Well, we sure didn't get into it to write boring business applications except a few in the dotcom years who quickly moved on when it went bust. As I remember it though, there were many who just wanted to play games and only a few who wanted work with code and I don't think pushing them to play more would have brought them over. Of course you needed the opportunity, but there are a lot of games that are mod-friendly if you're so inclined. I'd sure encourage and test if tweaking a game peeks their interest, but if it doesn't I wouldn't try with more game time.

No one said that they always lied.

No one even said that they lied, only that they were not credible.

For instance, if I said that the advice of financial advisers was not credible because it was no better than a bunch of monkeys randomly throwing darts at a list of mutual funds. It wouldn't necessarily mean that those financial advisers purposefully lied with their advice.

For instance, it could mean that they have a bias of some kind, known or unknown. It could mean that they prefer to choose funds that sound cool and trendy, so that themselves sound cool and trendy when speaking to clients. It could mean that the person who hired them or the person who owned their company had a bias of their own and selected financial advisers that followed the same financial schools of thoughts that he did. It could mean a number of other things too.

If it were in existence ~1400 years ago, perhaps we would have nipped Islam in the bud.

If it were in existence ~2000 years ago, perhaps we would have nipped Christianity in the bud.

And I wonder how many readers agreed with my first line, then threw a shit-fit when they got to my second line.

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A swiping keyboard requires capacitive touch. Capacitive touch requires more energy than just a hardware keyboard. There are Android phones without touch capabilities and only hardware keyboards, especially in developing countries, but I do not think that's what you want. Also, those phones do get security updates, but they will never go above Android 2.3x because they only have a single core processor.

An FM radio requires a wired earbuds/headset to act as an FM antenna. Phones in developing countries have that functionality enabled as well, since data connections can be very expensive otherwise. Camera, don't aim higher than 2MP or 3MP, if you want something better, you'll need to carry an extra standalone camera with you (or actually buy a better phone). Podcast playback implies longer battery usage. You'll be able to do it, but you shouldn't do it if you really want to conserve battery power.

You'll also need to keep your data turned off, buy yourself an extended battery with good reviews, and live near a cell phone tower if you want to get yourself closer to your goal of multiple days without a single charge. By the way 5 days may be pushing it, if your battery is the size of a briefcase, like in the olden days of early cell phones, then may be you have a shot at lasting 5 days, but then you'll have to carry a very heavy briefcase everywhere you go. Also, I mentioned that you needed to be near a cell tower, because if you live near a cell tower, your phone doesn't keep retrying the connection every few seconds, your phone wastes less battery energy, and your phone actually irradiates you less.

Many game companies don't treat their workers very well, but your company sounds even worse than usual.

It sounds like the newcomers are the frogs that leapt out, however misguided and ignorant they were, and you're the frog that stayed in to slowly being cooked alive.

I would venture to guess that the new workers who left got other gaming testing jobs at other game companies, or got other software testings jobs, and are now healthier and happier for having left your company when they did.

My early experiences were the old Atari VCS (2600) and VCS stood for video computer system. I was fascinated by the pixels and the idea of a TV being interactive.

I wanted control of the pixels.

Later, in school, I got to work on Apple ][ computers, and those just begged to be programmed. Gaming can initiate the desire, but so can a lot of other computer driven things these days.

It is not prep directly.

Indirectly, games can be prep. For a few friends and I, cracking copy protection got us into 6502 machine and later on, Assembly language. We would use the monitor to see what was going on. Reading the ROM listing told us a lot more.

BASIC is slow, and that too drove learning more. To get the real magic out of the old machines, one has to know stuff. We made games, played them and learned. Utility type programming was good too. One such program generated book reports with just a few picks and keyboard input.

Just playing, unless the game incorporates programming concepts, is not meaningful. The ability of games and other interactive things can spark the desire to build and control.

The latter leads to activities that do serve as prep.

Not to be a downer, but when I was a Teaching Assistant for a Computer Science class, the students that told me they wanted to do computer science because they loved computers games were usually the first ones to drop out.

Not that Computer Science equals programming. It certainly does not. Computer Science is generally more focused on the science part anyway, not on the programming itself. So I'm not saying that people who love computer games don't become great game programmers themselves. I'm just saying that based on my own biased and subjective experience, I've come to find that gamers didn't make great Computer Science students at all.

Because sitting around playing video games all day is *exactly* like a career as a programmer. If you like one, you'll *love* the other.

Missing codecs: AAC, H.264, MP3
Missing plug-in: flash

So either patents or not their code, if you got a good solution for that I'm sure Google would like to hear it.

I don't think you have to come up with that many conspiracy theories, Mozilla's "problem" is that they won. They broke Microsoft's monopoly, made HTML/CSS properly standardized and together with KHTML/WebKit/Blink some 80% use an open source renderer though many use it in a closed source binary. Microsoft would be laughed at if they tried any new proprietary extensions and for the rest the implementation details are all in the open.

Their problem can be summed up in two words: "Now what?" and it turns out they didn't really have any other goal in common than slaying the dragon and now the dragon's dead. Some UX designers get to make an art project. Some cowboy coders thinks more releases is better. Some will do anything to get away from the reliance on their biggest competitor. Some security nuts get to go overboard. Some want to go after Android/Chrome OS with Firefox OS, but this time they're not competing against proprietary and neglected shovelware and barking up a tree Ubuntu has made essentially no progress on.

Let's face it, Mozilla mainly won because Microsoft was trying to keep the web from competing with local applications so they could sell Windows licenses, they got to the head of the pack and grinded it to a halt. They didn't want to compete, they wanted to put a spanner in the works for as long as possible. It annoyed many and gave Firefox enormous amounts of goodwill even when it didn't work properly, out of spite for Microsoft people kept using it and pushing for sites to support it. They don't have a clue on how to compete with someone that puts up a fight, which is their second biggest problem.

No, don't make it that complicated.

At the very least, allow me (or my lawyer, or my surviving family members) to request footage where I am the one being video-recorded. This should actually be easy to initially automate as well (if the officer actually took down my details, or my license plate number, to run a check on it). The time of the lookup should give us the identity of the police officer (or possibly partnering police officer) who did the lookup. From there allow me to make a follow-up request in case the body-cam footage points to other officers coming on the scene with their own body-cams or dash-cams, or in case I believe some other footage is missing.

After all, this is the primary reason we want the police to wear body-cams. Do not believe the false dichotomy played up by the police PR spinning machine. The police actually loves receiving requests from third parties for Terabytes/Petabytes of information. This is a form of project of scope-creep that can only slow down the wide-scale adoption of mandatory body-cams in the US and/or possibly cripple the initial intent of those body-cams by allowing the police officer/department to become the editors of those videos themselves.

Isn't that argument a bit like "I plan to live forever, so far so good"? After all, if it did wipe out all life well then we'd be dead so obviously it hasn't happened yet. Some large extinction event seem to happen once every 50-100 million years, what does a once in a billion year event look like? Ceres, the biggest object in the asteroid belt is about a million times bigger (10^20 kg vs 10^14 kg) than the dino killer. That one isn't going anywhere, but there's clearly quite a few potential total extinction candidates if they came to intersect with Earth's orbit.

Excessive hyperbole is silly, yes...

Global warming is a sloooooooooooooooooow process and even if you burned every bit of coal and oil you wouldn't make Canada into Sahara, it's hardly an extinction level event. A modern day pandemic could presumably kill millions, but it's hardly an existential threat to the human race. Same goes for total thermonuclear war, there's be a lot of direct deaths and many more indirects deads from nuclear winter and starvation but not enough to wipe us out.

Tsar Bomba (most powerful nuke): 50 MT
Chicxulub asteroid (dino killer): 100,000,000 MT

We're not even remotely in the same league. The odds are small that it happens tomorrow but in terms of "worst case" asteroids have everything us humans can come up with beat by far.

This. It seems sexual preferences, age and location is rather essential for the service they provide and email, well how else are they going to notify you that someone has taken an interest in you or that you got a reply? You can't ask a doctor to not work with medical data, there's of course good and poor security but at the end of the day if there's a total system compromise you're screwed.

Best practice seems to be as follows:
1. Public facing server makes web service call to locked down proxy server.
2. Proxy server validates every request thoroughly, everything that looks even remotely funny is rejected.
3. Proxy server queries stored procedure in locked down database, no SELECT * for you.
4. The results are serialized back to XML and sent to the public facing server for display.

A lot of work if you want to do it right, but you get a fairly good barrier to a total breach from the outside. Of course they could compromise your web server and start harvesting data, but you should have some sort of tripwire system for that with audits and logs checking for abnormal activity.

The other way in is of course from your network, if they can compromise someone on the inside with database access or developers to plant vulnerabilities that'll go into the production system. But that's usually a much tougher route and really no different from breaking into any other secure network.

There's actually nothing degrading about a handout. Nothing at all. I get so sick of hearing this bullshit. If there was no "subsistence and degrading handout" people who think it's degrading would be complaining that there wasn't even a system in place to provide these people with even a subsistence level handout. What's degrading is being satisfied with a handout. Coming to expect the handout and refusing to work hard to improve your lot in life is degrading and people bring that on themselves all the time. Before you take me to task for anything understand that I grew up as poor as anyone in the United States you can point to. Go ahead and find an example and I can most likely match them or put them to shame. My family lost everything when I was growing up and the one thing we didn't do was lay down and accept a handout. My mom refused food stamps when we could have used them. She never went on welfare and she only accepted unemployment grudgingly. She beat the fucking bushes for work and never gave up. My brother is the first person in my family to get a college degree and he did it working full time paying his way as he went. I have literally gone to work with a broken back (wasn't aware of it at the time). Fuck the poor who spend their lives crying about what they don't have and how unfair it is. Everything they could ask for is there for the taking in the US if they will just get up on their feet and work for it.