I think most reasonable people would agree with what you said.

I'm a heavy Xbox 360 user. I haven't been banned from XBL, because I don't go out of my way to break the TOS. I have been banned (for two weeks...once) from xbox.com, for posting something some unnamed moderator didn't like. A few of my friends have been (temporarily) banned from XBL for things like having "FFTW" in their motto.

In all cases it was impossible to get the exact reason for the ban. When I was banned from xbox.com I couldn't even send a private message to the moderators asking about why I was banned, because the ban removed my ability to PM the moderators. In all cases the bans were handed out anonymously, with no information about how to escalate if you felt you were banned erroneously. People were basically left guessing as to why they were banned with no way to find out what the reason really was. This is consistent across the board with Microsoft.

If I don't know why I was banned, how am I supposed to correct my behavior? Not knowing also often leads to all kinds of unhealthy speculation, paranoia and conspiracy theories.

Why can't Microsoft just tell people? They have all the information about why they banned someone after all.

You haven't followed New York State politics. They're not interested in solving problems for their constituents or saving tax-payer money.

There was a discussion on this on Slashdot already.

The contract is NOT expensive, if you look at the requirements, which are (or were) publicly available on the Government's contracting job bank.

In fact, if you looked at the requirements, and have any experience in system integration work, you'd have felt pity for whoever schmuck ended up doing the work for this one. It was preconditioned to fail.

It does seem, though, that the contractor made a best effort to screw it up on their own with the non-compliant implementation. If the Government requires them to fix it, I'm pretty sure the contractor won't actually make any profit out of the project.

This retailer is seriously screwing its customers by hiding problems in product it sells. I would absolutely avoid shopping with the retailer if I knew who it was.

Consumerist.com, owned by Consumer Reports, is doing a pretty good job exposing anti-consumer behavior by companies. I would tip them off about this.

So if you didn't have to work â" and had more money than George Lucas and Steven Spielberg â" would you be like Sall and continue to program?

Yes, I would.

I would work on all the projects I don't have time for between 10-hour workdays and 24-hour take-care-of-the-children-make-sure-wife-is-happy life.

I would be busier than ever. And I would love every minute of it.

While Apple is "pondering", the GV Mobile developer went ahead and released the app in Cydia.

That is a violation of the iPhone developer program.

It's gonna be very interesting, if Apple lets GV Mobile back to the app store.

Google it.

I think the bigger issue is what this is going to do to the sales of EMI artists, whose fans are not the Walmart shopping kind.

I would expect some of their artists be VERY unhappy about this move...to the point that I would expect a few of them break their contracts over this. Assuming EMI doesn't concentrate entirely on the Britney Spears mass market type of music.

https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=9745fb34e48a36a32b4fc589c3e371cb&tab=core&_cview=1&cck=1&au=&ck=

The Federal Business Opportunities website listed this opportunity a few weeks ago (could've been up longer than that, who knows).

It's not "just a website". It's a bit of a cluster**** in terms of number of data sources, what they expect to do with the data, etc.

I've done my time (never again!) with sorting through data from various data sources and while the actual programming part is *usually* not that difficult (assuming the data is not too badly malformed), but there are so many problems with processes, dealing with crap data, exceptions, etc. that if I were bidding for this work, I'd inflate my estimates quite a bit, too.

And that's all they do...for 30 minutes, after which they go back to watching American Idol.

They already spammed me, so what's the point?

I'm setting up an email filter rule that returns all that stuff back to as many Systemax employees as I can possibly find.

...and they only had 200 years to fix it.

Maybe another 100 years more and it'll catch up to Japan of 2009.

Why do you think net neutrality is such a hot topic?

Of course not. MediaSenty is protected by lobbyists.

The students are not.

Just make sure you don't legally change your name to Anonymous Coward and I think you'll be fine.