Boo fricking hoo, if "some" are "troubled" by the very natural fact that hard work can overcome all sorts of impediments. Their answer is to pretend hard work makes no difference by taking away the rich kids' advantages.

You are mixing morals with laws. The two do not always match.

It may be legal to funnel taxes out of a country where you make your profits, but I have not yet seen anyone make a convincing argument that it is (morally) right.

A lot of things are legal, but not moral. Lying to your best friend, cheating on your wife, pissing in the pool.

On the other hand, there are things that are moral, but illegal, usually because laws change slowly or don't cover all edge cases. Fortunately, many countries have a permissive judicial system where a judge and/or jury can decide that yes it broke the law, but in this particular case it's (morally) right to let it go unpunished.

They are not the same. Tax evasion is illegal, tax avoidance is at the very least a gray area, and in the extreme way most corporations implement it, certainly not moral.

Use the Firefox plug-ins Ghostery, Privacy Badger, Self-destructing Cookies, and Better Privacy and everything will be pretty much wiped out.

See above: enable "Do Not Track" in the Firefox Options/Privacy tab and you are (hopefully) in the clear.

Nah, just business as usual.

For pure evil, you have to go to Wall Street.

Some people within the United States may disagree with you. Pot, meet Kettle. Kettle, meet Pot.

Speak for yourself, eh.

They annoy me because they set up such stupid pointless conditions. Why would anyone want to go to market with a fox and chickens? Who carries so much gold that it will sink a boat, who would want to hire and trust a riverman with such a marginal boat, and what happens if the next passenger weighs five pounds more?

It's more fun to ask questions back and make them admit the questions are pointless.

And I don't want to work at companies that think such questions have anything to do with how I work, so I figure I may as well have fun blowing up the interview.

I'd hope to come up with some smart ass answer involving walking on a moving bus.

It's like those annoying questions about having two chickens, a fix, and a bag of gold, trying to cross a river in a small boat which can only carry you and one thing at a time. I always imagine saying that's a pretty sorry ass boat, and maybe he needs some good ole market competition in the form of someone with a bigger boat. Or maybe to say that if I am going to market, what's with the fox -- no one sells fixes at market, so why not kill it and drape teh skin over your shoulder so you can sell the only sellable part? Or if it is a fox market, let it eat the chickens now. Or if you are coming from market, leave the fox behind. And if you are carrying so much gold that it would sink the boat, you are either an incredbly attractive thief target, or you should be able to find someone with a bigger boat, or that boat is incredibly dangerous if it is that close to sinking. /get off my lawn

Last week. Whiteboard marker, to be precise, but if we had a blackboard in the meeting room, it would have been a piece of chalk.

Everyone who knows something about presentations also understands that Powerpoint is a horrible abuse and failure in at least as many situations as those where it is a useful tool. There are things that you can best show in animated slides, others are best described with prosa text, yet others with short and memorable phrases. In addition, everyone learns slightly differently. Some people can't remember anything in a lecture unless they take notes while for others watching all the slides or the scribbles on the blackboard is the most important and for yet others hearing the professor / teacher / workshop-giver is the main part.

The so typical and almost always wrong our-one-size-fits-all Microsoft approach will not solve any problems, it'll make it worse.

If kids these days don't know how to express themselves with pen & paper, then maybe that is something you should teach them? It's a useful skill, and even though I've been a computer guy since the C64 was state-of-the-art, for some tasks I still prefer a notebook over any iPad app, and the reasons are purely practical.

It's more than hiding, it's actually a trend. Google "Chaos Cinema" - there's some great analysis on how it came to be and what goes into it (camerawork, lighting, sound - much more than just short cuts).

...there are serious people and then there are clowns.

I'm the first to stand up and say that feminism in its current incarnation is just as evil as any other -ism and regularily crosses the border into misandry. However, portraying strong women in a fantasy world is not an attack on manhood.

Firstly, there's the fantasy aspect. Secondly, there is nothing wrong with strong women, and especially if you're a real man you aren't afraid of them. If you're a weak man, of course, who nurtures his illusion of superiority by surrounding himself with people even weaker than himself...

Unless the movie carries an "all men are evil" message, and from what I've seen and read so far that is not the case, I think in an ocean of stereotypical man=hero, woman=princess-in-need-of-saving Hollywood crap we can enjoy one movie every now and than that shows a different facet of life.

We've all seen and heard this kind of government behaviour before: In the communist countries.

In Eastern Germany there was a failed popular uprising in 1953. One of the most famous authors of that time, Bertold Brecht, coined a phrase following it that became immortal: If the government is not happy with the people anymore, wouldn't it be easier to dissolve the people and elect a new one?

He is spot on for today as well. It used to be the parliament would represent the people, and if we felt dissatisfied, we could dissolve it and elect a new one that represents us better.

But in almost all western countries, politicians have taken control of the political process that was intended to control them, and basically you don't have a chance to actually get a new government. You can choose different names, but they don't really mean different things. And more and more you hear politicians talk about their subjects (oh wait, isn't that the wrong way around? Yes, actually it is, but we're moving back to medieval mindsets!) in a way the reminds you of Brecht.

Then you want to stay away from Steam, because there are whole forums filled with people telling you that when something breaks, not only can't you play your games, Valve also doesn't give a fuck and will be about as helpful as a dead parrot.

If you think that many people use Bootcamp anymore, you're stuck in 2010. What I see in Windows stuff running on Mac is running in VMWare or Parallels.

Because the only graphics that exist in the world are the high-end games that were intentionally written for hardware that didn't even exist at the time of programming, yes?

Wake up, man. High-end gamers have long ago become the minority, ever since the rest of the world discovered that you can use computers to play games. "My little pony" games outsell most of the games reviewed in gaming magazines except for the top 20 or so. Farmville has more players than World of Warcraft had even at its peak.

Occulus Rift is a cute toy for a gamer, but for people working in the 3D design sphere, it could have been a tool. I'm talking visualisation, architecture, construction, event management. Everything where a look at what it will look like before you build or make it can save you thousands or millions. Now have you checked lately what creative people use? I sat down in a room full of design people less than two weeks ago, and every single one of them had a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. Zero windows computers in the room. You think they're going to give a fuck for your technical argument about driver support? If it doesn't support what they're working with, they'll not be using it, and that's it.