My Dad asked me once how I got DVDs that I owned onto my iPod Nano, and if he would be able to do it himself. I told him it was a pretty convoluted process involving multiple pieces of software I downloaded and built from source, some shell scripts, and invoking the Nyarlthotep, the Crawling Chaos, at the appropriate moment.

After a few minutes of research, I bought my Dad a piece of software for $20 that with one button click rips a DVD and transcodes it into an iPod-compatible file. I believe it was something from Cucusoft. I then watched him easily rip his entire DVD collection to an external hard drive using that software, This made me realize something important: The saying "Sure, a tech savvy person could do this, but not an average user..." is only true because "tech savvy" people (like myself) are morons and will happily accept a poor user experience and hours of lost productivity to save $20, and then pat themselves on the back because they did something "cool". Meanwhile the "average user" has already been watching their movie for a couple hours.

Or my favorite example from my home town, LUSFiber.

Your local government has picked Charter to be the local monopolist. The solution isn't to get Verizon to lay lines, it's to allow alternative cable providers to operate. If it comes down to it, require Charter to sell access to their lines. If Charter throws a fit, see how they like running cable without government granted right-of-ways.

Also, the Federal Government fscking LOVES XML. Like, a lot. The things I saw in the new "protocols" they're deploying for internatl air-traffic control data stuff... Wow...

Having said that, I don't really have much sympathy for someone who's trying to help students and employees circumvent network policy. They can watch their porn or check facebook on their own time.

Actually at my last job I'd regularly have to "circumvent network policy" to just do my goddamn job. That policy was quite literally set by Congress, by the way, so good luck getting it fixed.

Maybe we shouldn't apply technical solutions to these sort of non-technical problems. Maybe we should just discipline/fire people who waste time at work, or trash school computers.

So you read the handy transcript right below the video, right?

I see the benefit of driverless cars, but people need jobs too.

I fail to see what job would be eliminated by my purchase of a driverless car.

So that the Java Calendar objects provide consistent(ly bad) behavior across all platforms.

Not really a dumb question, just have to understand that's a design goal for Java: to abstract away anything platform specific.

There are limited run craft brews that get up to the $100-200 range per bottle.

I several times a year buy $10-15 bottles of beer.

I think you haven't done your market research very well.

I really appreciate the assurances of random anonymous giggling internet tough guys.

They really help me sleep at night.

Eclipse tries really hard to have good C++ support. I'm using Indigo still (I think), on my workstation. It does a few things well, but some of the automatic warning/error detection is bad bad bad...

As far as GUI editing, Qt's Creator is actually pretty great. Curious how it will integrate QtQuick going forward. As someone else pointed out, Eclipse actually has really good GUI editing capabilities for Java now, thanks to Google.

So, yeah. I think Eclipse + Plugins (and Qt Creator) is plenty sufficient for development on Linux. Is it as good as Visual Studio on Windows? No. But I'd MUCH rather develop a GUI-based desktop application for Linux using Qt 4.x than ever having to deal with Swing... and GridBag...

Congress gave them some extra money to put it off for a while, but they still are planning furloughs for civilian employees. So, yeah, GP was full of shit...

It also included the President in 2004, 2008, and 2012, in case you haven't noticed.

Bullshit. They most certaiinly had the statutory authority to spread the manpower budget however they wanted.

That's not how sequestration works. Every program was cut 10%. The DoD is avoiding furloughs by laying people off, most likely.

The summary is wrong. All workers are furloughed 10% of their time, which is 1 day per 2-week pay period, ie: ~2 days a month.

Also, the FAA doesn't pay overtime. Pretty much all their employees are exempt, and/or salaried.

Did you read the bill, by the way? Every program, every account was cut by 10%. There was no way to "absorb the cuts with less impact". The budget for labor hours was cut by 10%. That means you can pay 10% less labor hours.

Source: I'm a contractor who works for the FAA in R&D.