My employer is a Microsoft shop. Microsoft Windows Seven optimizes my productivity with its new context-sensitive search. Microsoft Office allows me to quickly compose documents and spreadsheets of arbitrary complexity.

It is no surprise that Excel is being used for engineering given its power and flexibility. Hell, a shop I worked for used Excel as its database.

Now let's get down the the nitty-gritty - Visual Studio is one of the most powerful IDEs on the face of the planet. You want power? You got it. You want speed? You got it. You want both? It empowers you, the ninety-pound weakling, with both, with minimal effort. I got a raise because I used Visual Studio. I got my dick sucked by my boss' hottest secretary because I wrote an patch in C# that prevented our ERP system from total meltdown.

Why be some boring open-source ODBC slob when you can be fast. Quick. Nimble. Packing.

Be potent. Be Microsoft.

Well, technically, it would be larceny here in the states. In other words, "borrowing" without intent to give back to the owner.

Yeah, it sucks. The snooping is a natural result of voyeurism perceived as normal in this society. Reality TV and social networking are proof that people are willing to give up their privacy for attention, and so people wishing to dig into private details feel that it is the norm rather than the exception. Dignity and respect of privacy no longer have meaning in this society.

All of the phones used in the experiment were "smartphones." What model of smartphone? Would people feel compelled to steal and reprogram these phones for their own use if they were not so flashy and overfeatured? Do people really need the always-on connectivity and eye candy that smartphones provide? Are they really so important that they cannot wait to get to their workplace to do business? Obviously not, because if they were important, then their employer would accommodate their desire to not have to be tied to the job 24/7.

My phone is not smart. It does not have a touchscreen, but it has a camera and can take videos. It has limited internet ability. Yet, if my phone was stolen, I would not fret because it is ugly, scraped-up, and the worst a theif will find is a picture of me sucking on a Mexican titty. Nobody would want to steal that piece of shit. And I'm fine with that.

Cloud Strife was a fraud, a sham. Aeris had no personality. Seeing her slaughtered was almost as funny as watching Leonardo DiCaprio sink into the water and the end of Titanic. FF7's ending sucked. And if Sephiroth's Super Nova exploded all of the planets and the sun, then how did everybody survive long enough to kill him and end up living on the planet afterward?

Yeah, sure, it was "groundbreaking." You want to know what "groundbreaking" means to me? I remember ejaculating in my pants seeing Final Fantasy II (American) for the first time on an SNES. Whoa, mode 7 graphics in the opening sequence. An actual plot, with real designed characters instead of generic throwaways. When you would hit a monster, each damage digit would be staggered from the next and "bounce" into place. That's groundbreaking, motherfucker.

Aeris dying? Hahaha. I cried when Tellah gave his life, casting the Meteo spell to save the party.

The original Final Fantasy wasn't released in the U.S. until 1990, and the original Zelda is more of an action game than role-playing.

Many of the games in the slideshow are a lot more like Shadowgate than Zelda or Dragon Warrior.

The outlook is dim. Americans can't find jobs and are sleeping on the streets, and for some reason they don't care. They aren't doing anything about it. They believe that this upcoming joke of an election will magically solve all of their problems along with their pet issues. GO ANON!

Heh, you're funny.

So to go down to 10,000 feet below sea level, you'd essentially need ten shells, each with a valve, with each shell becoming a point of failure. And that's more of an ideal situation, not taking into account how you're gonna get shit in and out of the vessel.

I work in this industry(shoutout to DeepSea Power and Light, here in San Diego), and we used pressurized oil to add structural integrity to certain electronic components. In fact, it was even mentioned in the article.

You could have one onion layer of super-high pressurized oil, but it would essentially behave like a solid which could be pushed into the inner shell. Shit, why not, oh, just have one shell designed to withstand the pressure? Or, better yet, fill the whole vessel with oil pressurized to 1000 bar? That'll show those damn skeptics.

I know people who have had their unemployment extended three times. They say that there's no incentive to find work flipping burgers or working retail only to make less than what their unemployment pays them, and I agree wholeheartedly.

Before I found my job I was unemployed for 9 months(though I was going to school), but I could be choosy in picking the jobs I was offered. When one that was willing to pay me what I wanted opened up, bam, I was back in action.

Another reminder of why one shouldn't social network at all. Some may say that an employer or coach may force you to get a facebook profile, but it's much easier to fight it, let it slip through the cracks, or even comply when you get to start from a clean slate.

It reminds me of that episode of COPS which opens with an elderly woman in a gas station. The woman holds up a rock of crack, telling the cop it was she that called them because somebody sold her that rock of crack.

The episode comes to a close immedately as the cops cuff her on the spot without question and take her in.

Okay, you put me on the defensive. I joined the Air Force, which meant that I would get a bitchin' tech job(and I did) and likely never face danger. Yeah, call me a pussy, I don't give a fuck. It was during a time of (relative) peace and sanity, so I knew I wouldn't have to deal with wartime bullshit. I joined because I was unmotivated in high school, because I had a life, and so I needed job training and a college fund. My family were disciplined, but they sure as hell weren't rich - and I did need some discipline at the time. Why the hell not? Am I a pussy for admitting that?

I got out right after 9/11, but before the wars kicked in. I knew that the rationale for the wars was bullshit(WMD? we sold Saddam that WMD!), but by that time I was happy enough being the fuck out of the military. And yes, the world would be a better place if all of the religious people, or at least the people who subscribe to one or more of the three monotheistic religions of the Middle-East, would drop dead on the spot. That is where the trouble lies.

So the short answer is, no, I'm not a hypocrite.

As a red-blooded American who served in the military and comes from a family who also did(mother served in army, father served in Marines and saw action in Vietnam, Grandfather who was bomber aircrew during WWII, uncle served in USAF), I endorse your comment wholeheartedly.

I know the Slashdot leadership and a good majority of their chickenhawk wannabe-military fanboy readership subscribe to Judeo-Christian beliefs about being in the moral right as nation-builders, but if you're gonna tacitly encourage war with Iran, then enlist, pick up a fuckin' gun, and go shoot yerselves some strangers. See your buddies turned into hamburger and shuttled back into the states to live their lives as disfigured vegetable abominations, and you can become a nonfunctional drug-addicted alcoholic having to cope with those horrors for life. There are laws to reward employers for hiring veterans, but all it takes is one flashback flipout to make even the most patriotic employer reexamine their hiring decisions. Kids can't even afford school because that money went to some glorified security guard being paid $300,000 a year.

If you're gonna go big, then at least do it right - indiscriminately carpet-bomb the entire Middle East, including Israel.

Some like me may argue that participating in an actual unique discussion, even in a static forum, is a lot less useless than playing the same crappy game on a tiny-ass screen...again.

And, for the record, I happen to be an outspoken anti-smartphone guy, likening them to Linus' security blanket. Might as well be suckin' your widdle thumbs, too.

So instead of trivially adapting your existing PC for display on a Big-screen, you feel compelled to shell out extra dollars for a piece of hardware, which is essentially another redundant PC, that you don't even need?

Perhaps valve should develop a "big-screen" version of their software and leave it up to the gamer to build or modify their boxes appropriately. If anybody knows how to build bitchin' rigs, it's gamers. And Alienware machines have been overpriced pieces of shit for a long time now.

There is, of course, much legitimate debate about just how much of the money going to NASA is well spent, and whether that money should be spent right here on earth instead of up in the heavens looking at rocks. I certainly do not plan to weigh in on that debate here.

However, I must say that I have been very enamored with the rover missions from the start, and my children and I followed them fairly closely during their first year on Mars. We built toy models of the rovers and viewed many an animation and photograph on the Internet. I remember reading that one of the rovers (I don't recall which one) had traveled some particular distance (I don't recall how far) and taking a stroll outside our house that was roughly the same distance, just to get a feel for it. The idea of walking along such a truly distant shore was simply fascinating to me.

Profitable or wasteful, harmful or beneficial, search for truth or wild goose chase, I believe that missions such as that of these Mars rovers are products, at least in part, of the truth expressed by the Preacher in Ecclesiastes 3:11 when he says, "[God] has put eternity in their hearts..."

Additionally, and you may disagree with this, is that I got laid just an hour ago. Split the wood like an oversized and improperly placed lagging screw. O' Lord, shall my nuts lie content tonight.