There are plenty of top-notch people working American IT companies from India and similar non-Western places, because I work with a bunch of them (in the U.S.). Hiring anyone is simply a matter of figuring out how to filter out the posers, the Dunning-Kruger experts and the BS artists, and there are plenty of those to go around.

You can't appreciate the beauty of it until you read it in the original Klingon.

Yes, yes they are. Nowadays, the spectacle is created mostly with gigantic stories and the special effects to back them up. Gigantic stories, not necessarily good ones, but back in the day the musicals were the best way to create an inspiring and exciting spectacle. Of course, those wonderful films are as inspiring and exciting as always, but popular music has been dumbed down too much for it to be a vehicle for a movie ("From Justin to Kelly" notwithstanding).

It's fun. It's obnoxious. It's memorable. I like it.

Well, you're clearly the target audience of the new Trek, then.

So once we start using this on everything, 1 out of every 5 times, it will lead us to bogus conclusions with false statistical confidence....

So, a vast improvement then? ;-)

Let me introduce you to a little hobby of mine called POV-Ray.

Perhaps the person is a developer. I normally running a VM, sometimes two or three. My machine has 20GB of RAM and it gets used.

I never installed Java in the first place on this computer. It's just too much hassle. Those very few sites that have Java plug-ins... I can live without.

I also enjoyed Omega more than Nethack, so much so that I ported the game to C++ in the late 90s, but never finished it...

Between that and a quote from Crow T. Robot, I salute you, sir.

The only sad thing is that your ascension probably doesn't earn you as much money. I've never ascended or even gotten close, but I hit a point about 10-15 years ago where I realized that beating Nethack amounts to reverse-engineering the spoilers list, a lot of which is arbitrary and capricious. I still play once in a while, but I don't ever expect to win.

I don't know if I've changed or the game has changed, but I don't recall Hack being so unforgiving when I first played it (29+/-1 years ago). Maybe I had more patience back then. Nowadays, I tend to prefer games like WazHack (which also runs on Android) because it is meant to capture the spirit of roguelikes without being quite as tedious and unforgiving. It's a lot of fun, but I miss some of the richness of Nethack. There's just no pleasing me, I guess.

My all-time favorite roguelike was Omega, which was pretty obscure, and hasn't been actively developed (to my knowledge) in well over a decade. I actually ported it to C++ back int he late 90s, but lost my momentum and never finished the project. It's sad, too, because I was probably 90% done. I frequently think about dusting it off again. Omega was almost unique (especially in the late 80s) in that it had a whole world including towns and several dungeons (and even some trips to alternate planes). I came _this close_ to winning Omega back in the day, but could never figure out what to do in the endgame.

For ancient and obscure roguelike fun, I used to play Oubliette back around 1983. It was also pretty unique in that it supported up to 6 characters and implemented the idea of multiple trips to the dungeon with realistic amounts of time required for resting and healing in between such that aging became a factor. It was pretty buggy, but did an amazing amount of stuff in an executable that was all of about 40k in size (with about another 60k or so in data). I figured out the semi-trivial encryption used in the data files with a friend and wrote a suite of Turbo Pascal programs to modify the game files (for instance a utility to reset the ages of your characters so they wouldn't get old and die). We also hacked our way to level 9 with a maxed out party just to see what it was like and experienced a TPK in the first encounter most of the time. I never legitimately got past about level 3 or 4, and I seriously doubt it was even possible to get down to level 9. Fun times.

They key word here is "small". The complexity of managing a company grows at an geometric rate as a function of employees. The complexity of a project grows at an exponential rate as a function of the number of developers (at least after you get past a handful of people). Small companies that don't produce quickly die. I work at a medium-sized company where the scaling issues I described above really apply, so even though it's a good environment and management isn't a hindrance to making things happen, there's no way I would say work gets done quickly. However, the work does get done, and the environment is such that I feel like I can really make a difference. This contrasts to when I worked for a large company where I felt like nothing I said or did mattered in the long run (even though I did really good work for them.).

It sounds like you are in a good situation, and I hope it stays that way.

I very rarely saw XP crash in a way that wasn't obviously attributable to a hardware/driver issue. Vista blue-screened on me a couple times, but I stopped using after about 2 months because it was such a turd. Windows 7 was better, and Windows 8 is too, once you do what you can to eliminate all the "Metro" stuff. Both of them are still slower than XP in my experience, especially when copying across a network to a Samba share, which I do a lot. But blue-screens are almost a thing of the past in my experience.

I learned less from the Minnesota Starvation Experiment than I did from the Minnesota Spankological Protocol.

In my experience, most people do the same thing, but using Word. It's really annoy when someone sends you a screenshot and it arrives in e-mail or a Bugzilla attachment as a .doc[x] file. :-/