Well, I'd never heard of him before. Perhaps, outside of some small group of fans, this represents his true worth. And I won't be looking to find out what other opinions he might have - I can do without that sort of sloppy thinking, thanks.

Yup. If Atwood thinks typing speed is the limiting factor (ie he's I/O bound) then there are a number of possible solutions, only one of which is increasing the I/O speed. A better engineering solution (remember - the best engineer is a lazy engineer) is to modify the environment so that less typing is needed for the same result. When I look at code for modern graphical environments I'm horrified by the code density (in terms of source code) - there's simply way too much typing to achieve very little. This is what needs fixing, not typing speed.

Coming soon to a location near you ..

No, it's BOTH those things together - ie, a missile. Each is ok on it's own.

FSVO of terrorist. Iirc, the IRA caused rather less hand-wringing in the 1970s.

Burying people scales fine, at least for number if not for localised rate. The problem is with reserving the places they're buried in for a period much longer than their actual life. We should fill a graveyard, then reuse it as a field and move the burying onto another place. A period of say, 100 years between burying and growing would leave adequate time for direct relatives to feel their loved ones were respected. Turning perfectly good fertilizer into carbon, on the other hand, is silly.

So who, exactly, wanted to assert this right ? Names, please, not agencies.

So, is there a firefox plugin that fills in captchas for me ?

And all the places I've seen it (mostly animated catalogues) are hateful. I hope Microsoft get the patent and make it really expensive to use - then I'll never see one of the stupid things again. Just give me the next page dammit without a cutesy animation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandy_Rice-Davies#.22Well.2C_he_would.2C_wouldn.27t_he.3F.22

Good reply. Lots of the comments in this topic are about how to make yourself fit comfortably with the team (which is certainly something a manager wants, though he will still value a loner as long as he's not unpleasant).

But the one thing that marks you out above all other is :
"Understand his/her expectations and deliver on what's asked. However, if the expectations are completely unreasonable, have a backbone and ensure they know why you can't rewrite Linux in a day."

What makes a manager's job harder than anything is stuff that doesn't deliver on time. A poor manager needs to be politely told that his expectations are unrealistic. A good manager will let you set the timescales .. but they need to be real, and most of all, you need to meet them.

.. There's an app for thet !

It's a game. Who cares ? If the gaming industry gets as precious as the music industry, they'll go the same way. A product that will make money is one that's accessible, available and attractive. When an industry thinks IP is more important than keeping and attracting customers, it's dead in the water.

Sounds a good strategy, but sometimes I wonder whether we needlessly mistrust electronics and software.

What if the spring were to break ?

Sounds like a good tradeoff to me. OK, it's harder for Joe Public to see a popular website, but it keeps the government's sticky fingers off the law, and 'satisfies' the DRM lobby with a technically unfeasible sop. Meanwhile, anyone who cares still has access via proxies, ssh tunnels, blah blah blah