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.

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.

Go fuck yourself.

'nough said.

What I learned in my years in IT Compliance (SOX) is two things:

a) nobody really understands these things (ITIL, SOX, Agile, take any buzzword you want), including the people charging you at high-class escort levels for consulting.
b) there are many ways to skin a cat.

SOX is actually very simple, but consulting companies are not interested in simple, they're interested in selling a lot of expensive consulting hours, so they turned it into this monster. I was the Senior Manager for SOX in a 2500 people company and I was not overworked. Another company in the same corporate structure had a room full of people doing SOX, and I dare say their compliance wasn't better than ours.

ITIL is more formalized, but I don't see why anything in it has a hard requirement for the insanity you describe. I'm fairly sure the issue wasn't with ITIL, but with the particular way it was implemented. I'm almost certain it was implemented by outside consultants, am I right?

Just like nothing in Agile prevents you from making architecture decisions early on. It just tells you to keep an open mind for changing them. And nothing in ITIL tells you that you can't change anything, it just tells you to do it in a way that properly tracks the change.

I'm not saying these things are not often nightmares in the real world. I am saying that they do not have to be. There is no "it has to be horrible" clause in ITIL.

The problem is not with Agile, but with people who believe in magic potions.

Nothing in this world ever solves all problems. Nothing in this world ever fits everyone. Agile is no exception. It might be good or bad, depending on circumstances such as your team, your culture, your project and a dozen more.

The best you can do as a leader (manager, lead dev, CTO, whatever) is to pick and choose and come up with a system that works for your company, your people. It might be Agile, or Agile with something else mixed in or something else with some Agile mixed in, or no Agile at all. It depends.

If you believe you can take something that someone else cooked up without knowing your situation, and just apply it by the book and that's it, then you are not doing your job.

They are traitors and should be jailed. In fact, since they believe they're involved in a "war on terror", maybe we should try them for treason under military law.

Also, I wouldn't trust the statement that the chancellors office didn't know anything.

And people still fall for that argument, which amazes me to no end.

Yes, markets need liquidity.

No, markets do not need 5000% liquidity.

Everything is toxic in overdose, even water.

The real people to throw in jail are the ones who made it possible. The guys who deregulated the markets so much, the ones in oversight of the finance system who didn't see these things approaching and the people who dissolved all the protections of the real economy against the finance market because they were greedy for quick bucks.

Politicians, mostly, but we should also go after the lobbyists and their employers who influenced them.

Of course, that will never happen. Society rarely becomes self-conscious enough to get rid of its parasites.

That is exactly what I mean. I would even go one step further at the end: Without the risk of the computer compromising the user. Because the computer in itself is worth its scrap metal value and that's it. Everything of actual value is in the user - the data, the communication, the access to 3rd party networks and services. Not that one particular user in front of the machine, maybe, but a user.