Hack the Planet!

My current office doesn't have a coffee machine at all (though it has a sign up at the entrance saying to switch it off at night), instead we get caterers sized tins of Nescafe Blend 43.

You don't work here for the perks.

With the withdrawal of Alcoa from the Australian market, we will no longer have Aluminum recycling locally available.

From memory it was Steven Levitt of Freakonomics Fame who drew the inference between abortion rights and crime statistics. He has an extraordinary way of looking at the world.

The sig started out as "In an NT World", "Metro" doesn't have the same 'ring' to it, the cadence is wrong. Tempted to go back to the original.

At the time I originally came up with it, I was bombarded constantly with how Apple was going out of business - Dell's statement that they should return the money to the shareholders was not the most pointed remark along that line. It's almost funny that they are currently one of, if not the, most valuable companies on the planet.

Sounds a lot like drinking 'Turkish' style coffee. I had a lot of this style of coffee in Indonesia as an exchange student many (many) years ago. You go used to stopping just before the grounds, leaving a residual sludge in the bottom of the cup.

That's why Keurig have partnered with Epsom.

I'm really surprised to have gotten this far down the thread without anyone mentioning the parallels to ink jet cartridges with DRM. I'm looking at you Epson.

There are some indications that coffee actually reduces your risk of some cancers.

I was in part responding to the idea that women get to choose to work lesser hours therefore it's fair they get paid less. Many women don't work lesser hours and the roles they more frequently work in are often lower paid per hour.

The reasons for this are varied and complex, but a significant part of that is the 'higher paid' STEM roles are seen as unattainable for women more than for men - even given a broad background of socio-economic factors.

Women are more likely to be channeled into nurturing or service roles such as teaching, nursing, childcare or aged care, rather than more lucrative roles such as sales or STEM roles. At the lower end of the economy, they are more likely to be a waitress than a construction worker - guess what pays more. Yes being a construction worker may be more physically demanding - but being on your feet all day waiting tables isn't being slack either. In Australia, tradesmen are some of the best paid people, I can assure you that the 'professions' for working class women are not paid nearly as well, they are likely to be a hairdresser or beauty therapist or a masseuse.

And you can bet that the construction industry is unwelcoming to women in very similar ways that IT is. I can tell you I've experienced both first hand having started in Architecture and worked directly on building sites as well as moving into IT and working directly with programmers and other IT types from the position of doing both Tech Support and now as a Systems Analyst.

You say that programming jobs aren't lucrative - that is a relative term. They may not be paid as well as a top performing sales person or someone in finance or banking - but they generally pay better than nursing or teaching or any of the personal care professions women tend to get pushed towards.

It has been shown in many developing countries that the best way to improve your economy is to give women more money. Here's a couple of studies to get you started. It makes no sense to keep 50% of the population explicitly in underpaid roles.

Acknowledging that this is totally a 'devil's advocate' type statement, but I suspect you would find there are plenty of women, particularly single mothers from lower income households, that work more than one lower paid job that total in excess of 40 hours (and some in excess of 60 hours) just to make ends meet.

Many of these women come from backgrounds that don't value education and are not equipped for higher paid roles that would enable them to work more manageable hours at a single job rather than terrible hours at more than one job.

This is not to say there aren't guys who work terrible hours, some in more than one job. But choosing to ONLY work 40 hours is sometimes a luxury afforded to people to can afford to do so, either because the job they have is sufficiently well paid or they have someone else supporting them.

Women also frequently are expected to be the primary partner responsible for child care, to be at home and available when the kids aren't at school, 'allowing' the male partner to put in the extra hours for the greater responsibility and career opportunities that equate to higher incomes.

Much of the push these sort of initiatives promote is not about mandatory quotas when hiring but about providing equal opportunities. Currently the opportunities are not equal, women are still actively discouraged from pursuing STEM jobs and encouraged to work in lower paid, lower status, nurturing based roles. If you want to see men becoming teachers or nurses or aged care - make changes so that the roles are perceived to be as valuable to the community and the bank account as programming or sales or working on an oil rig.

A friend of mine went to school with him and was reasonably close with him growing up. He has characterised Assange as sociopathic, largely as a result of his upbringing. Nothing would surprise me at this point.

I know when I answered I took video gaming to be a subset of the gaming I do. I also do puzzles, word games, card games, board games and PnP games.

Most 'true gamers'[1] play a broad range of stuff.

[1] Where 'true' gamers are like 'true' Scotsmen. :)

The proposed changes for D3:Reaper of Souls actually look pretty good and seem to address most of the issues people complained about with the exception of LAN play.

We all know that ALFA stands for Always Leave Finance Available. :)