suspend works fine but required a tweak that would probably have been there if the OS had been shipped and supported by the hardware vendor. It's silent except when you put load on both cores of the CPU... at which time it does get noisy by design. Regardless of the OS.
The laptop happens to have pretty much all-Intel hardware, including the integrated graphics chip. When it was new, the rather poor battery lasted just a tad over two hours on Linux, and perhaps a little longer in Vista that came pre-installed. If there was a difference, it was in the order of ten minutes, not hours.
The bottom line is dead simple: the major problem isn't the way the OS itself but that you don't get the OS with support from the hardware vendor. Do you think Windows would fare particularly well on a PC with random parts, without someone taking care of testing it on that particular hardware and providing the necessary drivers, software and other tweaks?
No, it wouldn't. It's surprising that a random Linux distribution works even as well as it does on randomly selected hardware.
The real solution to the problem is to either make the interface between the hardware and software totally standard down to the detail so that the software doesn't need a detailed setup to run optimally on any particular hardware, or to get the OS with at least some kind of support from the hardware vendor, just like you do with Windows.
The former option is of course practically impossible. That's why the next time I'm buying a new computer with Linux on it, if at all possible, especially if it's a laptop. That doesn't necessarily solve the problems because the hardware vendor might well be oriented to "as long as it works", but at least it's a start.
Except that Ubuntu has shipped with a tickless kernel by default for a while.
I didn't RTFA but I'm a little confused by the argument that it doesn't make sense to port the game because you'd practically have to use a binary-only driver in order to run it. Who has ever run any id tech 4 games decently with an open source graphics driver? What is it that has changed since last time?
(I know someone got Doom 3 to "run" on the R200 or something like that but I'm talking about a reasonable level of performance without a total sacrifice of the graphics that the designers meant for the game.)
I guess I could count myself in to either of the factions.
My phone is four years old, based on an ancient Nokia platform, can't really surf the web, data connections are limited to GPRS, and it doesn't have a decent music player. On the other hand, it's easy and slick for calls, its T9 keypad is decent for texting -- unlike some other mid-range phones I've tried -- and I can tether it over bluetooth if I really, really need to check that mail or something. And it cost about 160 euros four years ago.
I have no urgent need to replace the phone, but if I did replace it for any other reason than it ceasing to work, obviously I'd want something more. If I got a device capable of being a general web device, communications platform, music player and whatnot, I wouldn't want to be limited by the details of its software. Its usefulness to me as a communications platform would be limited if it only allowed me to connect to a single IM service such as MSN and not other IM services or SSH, or if I couldn't have a decent IMAP client on it for e-mail; it wouldn't be that great a music player if it didn't play the formats I have music in; and if I could search the web and read e-mail but not copy and paste an address from e-mail into the web browser or a map application and switch between the applications with ease, that would be rather cumbersome.
If I go the route of doing all those things on a mobile device, I'll want it to be more or less a general-purpose computer limited not by such details of the software supplied by the vendor, even if physical size and hardware will always place practical limits. Having played around with an N810 before, the N900 seems intriguing in this sense. However, I don't desire to have all those things in my pocket quite enough yet to justify the price right now. Perhaps some day.
Until then, I'll stick to my old paradigm of just having a small device for making calls and texting.
Specifically you mean the United States world... Other developed nations do not have our problem for one reason or another.
Some do, although not quite to the same extent. Yet anyway.
EA published System Shock 2. They just didn't design it. I guess that's the key.
I don't think anyone should try making another System Shock game just because they want to make a sequel to the series, though. If someone were to do that, it would have to be because they happened to get a great idea and vision for building new things on top of the spirit of the original games. That's the only way I could see a sequel to System Shock succeeding, and you can't force such a vision, so "we want to make a sequel because... we just want to make a sequel!" is wrong, no matter who does it.
If you get an idea of what the crucial pieces of the original spirit are and how to retain them, how to tastefully bind the pieces together, finish the story, and bring in something new into the game in the process, then you can go ahead with figuring out who could implement those ideas well enough to make justice to the originals.
I'm particularly sceptical about sequels to titles like Populous which were originally interesting because they did something that was a pretty new concept in games at the time: in Populous, for example, it was the modeling of behaviour of relatively large populations, and giving the player seemingly great powers to drive those. (SimCity did something similar in that sense at around the same time, but I don't know of many other mainstream games that did.) Many of these games relied pretty heavily just on those novel ideas.
If you tried to make a new game now based on the same idea, it wouldn't be novel or exciting anymore. You'd have to make up a new and different concept in order to achieve a similar "wow" effect, but if it's going to be based on an entirely new concept and idea, why would you call it with the same name as an older title with a different concept, except for marketing purposes? That's a paradox -- you can't both be novel and retain the old idea. The only way it would make sense would be to use the original concept and develop it further so that it brings in an additional concept that is compatible with the original spirit but still novel enough *today* that it brings a new "wow" effect. I'm sure that's not impossible, but it's rarely seen, and probably rarely in the mind of people thinking up sequels.
I've seen really good sequels. System Shock 2 comes to mind, as do Civilization games. These sequels did exactly that: took parts of what was central to the spirit of the original games and built a game on top of it that brought in something else that made the combination interesting.
On the other hand, Populous 3 wasn't particularly interesting, IMHO, probably because it didn't have any particularly novel ideas anymore. It just shared the name and a loosely connected background story, neither of which made the original games interesting.
The logic is obvious and I'm sure you're correct about it, but it still doesn't make any sense. Based on the way you put it, I guess you agree.
A registry of sex offenders exists (supposedly) to keep track of people of potential danger to other people. If someone urinates in public and a fellow human happens to see a glimpse of his tool, I'm pretty sure that doesn't mean the person taking a leak is any more likely to rape someone than anybody else is.
But then, as other people and some of the linked articles in this discussion have pointed out, it's questionable whether even actual sex offenders are much more likely to commit another similar crime than any random person is, and you don't keep a publicly viewable registry of other violent criminals either, so I guess it's not even supposed to make sense.
What about a Slashdot account?
Clearly, Slashdot counts as an antisocial network.
Public urination? Sex offender? WTF?
I find urinating in public generally more or less offensive (much more so if it's done at a random corner on the street, not really so much in a concealed bush), and would really like the drunked idiots in the city to stop doing that on the street (yeah, it happens), but seriously, if it counts as a felony that you have to register as a sex offender for... someone has a rather weird idea of a sexual act.
Citation needed.
Yes, indeed.
And if this is true, is every piece of Windows software a derivative work?
Doesn't really matter for application developers if the Windows libraries, or tools for developing with those libraries, come with a license that allows applications to use the code by calling it through the published API without being considered a derivative, or something similar. (I can't be bothered to check if the licensing terms actually do state something like that, but I imagine they might.)
What if the work involves the plumber algorithm?
Wikipedia has some kind of a superficial description of how it's measured in Europe.
Note that being registered at the employment office as looking for work (which has the side effect of being included in the stats) is a requirement for getting unemployment benefits, so the figure is likely a somewhat accurate measurement for the number of people who are without work and aren't overly rich regardless.
Yes. Which is exactly why it's important that businesses don't get a big concentration of power compared to the workforce. You don't want to give a selfish agent too much power over the other (selfish) players in the same game. You want to keep the game balanced so that both parties can benefit and development can happen.
Surely any corporation would want all the power they can get for furthering their selfish goal of filling their owners' pockets, but that's a completely separate from the issue of whether it's a good idea to give them that power.
That only works legally if your friend's toolkit is a "major component" of the underlying operating system. Other than that, the GPL doesn't allow redistributing GPL-licensed code linked with GPL-incompatible code.
You can compile it with tools that are available for quite a few platforms, though, which is a little different than being restricted to software on computers from a single vendor. Having a computer is a rather fundamental requirement for most tasks involving practical computer programming (yeah, I know about Dijkstra) but having a specific kind of computer is slightly less so.