Not Joe Blow wielding a hammer. It won't be standing 10 years from now.

Does she run Android 2.1? Is there a contract involved?

Isn't your nation already bankrupt?

My experience with unions is a positive one. I am an electrician and a member of the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers). I'm not crazy about everything unions do, including my own, but when I became unionised I moved from a company that was abusive, disorganised and flat out too cheap to pay for MANDATORY safety gear...to a company that is organised, on top of their stuff, not abusive to their employees and staffed by COMPETENT people. Everyone I work with loves working here. I also get a great benefits package and the variety of work experience I am able to take in is huge plus the supplementary specialised training available to members doesn't really have an equivalent outside of the union. Also, no matter who I work for, I get paid the same rate.

One more thing, our company does not keep around any incompetent electricians who waste time and slack off "just because they are in the union". The union does not prevent us from sacking them if they legitimately suck ass. It's much like the non union world...If you are good, you will have a full time job even in a crap economy. If you are useless, you will be sent back to the union hall and you will sit there a very long time.

I think developers in companies like R* should become unionised. You guys who suggest that they "just quit" when their company pushes them too hard are probably right in theory but the reality is, I doubt there will be any mass quittings that "force the company to rethink their actions" and I doubt that conditions are going to improve industry-wide. So what is the long term solution to this problem outside of organising into a union? It will push the monetary cost of developing games up, but reduce the human cost. That or they will outsource. There is no perfect fix since management will not experience a magical paradigm shift in their labour philosophy. I'm all for solutions that don't involve unionising but, are there any that will really be effective?

At my work this would be just ideal. We are a medium sized electrical contracting company(I am an electrician, not an IT person and we don't have one on staff, but there is a company on retainer should anything go wrong) with about 65 people on the payroll. At our office/warehouse we have one server that sits in a mess of wires and a variety of workstations. All our computers are aging Win XP machines which are clunky, occupy space and electrically inefficient. The server handles email, file serving, backups and maybe the website...I don't know if we host it ourselves or have it hosted elsewhere. In a year or two we are going to be due for an upgrade and due to as the level of dissatisfaction with Simply Accounting increases I feel tempted to suggest switching our office entirely to Macs running MoneyWorks Gold. We would retain one Windows computer to run our estimating and bidding software, Accubid and BidWinner Plus.

This mini server would complete the picture and do it without requiring a server closet...which is good because we don't have the room for one. We don't need or want massive processing power...we want compactness, reliability and energy efficiency. Our server is mounted on the wall of a warehouse room where we store large quantities of wiring, tools and other supplies, and as we are short on space this would be very welcome. I imagine the reduced frustration would increase our productivity and make management a lot easier without needing to call up the IT company all the time. We install a lot of renewable energy equipment so energy consciousness in our own office is something we pay attention to. People who scoff at this thing simply don't work with or see applications where this would be a perfect drop-in solution. Apple is once again offering something that nobody else is capable of and I am glad they have paid attention to something a lot of people need but cannot otherwise find. At my company Linux is not even remotely an option, so fanboys can go pound sand.

If they think 48kbps sounds better, that right there is grounds to objectively say....they're a bunch of idiots. Not much more to read into.

The story of David Hahn, the "radioactive boy scout" sticks out in my mind...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn

Really? Citation please? Especially the part where it says it's alright to do it "to defeat the west" ?

None of you ignorant free-speech-hugging white boys have ever been on the receiving end of real racism. Oh sure maybe someone called you a few names in elementary school and you felt sad, then you went home and ate your unsalted mashed potatoes, cried into your pillow, and went back to being the ignorant majority for whom life is pretty easy, all told - and believed you had a "racism" experience and that "gee it wasn't so bad so why can't everyone else just STFU and let it slide?". Or worse, you get wound up about someone making a joke that white people can't dance - and in that situation all of a sudden it's racist. The problem is most of you guys might be well intentioned but are hopelessly clueless about what it's like to actually be a victim of this behaviour and in what way it hurts. This lack of insight makes you guys prone to believing it doesn't exist or isn't a problem. It does exist and it is always a problem. The reality is that it is the least humane behaviour and there is no honor or intellectual upshot to defending hate just because on paper it qualifies as free speech.

In Canada, we don't like morons who shoot their mouths off spewing racial epithets, and that's why we have laws to shut these people up. Yes, censorship! A bad word! It's not an inherently bad concept. We like it because it serves a purpose, which is not subjugation and silencing of the general public as the alarmists would have you believe. These laws don't get used on just anybody and frankly the government is too busy wasting money on General Motors...it doesn't have time to go around silencing anybody it doesn't like, so take off that ugly tinfoil hat. This is why Canada is a cultural quantum leap ahead of other western societies. Don't believe me? Travel. Oh but this kind of censorship's not in the Charter? Fuck that. The charter was written by a bunch of WASPs who had no inkling of what the country would become - i.e. sustained by hard-working immigrants while the existing population became, old, lethargic, unmotivated and allowed its birth rate to fall below 2 children per couple. Oh, and the "Canadian founding fathers" were racists too, living in a time when it was commonplace and acceptable. Today it is not, and if that means some 150 year old laws need amending, so be it. The government does need to meddle in people's affairs in this matter because quite obviously average people are just too ignorant or lazy to conduct themselves properly 100% of the time. Stop crying about "regulation this" and "communist" that. Don't like it? There's a country just to the south of us where you can say all the dumb crap you like, and possibly you will even inspire a crowd of inbred rednecks to consider you some kind of great thinker while you're at it. Take Alberta with you. You can write books and become the next Ann Coulter, the poster child for what defending "free speech" is all about. Idealistic "people should just do blah blah blah theoretical solution and then we won't need regulation" blather doesn't work. This is the real world, and real people are real dumb, and really need to be spoon-fed to be kept in line.

I get some robocalls but not that many, and zero of them are politically affiliated. What I do get though are ethnically targeted telemarketers calling me up and speaking in hindi or urdu. Somehow someone sold the company information which includes my ethnic background and they try to cater to me by speaking my language. I ask them where they're calling from and most of them say they are in India or Pakistan, and sometimes a Middle Eastern place like the UAE where lots of South Asians have moved. They sell all sorts of stuff from insurance to long distance plans to duct cleaning service and travel packages. There's nothing I can do to stop these guys and when I answer the phone they speak as though they are some seldom-spoken-to relative calling me after a long time. Friggin annoying. I'm on the Canadian National Do Not Call List which reduced telemarketing calls by about 75% despite its huge list of exceptions...but of course it doesn't apply to international efforts to sell crap.

rundll32...let us never forget