The Free Market assumes people are educated enough to make informed decisions. The thread's grandparent is saying that most people don't understand enough about computer networking to say "Hey, I should buy a PC game instead so I can play it whenever I want". Admittedly this is a trivial example of this kind of free market failure . I'm sure you could find better examples in the recent economic meltdown over CDOs.

If it's a commercial application, it's typically as simple as running the installer script or binary provided for the vendor (uh...just the same as Windows...)

Errrrr, no it fucking isn't.

and if the vendor has done their job right it should just work out of box with a wide range of Linux versions.

There are no development APIs for developing and installing third-party applications quickly and easily as there are on Mac OS and Windows, and as such, Ubuntu and other Linux distributions have no applications of note written for them. It's at this point that the market share bullshit is wheeled out, but we're talking about even the smallest of applications you find on Windows and OS X rather than the large well known ones. There is no effort whatsoever to create an application base of any kind. Ergo, no one but geeks living in a fantasy world (surely this is the release that will finally do it?!) ultimately finds Linux desktop distributions, especially when compared with the hype behind Ubuntu, useful. Beyond the stuff in the package repositories there is sod-all you can do with it, and if you want to update to a nice new version of an application that happens to be in the 'official' repository somwehere, sorry, but you'll have to upgrade. No one wants to put up with that shit.

It's already written into the bill... they need a REALLY good reason to suspect you; they are not allowed to "suspect" you do to skin color, race, or country of origin...

Now proving what their suspicion was in court may be difficult, but you'd better believe it'll be the first question out of the court appointed lawyer's mouth.

I don't carry most of those with me *because I don't want to lose them*. In addition to it not being a cops business to anything other than my first and last name, if I'm not being charged with a crime- First, and Last. That's all you get.

The European Computer Driving License may be helpful here. See http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=nav.5829 for a syllabus.

Professionals are paid for their time. Period. You can slice it however you want, but almost no one works piece meal. Most of those that do are VERY far down the skill ladders.

It was a nice try to slander me with accusations of working for McDonalds. Last time I checked, their POS terminals don't allow the user to initiate a web browser (or any other software).

Wether salary, or hourly, you are being paid for your time. Surely the result are what count (mostly), but there is usually an implicit agreement of a certain block of time, on certain days. If you can't abide the agreement, then you shouldn't make it. However, if you convinced someone to pay you salary, and then just do as you please, that's great. But it's not a career, kiddo.

It was disguised as a normal iPhone 3gs, and had a drop-protection skin around it. To the casual observer (which the guy that 'found' it claimed to be), it wasn't a test-unit.

Not at all...

I enforce the rules THAT YOU MADE UP.

They aren't MY rules. They are YOUR rules.

If you don't like your own rules, then tough cookies.

An anal geek is going to follow the given rules to the
exclusion of all else. A geek's job is to make sure that
stuff stays running. He's responsible for ensuring that
millions of dollars per hour is not lost due to someone
screwing up with relevant computer systems.

This "customer service" nonsense is for burger flippers at McDonalds.

This "customer service" nonsense is what causes professionalism to be discarded in favor of pandering with chaos being the end result.

Can you tell me that password again?

Or perl with the more than one way to do it will make it nearly unreadable if you have a different style in every line

I could see this being useful for Model-View-Controller type applications (dunno whether that's used in Java).

It would be cool to use your screen real estate to automatically open the view and model belonging to the controller you're coding.

Thanks for correcting me there! I've learned something new.

from a grading point of view iv'e never seen how anyone could get anything over 100% in anything unless there is extra credit involved and its being used for individual assignments. maybe you meant that but just saying that iv'e never heard of anyone with 105%+ ESPECIALLY when they only do "pretty good" on the tests.

Oh yea? My boss just busted into the bathroom stall and told me to stop wanking!

If Gates hadn't been stupid enough to give the order to build MS Windows on top of a crappy cutdown CP/M clone instead of on top of MS Xenix we wouldn't have needed Linux in the first place and the computers of the world would not be infested with malware beyond the dreams of science fiction. Gates had a lot of chances to get things right and missed the boat on multiple occasions. Thanks to him the "computer experience" for many is frustrating and annoying and computers are seen to be unreliable.