They are being discriminated against... discriminated against for being dumb. Dumb people are still people, you insensitive clod!

This article is about consumer products, and this comment clearly should be taken in that context. The typical consumer has never even heard of HP-UX or MPE, let alone possessing the requisite knowledge to judge either of the two. So in this context, yes, both are decidely "chopped liver". (It also could be argued both are "chopped liver" in any context, but that's a different discussion.)

It's not necessarily a good thing either. "Experienced" developers have a tendency to continue to code in the same way and continue to make the same "mistakes" because "that's the way we've always done it". Infusion of new blood is needed regularly to stir new ideas and uncover unnoticed design flaws. This is not to disparage experienced developers in any way -- there are a lot of positives that come along with experience. It's just ideal to have a good mix of experienced and more youthful developers.

While I don't know how common it is, there are American companies which follow this practice as well. A friend of mine recently received his MBA on the company dime, and he'll have to pay back 100% of the tuition costs if he leaves with one year, and 50% if he leaves within two.

Hardier materials and more robust construction methods may mean less wear and fewer costly repairs over time. but they also mean less long-term money going to the powerful construction companies who contract for this work.

Thankfully it's now modded +5 Insightful, as it should be. Perfect balance and harmony has returned to slashdot.

In other words, if you don't want it to be taken down without a fight, you better host it yourself. Don't count on one mega-corporation to protect you from another. I don't condone the actions of either corporation in this case, but (at least for now) we all retain the right to take our business elsewhere if we don't like what they are doing.

Fallout 3 from Bethesda had Windows Live for Games, which is the biggest pile of smouldering DRM turd I have ever been unfortunate enough to experience.

My ISP likes to rate limit people (i.e. drop packets) during peak times, and this entirely killed Steam/Windows Live logins. Steam behaves itself 99% of the time offline, but Windows Live was shit - I had to wait several days before I could actually create my initial account. There was an offline function after initial setup, but it was not always reliable (eg if you had a network connection, but didnt want to use it).

Oh, and even worse - if at any time Windows Live for games decides that an update is available, you cannot skip it whatsoever and cannot play YOUR GAMES THAT YOU OWN at all until it has performed the update. So you get a sniff of network access somewhere (airport wifi) and there's an update available that you dont get to finish too bad, you cannot play your games anymore.

your the one claiming god exists, it's up to you to prove his existence. that's how it works, you make the claim, you provide the proof. otherwise i can just say "aliens stole my lunch money", and claim victory when you fail to prove me wrong.

there's nothing setting god apart from a fairy tale in the eyes of someone demanding proof of his existence, the both lack any physical evidence.

Not taking BSD into account? Heh, Most BSD users love Apple since for the most part as a user OSX is a really pretty BSD. They took BSD into account when they made OSX, they just brought the BSD people into their camp so they don't have to fight against them, we BSDers fight with them!

Quite relevant to this discussion, I think would be that after prohibition ended (1933) the vast majority of organized crime *did* indeed lose all their black-market booze money, though there were still *plenty* of existing illegal activities for them to continue to capitalize on (prostitution, existing blatantly racist drug laws, e.g. the Harrison Act from 1914), and some new ones which conveniently materialized,only 5 years later, for instance: the Marijuana Tax Act)

Obviously we can't legalize actual violent crimes or bribing/blackmailing lawmakers, that organized criminals profit from. Though legalizing and regulating simple possession and sale of a freaking dried plant or some powder, would likely free up law enforcement resources to deal with those kinds of things. Again, one could argue that that's not a certainty, but what is?

We'll never find out *for sure* if "legalizing everything" will *drastically* reduce violent crime, unless we do it (it couldn't be more of a disaster than prohibition if that experiment failed) though, I think it's disingenuous to suggest that it wouldn't reduce violent crime at all, it's really pretty simple to see that it would.

The important question is: would legalizing the drugs cause more harm than the increased violence that their prohibition causes (directly and indirectly)?

I suppose that's a complex question, but I've never seen *anyone* present hard evidence that it would. In fact the evidence is growing from countries like Switzerland, Holland and even the UK -- that drug legalization/decriminalization programs do indeed have a net positive benefit to a society currently undergoing drug prohibition, especially when coupled with a good public health program for treating addiction, even though, seemingly there are some people that don't seem to be able to stop their self-abusive behavior. But if they are getting their drugs from a clinic, for free even, they're probably not out knocking over a liquor store.

Some of the same people who say that there's no climate change because it snowed last week would say that "the science isn't in" on this one too, and while they may have a point (albeit possibly for the wrong reasons) -- sometimes you have to do something, even with "limited data", simply because it's the right thing to do, even with risk of failure, or risk of making things worse.

Since hey, if it doesn't reduce violent crime, or generates millions of new addicts (yeah, right), then launch the war on drugs "reloaded" or whatever.

With alcohol people realized after only a decade that it wasn't helping (or maybe more because a few too many senators and their buddies got caught drinking.)

After over 70 years of racist, poorly-conceived reactionary drug policy, it's time to do something to change it. I'd suggest that "legalizing everything" would be less harmful than what we have now, in almost every way -- but ideally there would probably be some kind of regulation, which is something that would require mature, reasonably smart people, with the authority to enact law to sit down and discuss the issues and listen to people who have actually already studied and thought about the issues -- I wonder how long it'll be before the US has that.

You're right. The best way for a non-profit short on funds to attract attention and additional contributions is to cease fulfilling their charter.

Are you a tall, dark and handsome fellow who's obviously not happy with these findings?

Got any evidence for your claims? because I've yet to hear of such a case from any of the people I regularly play with on any VAC-enabled game I own. Punkbuster, yeah, they kick you out for the stupidest reasons (I believe until recently it detected ATI's Control Center as a 'cheat', and still does for the Steam Overlay), but it's a) just a kick, not a ban, and b) not VAC and therefore not Valve's responsability.

Free speech has nothing to do with it. The ban on minarets was a majority vote. You may agree or disagree with it, but the people voted. Switzerland still remains the most democratic country on the planet. The "democratic republic" of the US, UK and Australia doesn't even come close to the pure democracy that Switzerland strives for.