Agreed. This thread is nothing but an opportunity for developers to whine about the 'poor working conditions' of their jobs. Of course, that isn't going to stop me from reading it.

That sounds a lot like T.I.M, The Incredible Machine. A game they used to make us play at geek camp. Little did we know, we were actually learning something...

Anybody else craving a Sea Breeze?

Also, apparently Steve Jobs was pretty vocal about the uselessness of DRM for a couple of years before Apple dropped it. Unfortunately, since Apple doesn't own the music, it wasn't their decision.

As an anglophone living in Quebec, I can say that while historically, some of the language laws did help improve a situation ripe with prejudice against French, in the last 25 or so years, the tides have turned and the laws are now oppressive, prejudice against English, and more importantly, counterproductive. It is clear that the intent of this law is to promote French language video games in Quebec. It is also obvious that this will fail.

Punishing noncompliance will have an adverse effect on French video games. Let's see some incentive. Tax breaks or grants to companies that release in French at the same time as English. Money talks, bigotry walks.

It is well known that the power generated at a site greatly exceeds the amount of power that can be delivered over a distance. While there is enough wind to generate the US's power consumption needs, how much extra would we need to generate to ensure that the required amount actually reaches the US? Everybody seems to jump at opportunities to generate seemingly limitless amounts of energy, however more attention and research should go into making systems more efficient and operate with lower power. Also, with the distance factor in mind, it is clear that if I were to plant solar cells on my roof, I would reap a much higher percentage of the energy generated than if I were to use power generated from wind in the Oceans.

Remember... "it' doesn't like to be called God.

That's really quite brilliant. That would be metered kind of like cell phone plans.

Throttling generally causes pretty large customer backlashes and a lot of resentment, as it is generally an unfair method of controlling bandwidth. In my own experience, customers have an easier time dealing with Bandwidth Caps, as they can grok that bandwidth costs ISP's money, but they don't feel discriminated against. Extra fees for over-usage charges can help finance a larger bandwidth pipeline in the future.

Also, looking at the usage stats, can you actually determine that P2P is a major cause of congestion? The last time I saw a breakdown of types of traffic, HTTP still took up the largest portion of bandwidth even in peak hours, on account of sites like youtube and google video.

Continue with the self teaching. It's an important tool. More important than the languages you learn is the ability to learn new languages. Sure, that .Net certification will get you far in your Miscro$oft friendly workplace, until one day somebody says, "shit, this legacy system we need you to maintain was written in PERL". At which point, your self-teaching skills will be your WIN.

I know a number of people who stopped reading the comic strip Dilbert because although it would make them laugh, from time to time a strip would address something remarkably specific to their workplace... and they would just die a little inside.

The arrogance of educated workers isn't anything particularly new however it is something that seems to drift from field to field along with educational trends. A couple of years ago I read an article on how something like over 60% of CEO's would not hire anyone with an MBA on account of how disastrous former employees had been. At the time, and as a generality (no I'm not talking about you, Mr. MBA who happens to read slashdot) MBA graduates tended to assume that because of their diploma, they knew how to run a department or company better than people without the equivalence in education, but many years of experience. Now this trend is starting to apply to programmers. They expect that with their degrees and certifications, they will be better workers, and thus given better opportunities than people many years their senior. Now I'm not saying we are all supposed to LIKE Bill Gates, or anything, but his high school diploma has certainly gotten him far. No amount of education will ever replace work experience. Learning new or even old out-dated languages is part of any intense IT job, and only with experience will you be good at troubleshooting and reverse engineering the kind of poorly documented stuff that you will be expected to do. Personally, I have the same level of education as Bill Gates and have dropped out of college twice, but that hasn't prevented glamourous opportunities from coming my way. On account of my skill, experience, and knowledge of my companies products, I've been flown to Edmonton (okay... it's really not THAT glamourous), while some of my colleagues have been to Vancouver several times. Now I'm not saying higher education won't get me farther in life, but not having higher education has certainly not prevented hard work and experience from contributing to an interesting career. Any college graduate should know that your education will get you nowhere without hard work and level headedness, and that an inflated ego will only hold you back. I don't think it's necessarily fair to entirely blame the baby-boomers for this scourge of arrogant graduates, but as a trend, I certainly suspect they didn't help. The boomers did grow up in a time where education guaranteed a more exciting career and life. Then 'everybody' went to school and we wound up with Generation X. You'd somehow hope that this younger generation (of which I am pretty much a part) would have caught on. Let's just blame videogames and short-attention span TV instead.

LOOK AT THE MONKEY!!!