Take the money and run:) Give them the tools to cover all the basics that a business person would understand. Just enough to run at a sub-standard operational level that might work under the heroic efforts of local labor, but fail miserably given the infrastructure, cultural differences, and adversarial role of contract negotiations (e.g. contractor does what's in contractor's best interest because he's not a long-term employee). Also, do this slowly so as to extract as much money as possible. When this fails, be there to offer a "fix" with mix of on-shore help. When things improve dramatically, slowly shed the contract offshore labor or relegate it to menial crap work the local labor force doesn't want to deal with. We've been doing this rather successfully in the software world for a decade now:)

Yep. It's real nice for Microsoft to be able to hold the monopoly gun to a hardware vendor's head and say, "You can support _OUR_ operating system at _YOUR_ cost, on _OUR_ schedule, regardless of how difficult it is or you can simply fuck off and die. Your choice." It's too bad Linux, BSD or any other OS on the planet can't have a way of doing the same thing. Don't blame Linux, blame the hardware manufacturer and vote your dollars. It's the only power we as consumers have.

I've been voting my dollars as best I can for years: no Linux support? No sale.

Yes the fact that human sexuality involves human emotion and intimacy is worth bringing up. But i think you are being a little bit hopeful there. I don't think the average Joe Bloggs is going to sit and explain those parts terribly well even if they already are trying to explain the facts of life. If a child is already being socialized by parents who are warm and understanding, they're probably also learning most of the fundamental skills to achieve satisfying emotional intimacy with a future love anyhow. If they aren't, because the family home is maybe awkward or slightly dysfunctional, then sure it would be great if they had it pointed out to them by someone, but i'm pretty sure they would have to either learn how to do so by themselves, through personal growth, or perhaps be a bit of social failure. A big part of why young kids get something from porn is just to see the technical aspects, what goes where, what moves does one use, how can a woman have sex with a donkey? What you're suggesting, Tom, is a much more elementary set of social skills, which hopefully they've already picked up on before they're even actively interested in porn.

I'm sorry you've given up on your convictions. But you know, it's never too late to change your mind and decide to live your life. For starters, why not back off the "Diagnosis Murder" or at least try to watch only what you bother to record on your DVR. Then, when TV time is done, pick up something new & interesting to learn in the open source world. Spend some time at your local Linux Users Group. Have you revised your "short list" of reasons why Microsoft are a bunch of disgusting assholes? You may not be a gamer, but perhaps your friends & families deserve to know that (just like their software products), Microsoft also cranks out garbage hardware with 40%+ failure rates (see http://www.destructoid.com/new-survey-puts-xbox-360-failure-rate-at-42--171088.phtml). Give the history lessons of Stack Inc., "cutting off Netscape's air supply", the anti-trust case and the fact that before Outlook the whole notion of a virus being spread in an E-Mail as *LITERALLY* an old Internet joke.

I'm approaching 40 and I've been a software developer for almost 14 years now & fighting and hating Microsoft since I first laid my hands on an MCC Interim Linux distro on six 3.5" floppies in 1993 as I learned that there was better, more secure & more capable software in the world than DOS. I've learned a lot, built a career, and I'm not about to give Microsoft a pass to pollute the world with more crap, vicious business tricks & closed "standards" as they always have just because I'm starting to get tired.

"Old" is a state of mind, and once you decide to stop growing and learning you're going to be stuck there...

ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: "Way to go, sport!" (you started a new game!)

Sorry. Thought I was a tortured Federation Starship captain there for a moment...

Although come to think of it, I do wonder how many bananas Best Buy get's for a crappy Sandisk MP3 player w/ 3 year extended warranty....

Nah. That would require me to RTFA.

Besides, higher education is only about coursework the same way international travel is only about airports...
Would he like to tell the world how it should approach physical therapy based on the one time he sprained his ankle?
     

I know the US is permanently emotionally and intellectually scarred due to the impact of fucking puritans,
but calling Playboy "porn" is way over the edge. If Playboy is "porn", then looking at images of the
Venus de Milo must be considered "viewing amputee fetish porn"...

As a rabid M$ hater, anything that keeps the garbage-ware that is Windows out of the hands of the typical idiot consumer and helps break the retarded view that "Computer must mean windoze" is good for technology in the long run. Good work Intel, and good luck to ABM*. May the beast from Redmond continue to die the death of a thousand paper cuts..

*Anyone But Microsoft

Start with teachers playing the role of overpaid coke-addicted managers & sales people with no ethics telling them what to do, when to do it, and how to do it (despite knowing less than the 5th graders). Move on to telling them to steal designs and cut corners on safety in order to meet a deadline for the quarterly numbers. Weather they pull it off or not then becomes irrelevant. Tell them they cost too much and that Chinese and Indian 5th graders can do better work for 1/10th of the cost. Send them home without recess or snack. That'll give them the real experience of any sort of engineering in the western world....

Back in the early '90 the whole HST vs V32.bis was a big deal for a couple of years. It's a bit sad to not see this mentioned in terms of the impact to the PC modem world...

Steve Yegge's post is (line for line) more of a masturbation session on how cool Google is.

Although he also makes the point quite well that if you're all rock star coders in a company
driven by engineering instead of marketing, you don't need no "steenkin'" methodology. But
then again, that's more of my first complaint now isn't it;)