The first game I played on a PC was Star Trek. Those old text-based BASIC games were the best!

If someone is doing something truly disruptive or dangerous, I'd ask them to stop. I've never been one to worry too much about the feelings of others when pointing out what they're doing wrong. In the case of the cursing, crotch-grabbing guy, he piped down for a bit after the HR conversation, but went back to his "normal fucking ways" pretty quickly. As for the frequent self-adjustments, it was humorous more than anything, so rather than worrying about offending him, I mostly didn't want to ruin a good laugh, particularly as it was a long-standing joke around the office and one of the first things people warned you about before you met him.

This article reminds me of a couple of incidents earlier in my career:

I usually find the HR department to be pain in the ass, but there are times when they are indispensable. When I first started working, I was managing a team of fresh college graduates. They all went out together after work one Friday for "movie night." The next week, one of the women who worked for me came to my office very upset. Turns out that after movie night, she'd gone to a bar with her fellow team members, then taken him back to her place and had sex. She was worried about pregnancy and disease because the sex had been unprotected. She was also upset that he was "being cold to [her]" the first day back in the office. At that point, I just said, "this is a topic for our HR department" and walked her and her "movie night buddy" to the office of the HR rep for our area. The resolution was to have one of them volunteer to be transferred to another area, but there was subsequent drama anyway. Social ineptitude coupled with inexperience and raging hormones is an unusually bad combination.

I also worked with a programmer who cursed worse than a sailor and "adjusted himself" more frequently than an entire team of baseball players. We used to take bets on how many times he would grab his crotch during a conversation, and if the meeting was all guys, we'd all adjust ourselves for laughs and to see if he'd pick up on it--he was completely oblivious. For whatever reason it went on for years without anyone ever doing anything about it. On the cursing part, he did eventually get called in to HR and scolded for his language, to which I am told his exact response was "Holy shit, I'm so fucking sorry." He still kept his job, though.

Apparently China's firewall is a lot better than their drywall.

You mean RapidShare has something else besides porn on it? I'm going to have to grab my other joystick!

It's pretty interesting that all of the focus here is on Rupert Murdock, whose politics don't exactly dovetail with those of the Slashdot crowd. TFA also mentioned (and quoted) the concurring opinion of Tom Curley, who was president and publisher of USA Today and is now president and CEO of the AP. Where's the seething hate for Curley, USA Today, and/or the AP? Surely they are just as worthy of derision. Why not suggest that the AP's content also be pulled from Google, or that the AP update their robot.txt file to prevent Google's indexing them? The focus on Murdock indicates that almost all are either too dumb/lazy to RTFA or so biased that they focus only on someone whose opinions they disagree with. Either way, such a lack of inquiry and balance shows that the average Slashdot reader/commenter has more in common with average Fox News viewer than he or she would like to admit.

When I see girls like this, it doesn't surprise me, but it sure does send me into sugardaddy mode.

If that's the case, I'll have to dig through all of the checks for my patented penis enlargement pills to find the check from the Nobel Foundation.

Oh wait, the invention has to actually work?!?

Then shareholders should demand a bigger dividend if the stock's not going up. Right now the dividend yield is only 2.1%. The average dividend-paying stock in the S&L 500 has a 2.6% yield--with no growth prospects MSFT should pay higher than that. Otherwise, shareholders have a lot better investment options and should sell the shares until the price drops to a point at which the yield is reasonable.

Per my comment above, stockholders should start caring, because MSFT was higher back in 1998 than it is now. They only thing you're getting with MSFT is a 2.1% dividend yield with no long-term appreciation in share price whatsoever--except for the Nasdaq bubble and a couple of brief periods since then (at the end of the last bull market and the bottom of the crisis), the stock has sat between $20 and $30.