You could also rename the intellisense DLL which solved the problem globally. That everyone at my company did this was a testament to how bad a pile of shit Intellisense for C++ was in VS2005 and VS2010. It's a hell of a lot better in 2012 - haven't used 2013 yet.

You want a proper laugh? Look at these power cables. There are no words.

No, he's right. In 90% of the situations that you'd use headphones you wouldn't get much mileage out of anything above decent $15-$30 earbuds. Don't get me wrong, I've got my expensive monitoring headphones for tracking, and I have a set of studio monitor speakers for my home recording setup, but I equally enjoy m $30 Pioneer phone buds and Creative desktop audio set for the kitchen. To a point the grandparent and I have it slightly easier than the people who absolutely want to have earthquake bass. You don't get earthquake bass with any kind of fidelity out of small drivers. It's just not physically possible. All these "bass enhanced!" tiny headphones and in-ears just have a resonant spike somewhere in the lows. Better lows? Bigger drivers. That means over-ears. And then they are either open and comfortable for large periods of time, but leaky as all hell meaning you either suffer from sound degradation from sound leaking in from outside so forget "fidelity", or you're annoying the crap out of everyone around you by the loud noise leaking away from you. Or you get closed over-ears. And sweat your ears off after anything longer than 20-30 minutes. And then you realize that if you add it all up, you can get an awful lot of enjoyment out of a good cheap pair of phones, and save your money to get a good amp and speakers with good drivers and crossovers for the spaces where you can listen to music on your own terms, in actual high fidelity.

Except that the studies show that when Y goes over 40 hours a week, the total amount of work you actually get done goes down. Not the average, not the work per hour, you get less work done in total than you did at 40 hours a week. So it is actually very much an "ism" - people repeating the same completely counterproductive action over and over in the hope that somehow they'll be more productive when they won't be.

Just be "that guy" at work that packs up and leaves at 8 hours that day. You'll get more done. Whenever you get flak, point back to these studies, and hammer home over and over again that you are getting the work done. In time the company culture will adjust and everyone there will be happier, including the bosses because more is being done with happier workers. Or you discover that you're working for a pathological employer who doesn't care about actual results but about appearances, but then you should leave anyway before you kill yourself working.

I have to respond to this, because it's clearly an attempt at a "balanced" view but missing some very important key points that distort your opinion.

First of all reducing the AGW debate to "both sides" with a neutral "middle ground" is disingenuous - in the count of number of people the balance is very strongly in favor of accepting AGW to degrees ( e.g. this recent set of studies arriving at between 91-97% consensus ). The denialists get disproportionate attention, which is actually a known type of political manipulation (e.g. argument to moderation) and this type of attention has been shown to disproportionately affect people who aren't specialized in the subject matter to moderate their position when no such moderation is required (more on this subject, though I can't find the scientific paper about it right now.

Second, appeal to "scientific purity" is overshooting. Science is constantly advancing, improving models, replacing wrong assumptions with less wrong assumptions. There is nothing "pure" about it, and in no way does it need to be to advance the cause and be useful to our lives. Words such as "purity" are much too loaded to be used, exactly because of the scientific approach. There's no need to deny - the scientific world does not have all the T's crossed and the I's dotted on AGW, just as it doesn't on gravity, physics and quantum theory, but we still happily cross bridges every day. The degree of certainty has long reached sufficient levels to warrant seriously looking at how to realistically (not politically, stupid carbon credits) mitigate instead of discussing a black and white position on AGW's existence.

And thirdly the AGW debate is much bigger than the USA. I understand that you have bipartisan issues across the board (not just AGW, and to be clear: I think both parties are in the wrong) but that doesn't extend to the rest of the world and this is a global issue.

So I think that while I don't entirely agree with your argumentation, I agree with your position. AGW is a science thing - and science has agreed that it exists though not to which degree. The challenge is to find solutions, and that's also with science.

Finally, I find the actual article very intriguing and somewhat challenging to my own views on AGW, as evidenced by my first thoughts on this: could it be that the geology of the antarctic is becoming destabilized because of the lessening of the weight of the ice sheet, in turn causing more geological activity? But that's a conjecture from an explanation that wouldn't challenge AGW, and real science must of course also look for other hypotheses.

Are you demanding rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty?

Fool. Women don't make bad decisions - it's just that reality reacts badly.

The test isn't claimed to be inaccurate, it's claimed to be non-representative of real-world usage.

If you're inside the car then you ARE toast at the end of it all.

I remember that one vividly. It's when the following phrase was coined "XML is like violence. If it's not working, you're not using enough of it yet.".

They really aren't that far behind anymore for an enormous amount of uses, some pretty graphics-intensive. From the HD integrated graphics onwards Intel has been making great strides with every iX generation, catching up in most ways that matter in all but the most demanding areas (high end games and GPGPU). And I'm not saying that because I love these guys, I spent a decade telling customer after customer that Intel just straight up lied (as did the driver) about the graphics capabilities of the 9XX series of integrated graphics, that our software would never, ever work properly on these cards, and they should have read the minimum specs that clearly stated that we didn't support these chipset (this is software that was an order of magnitude more expensive than the laptops they were buying to run it on, but customers can be a silly bunch). Having that same argument with management every two years "because thousands of people have these chipsets!" (they'd usually shut up after a realistic time estimate of the work to support these cards, along with a table of probable performance and visual quality).

No, the HD-series integrated chipsets make me quite happy, because now we can at least have minimal support for people who buy these laptops (it's nearly always laptops), and their experience will actually be pretty good.

As an aside, it's easy to tell that TFA is absolutely true by how few major gaming titles ship. Oh, wait.

The Sony MDR's are highly regarded in pro audio circles. I hate Sony-the-company with a vengeance, but I have a pair of ancient MDR-V900s that are incredible. I've used them for tracking, monitoring, live sound (where they really shine, because they lock out a LOT of external noise), and occasional mix reference. They were recommended to me by a person who tracks some of the biggest Belgian rock bands, and runs live sound at festivals of up to 60.000 people.

Downside: they fit so well around the ear that they aren't very comfortable for long periods of time (hot, sweaty ears), they are a professional, specialist tool. My day-to-day portable music headphones are Pioneer in-ears - where it doesn't really matter all that much because I want to *hear* what's going on around me when I'm hiking/jogging/commuting, so my audiophile experience is severely compromised anyway. When I'm really listening to music, I do it on speakers (Adam A5x).

Taking a page out of badanalogyguy's playbook, I compare it to a hand-built high performance racing car. It's really fast, but when you're driving it close to the edge of its performance it's twitchy as hell and you need a lot of experience to keep it from breaking out and careening off the track. A professional driver can make it do things you didn't even know were possible, and when you try to do the same following a detailed description you spin it out of control time and time again. It doesn't start with an ignition key, you need to flick a bunch of arcane switches in a complicated order to start all the car subsystems. When something goes wrong an unlabeled lights display looking straight out of Space:1999 lights up, and while the errors are described in the huge manual they are still so vague that you only begin to understand the errors after about the 10th time you've seen the same one. And whenever it needs maintenance or extension it turns out that someone manually hammered and bent the standard parts inside to fit, and nothing you can buy fits straight in without adaptation.

But man, it feels great when you run that thing around fast bends doing a great lap time. It doesn't really get you anywhere, but it makes you feel invincible.

And isn't it awesome? More stuff to learn, new things to unearth! One of the coolest science shows I've seen recently is Neil deGrasse Tyson's "the inexplicable universe" lectures - all about things we do not understand yet.
It doesn't matter all that much that quite a few people think that science being wrong is a bad thing, as long as enough actual scientists know that science being wrong is how it works. Without science finding wrong bits or inexplicable bits how would we know where to keep digging and looking for better explanations?

And in the mean time, those of us who know how it works can keep enlightening those that don't with stories of the coolness of our universe and science. Every kid I know is fascinated by many cool things they can find out about in science. Dinosaurs, flight, space travel, the variety of life forms, menthos bottle rockets, slow motion explosions and car crash physics, growing things in the garden, there is SO MUCH out there that doesn't even take an effort to get them interested in. Take a 6-year old around the Science Museum in London, and you'll find their curiosity will inspire you to learn more about everything. They'll come up with questions you can't answer, and you'll have to look things up together and figure it out, and it's just totally awesome.
Mankind is inherently curious. Don't let a minority of (admittedly very vocal) conservative (lifestyle, not politics) old fogeys drain you of your curiosity and excitement about being wrong.