Maybe the companies you've worked for sucked. I always book 40 hour weeks, because I can't be bothered to keep exact record of when I arrived at work, when I left for lunch, when I returned from lunch, and when I went home. Most of the time during normal operation I work less, closer to 7h than 8h days. But when necessity demands it, I've worked 12h days for weeks, and still only booked 40h at the end of the week. The important thing to me is getting the job done, and I consider the money I receive by booking 40h the cost to have me do that, whether it actually takes more or less time is irrelevant.
On average, I think I work less than the 40h weeks I always book. But I do my job well, I have a reputation, and nobody questions me.
I think it's more honest. I want to be payed for the quality of my work and not for the time I hang around in an office. It would be easy to hang around until the hours sum up, but I would be wasting my time and fooling my employer into thinking I'm actually doing something during that time. Sometimes I've completed the task for the day in 6 hours of concentrated work, and I'm not in the mood or mind to start something new. I pack my things and leave.
Nobody has ever raised an issue with my work hours so far, probably because I'm very good at what I do. And if somebody ever did, I'd probably get a new job. I don't want to compromise on how I do my job, and if I go, it's mostly their loss, not mine.

Thanks for one of those rare, massively informative and to the point posts.

If you consider that zero-g is an environment that is utterly alien to us, which we have zero adaptation for, I'm actually surprised how relatively well homo sapiens is able to cope with it.

If you compare it to other alien environments, like too much or too little pressure, too much or too little Oxygen, too cold or too hot... usually these great differences from our natural environment are very quick to kill us.

The satellites were brought up by Russian Soyuz rockets.

I'm sure this mishap has nothing to do with EU sanctions against Russia and the crisis in the Ukraine.

September has 30 days.
So that "immediately prior" to October 1st, should probably be September 30th.
Not September 29th.
Just sayin.

That's what I was thinking. Some bugs are practically impossible to avoid, because it is almost impossible for a single programmer to have the entirety of a software system in his head, with all possible cases and side effects. Without complete knowledge of a system it's impossible to know the perfect solutions.
At some point it's up to testing and quality control to take responsibility and weight off the programmers shoulders.

Are you sure we are talking about the same game when we speak HL2?

Wow. Do you play all your games like that? You must have raced through the game, blasting everything in your path. I realize that official speedruns of HL2 are probably way faster than 3hrs, but it still must have been a hectic run through the game.

I like to be sneaky, explore the environments, enjoy the views, smell the roses and listen to the stuff the NPC's have to say before moving on.

HL2 is true to its name. It took me about 16 hours to complete HL2. About 8h to complete Episode 1, and about 4h to complete Episode 2.

It's like the difference between silently swearing at the idiot in the car right in front of you and honking in a traffic jam at some idiot a mile away.

Then there is a growing number of Americans who are prejudiced about blacks/democrats/liberals, take your pick, or have -no idea- about history, politics and governing. In these difficult times of wars and crisis, Obama is one of the best presidents Americans could have hoped for. Better than most of your clueless American public deserves.

Yes, and? What's your point? The US and Germany are allies, it makes sense to share intelligence with allies. What doesn't make as much sense and undermines trust is spying on the administration and institutions of your allies.

This is especially true for Germany, to a lesser extent Spain and France. Not true at all for Italy.
Italians love waving their flag around and displaying it on clothing, almost as much as Americans.

I really like DF and have had quite a few memorable moments in both fortress and adventure mode. But the interface is outrageous. Using three (at least) different sets of keys to scroll through a selection, depending on context, is madenning, especially when starting out. I often wonder how Tarn can have so much talent to create a game like DF while at the same time failing so gloriously at implementing a decent interface.

8 galaxies and 255 stars aren't so impressive if you consider it was generated by procedural generation. Procedural generation can be a very powerful, impressive tool, but in the case of Elite, creating some generic star systems is really not a big deal. If you want to see incredible precedural generation, look at "KKrieger".

What was really impressive was one of the sequels, Frontier: Elite. This game was really ahead of its time, as it contained not just star systems, but real planets you could land on, seamlessly, with cities, some vegetation, atmosphere, clouds... simply amazing. The ability to fly through the depths of space and landing on a realistic planet without a loading screen has been a long time coming since then. The only other game that implements this, as far as I know, is a comparatively recent indie title "Evochron Mercenary"

Rage didn't crash a single time for me, and I didn't have any of the video driver issues some people where complaining about. I remember it being a fantastic, open shooter with some of the best AI and NPC animations I have ever seen, plus entertaining vehicle combat. And it ran fluidly on my old GTX275 card.

Anyway, JC deserves alot of credit for Doom and Quake alone, which were simply mind blowing, earth shattering games at the time.