This is the most unethical and/or idiotic argument I have ever seen in /. . You sir, besides being an Anonymous Coward, are also a complete idiot. I do not know what is your fucking degree is, but it obviously was granted by mistake, during an examination that does not require existence of a brain in your skull. I can write programs in several languages, and this is my profession for the last 24 years. By your argument, while I should be able to use my rights, 99% of human population would need to learn coding in order to be able to use theirs, in a society which spent more time to type on a keyboard than write using a pen.....

Unfortunately, it is easier for some people to let other people to think for them, instead of doing it themselves. Such as, some people have difficulty to see RMS' is not the only ethical analysis of the current political and technical situation of IT. At the most basic level; If there is a software utility exist in a platform I use,I can choose to use or not to use it, so I have the freedom. If such utility does not exist I cannot decide to use it so I do not have the freedom....

On this issue; Ian Banks' Excession has some very realistic (as far as SF goes) millisecond long battle scenes....

I have not realized that we had one.... Interesting, I wonder which verb is irregular.
When it is your native language peculiarities of the language tend to be overlooked. For example, in Turkish vocalization of vowels are horrible. We kid ourselves that it is very simple and regular. They might be simpler than English, but there are strange variations. I became aware of those modifications only in University while trying to explain my English teacher, how we understand particular homonyms' different meanings out of context. It turned out that they were not homonyms, but homographs.
And yes, I cheated by using Google now, it is not possible to remember homonym, homograph and homophone after 20 years :)

In 1992 we were buying 1 MB SIMM RAM for 50 USD, when ordered in bulk for our company, SIPP had a 10% or more cost-up. Then there was a big fire in one of the producers' facilities (I guess it was in 1993), that doubled prices overnight to 100 USD/MB range. Then prices lowered gradually, probabably it was due to relaunch of new production facilities in Japan and Korea...

Do you remember DEC? If they could see the potential in search engine market, they would end up buying Compaq and HP, with the head start they have. For the sake of fairness, I do not think nobody could see search services as a major product before Google showed us.

Unfortunate point you seem to be missing is that HR do not care about "what you need". And maybe due to my increasing age, I can understand their PoV. They do not understand, or they do not believe that it is their job to understand what you and your future co-worker, assistant, slave would be doing while working. I have spent maybe hundreds of precious working hours to explain, if a network team could find time to play a networked FPS, it is a good network team. In short IT definition of work is not compatible to suits' definition of work. HR mainly concerns with turnover rates, costs and business ethics etc.

HR people usually believe that sociable candidates are better that not so sociable ones. So that, regardless of the qualifications related to technical abilities, they are looking for such activities. So a good social networking presence is a better start for any job applicant. Fortunately Linkedin and slashdot are also acceptable as social networking environments for most HR experts.

That is why I love Action Point limited systems. After wasting so much time that could be devoted to study, work or family in NannyMud I was away from multiplayer games for a long while. Then I found Pardus (not the Linux distro but the game at www.pardus.at) Pardus limits your daily activity with a set amount of APs which regenerates very slowly, thus you cannot kill your whole day in front of it.

I have a serious count of friends(!) both in facebook (even after I left it) and in linkedin. Maybe 10% or at most 30% of them knows me in person. Maybe 5% knows me as a real friend.

I do not have many real friends, who has them I do not know...