Your analogy is wrong, a comparable mechanic would be one that fixes race cars in his spare time. And in both cases, the spare time work probably makes them better at their primary job.

I have two points along those lines:

1. Writing software isn't like pumping gas, cleaning hotel rooms, or driving a delivery van. Unless you are a world class genius, even a very slight amount of effort devoted to self-improvement means that you will be able to write cleaner, less error prone, easier to read, easier to maintain, more flexible code every year than you did the year before. If you have zero interest in writing software outside your day job, I can be confident the code quality I get from you today will be the exact same I get from you in five years, ten years, or twenty years and you will be exactly as competent to handle any given task then as you are now. In certain tasks that's fine with me - provided you only ever want salary increases to match inflation.

2. In my own career, I've found that the better I became at writing software, documenting it, designing it, writing tests for it, using source control, setting up development environments, etc.... the more I enjoyed it. I phoned it in at my job from age 24-30, and the only thing that made me improve was getting assigned tasks outside my comfort zone when no one else at the company was available to bail me out. Then in my early 30s, I had a little bit of enjoyment in what I do and started reading Slashdot and Lambda the Ultimate and so forth. Now in my late 30s, I love my work. I may be an awful developer relative to most of the software developer population, I can't judge that accurately. But I am certain my skill today is dramatically superior to what it was five years ago, and in turn that's well beyond where it was ten years ago. So when I see someone that works in this field but never willingly learns new things or discusses ideas beyond exactly what is required for work, I believe in most cases it means they're not skilled enough to enjoy it.

I am not asking anyone to make writing software their sole passion or give up nights and weekends to read on the topic or write code on side projects. I don't do that myself. I read about one non-work-related technology book a year, or take one Coursera class, and tackle a few little personal projects (e.g. setting up a Minecraft server on a VPS for my kids). That is barely a hundred or two hundred hours of work related to my career outside the day job, but the payoff is enormous.

Good point. I think Valve has a tough but not impossible path to take. I think some casual gamers will switch exclusively to Android and iOS. I think some portion of the serious gamers will be satisfied to use the Windows Application Store plus Xbox, especially as the application stores for Windows RT, Windows 8/8.1/9, Windows Phone, and Xbox converge.

But you're right that in five years - and probably sooner - a SteamBox with better performance than an Xbox One will cost less and have a much wider and cheaper game selection.

Now I grant that the games in the sales statistics are mostly indie games, not a list of top level titles. But the sales revenue percentage from Linux ranged from 1-6%, which is much better than I expected.

But I have a hard time seeing SteamOS get much of a foothold. I would love to be proven wrong. But it has got a weaker selection of big name games than the competing consoles are expected to get, and a weaker selection of big name games than the Windows version of Steam will have, and most of the hardware skews will be more expensive than an Xbox One and Playstation 4. Plus, last time I checked, it won't have support for Netflix, Skype, and similar services. That's a hard sell!

I want to get a SteamBox. But I would not be surprised if we have the only one in town.

I posted this elsewhere, but I read that the CEO of Motorola had been threatening to sue the other Android device manufacturers with Motorola's patents. So Google didn't buy those patents to protect other Android device manufacturers from Microsoft, it bought them to protect those manufacturers from Motorola.

All good points, but I keep looking at the Nokia Lumia 1020 and getting jealous of that camera. It's tough these days because so many vendors have been caught paying shills for fake reviews. But I'm hoping some Android device will be as good as the Moto X in most respects and also match - or at least come close - to the camera in the 1020.

I could have sworn I read somewhere that the CEO of Motorola had been threatening to use Motorola's patent portfolio to sue other manufacturers selling Android devices. So supposedly the top reason Google bought them was to prevent them from adding a Motorola Android Tax on top of the Microsoft Android Tax and Apple Android Tax.

Conversely, the biggest problem with the purchase for Google is that it could make the other Android device manufacturers nervous that Google would give Motorola preferential treatment. In turn, they might contemplate a jump to Windows Phone, Samsung's Tizen, or the Chinese fork of Android called Aliyun.

So to me, what Google did here may have been expensive, but I can see the logic behind it. They stop Motorola from extorting the other Android device makers. They move Motorola's devices from 'suck' to 'decent'. They strengthen their own patent portfolio in the Intellectual Property Legal Wars. Then they sell off Motorola so that it's clear they won't screw the other Android vendors to strengthen the brand they own.

I don't follow your logic. I have seen nothing to indicate that relationships involving lesbians or one woman and multiple men have more legal standing in the US than relationships between gay men or with one man and multiple women.

Right, right. I think that's the most likely explanation too. But I didn't want to open another can of worms by making that point, because every Slashdot discussion remotely related to food or health has a tendency to deteriorate into a flame war in which we the fatties are demonized.

Regardless how much personal responsibility is related to the obesity epidemic, the headlines and promotions based on the idea that it's getting worse are mostly just sales vehicles for the diet, fitness, and liposuction industries.

Keep in mind that, despite all the headlines built to grab ad revenue, the obesity epidemic in the US reached its peak in the late 1990s and obesity rates have been high but stable (not increasing further) since then. So the real question is what changed in food, plastics, personal eating habits, and social patterns from 1980 to 2000 but then stopped getting worse from 2000 until now.

The other interesting thing to note is that much of the rest of the world - except the parts where people are starving - is experiencing its own growth in obesity rates.

Why "against the male population"? A polyamorous relationship involving one woman and more than one man, or more than one woman and more than one man, would have the same legal difficulties.

I think the practical problem with legal benefits to polyamorous relationships is that they become more expensive to the government. There's a small tax break for married couples, and they can share among other things social security and medical insurance benefits. I don't have a problem extending that to any two adults. Once you extend it to any three or more, it gets more expensive. Say five people have a legally recognized polyamorous relationship - does that mean they get all five get a substantially larger tax break? What if four are dead and the last one is 88 years old, does the last survivor get five Social Security checks? etc... etc...

I'm fine with that. If there's no legal benefit to marriage, no matter whether you're gay, straight, transvestite, trans-sexual, or just two friends in a platonic relationship that live together, that's fine with me. But what we have right now is unfair - the Judeo-Christian religious definition of marriage carries legal benefits, and all other definitions do not. Either grant the benefits to any two adults that want a secular partnership, or to none.

I agreed with your line of thinking for almost 20 years, but I no longer do.

The lesser of two evils argument is a big deal. I support abortion rights. I support separation of Church and State with respect to marriage (give any two adults that want legal marriage rights those rights, or give no two adults those legal marriage rights, don't selectively define who can and can't have them based on religious law). I support social welfare programs. I support a tax system that shifts the tax burden into a purely progressive system - which is not what we have now, because of the differences between the income tax and the capital gains tax. The Democratic Party supports those things, the Republican Party does not, so the Democrats are my lesser of two evils. But both parties are hopelessly corrupt.

The current surveillance without court oversight and indefinite detention of terror suspects without court oversight was started under a Republican President and majority Republican Congress and perpetuated by a Democrat President with a majority Democrat progress.

The Democrats that made me one of the hopeful in 2008 are trying to block, trap, and prosecute the whistleblowers that Obama promised to protect in his campaign. There was a Slashdot article when that statement was removed from the Obama campaign websites a few months ago.

No Child Left Behind was the last serious attempt to reform education on a national level, and it was bipartisan and undoubtedly started with the best of intentions, but it takes money away from schools that need it most, gives money to schools that need it least, buries teachers in paperwork, and sucks the love of learning out of kids by grilling them with standardized tests.

The Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards to save the environment by increasing fuel economy are a token gesture meant to appear like action without doing anything - the US uses 70% of its petroleum per year on transportation, but that's not all personal passenger vehicles - commercial vehicles aren't subject to any similar big jumps in fuel economy standards. A big chunk of the energy and other natural resources used in the country is used by businesses, and in many cases it's cheaper to deal with inefficient energy use on an ongoing basis than to make a big one time investment in more efficient equipment and then either pay interest on the loans you made to get it or deal with the opportunity costs associated with investing in efficiency instead of something else. CAFE is a classic case of "make it look like you're doing something!"

The War on Drugs against marijuana is the latest form of the make-work programs under FDR's New Deal. Employ some people (DEA and associated prosecutors, plus lots of prison staff) and keep other people out of the work force (drug offenders in prison). We should have just put the pot heads to work digging ditches, spent the rest of the money funding free rehab clinics for any citizen, and saved ourselves a lot of heartache - and it's taken too damn long for the federal view of a substance clearly less dangerous in all respects than alcohol to change.

Our freedoms are eroding, our education is failing, our veterans are suffering, and the middle class is shrinking. These clowns are all either incompetent to fix it or too busy profiting from the problems. I will still support a local candidate that's Democrat or Republican based on the person. But on the national level, I will be voting third party, even if I think that third party is looney, because the other two parties are Sauron and Saruman trading jokes between Mordor and Isengard while the world burns.

Thanks. Again, I didn't know.

The future of most of consumer computing is mobile. Microsoft desperately wants a big piece of that market, so they did something they knew full well would enrage millions of loyal customers - they forced their mobile UI onto desktop and server devices as a way to get people who were avoiding Windows Phone 7 like the plague to get used to its user interface. Windows Phone has under 5% of the mobile market in the US but closer to 8 or 10% in other countries, and Microsoft is still spending money like water to grow marketshare.

If Windows 8 was merely Windows 7 2.0, it would have sold dramatically better and Microsoft's mobile future would be dead instead of alive but weak.