Have you been to a certain mass-market burger chain lately? It tastes like greasy crap. The one here is the least tasty burger offering around where I live (because there's a couple of pubs, a handful of little restaurants and a burger truck, all selling delightful burgers), but they're also the cheapest, fastest and have the largest profit margin to afford mass advertising.

People are (for the most part) cheap and stupid. Consequently the mass-market junk shop does the most trade even though a far superior product exists right next door for only a couple of dollars more.

That's interesting. I go to my local bakery and they put my fresh bread in a bag. Am I doing it wrong?

Try telling this to the "if you aren't doing anything wrong you have nothing to fear" crowd. Their response is invariably "the government would never do that".

I used to prefer VirtualBox, but it's become quite for me lately. The Linux version occasionally brought down my machine and the Windows version would cause BSODs more than daily.

I switched to VMWare player and I haven't had any issues. The only thing I miss in the free VMWare offering is it's nowhere near as easy/powerful to script things.

I've been in two not-at-fault bingles (rear-ended while stopped at lights both times), and each time all I needed to give my insurance company was the rego of the other car and the driver's name. Conceded it made it easier having their full details, but I have never been asked who insures the other party.

A little helpful hint - if your insurer is good, and you get choice of repairer then you should make the claim through your insurer even if not at fault. It shouldn't have any effect on your premiums because the insurance companies will sort that out between themselves. If the other party has a no-choice policy and you let them claim it then you may wind up stuck with whatever (possibly crappy) repairer their insurance sends you to, as happened to a friend of mine recently with very poor results.

Around here that's what we do. All you need to do is give their rego number (and hopefully name/drivers license number) to your insurance company. It is an offense to drive a vehicle with no plates and you are required to carry your license. Anyway, if you had good insurance it wouldn't matter if the other person didn't. Just snap a photo of the accident scene (presuming they didn't do a runner) that shows the plate numbers and you're able to claim.

+1 for TuxPaint. If you install the sound pack they'll love it, but you'll hate it.

My 8 year old just asked me to put it back on after I reinstalled my laptop. Seems there's no end to the creativity and the simple drawing tools are really fun to use.

Gcompris also held his attention for a good long while. There's quite a few challenges in there.

And +1 for all the other "take your kid to the park" responses. Get them out there and make them run about. Teaching them to be sedentary is a terrible thing, and you'll spend a long time undoing that early "work" later on.

VS is a really nice IDE unless you have used /anything/ else, Windows or otherwise. Don't give me that "Linux guys" crap. Everything you like about VS either happens by default in other tools or can be added with scripts.

VS does, however, include one of the best GUI debuggers I have ever used and that alone is worth money to me.

If you're making a professional lab then conductive flooring, yes.

For a hobby lab linoleum is best. You can get good quality stuff that doesn't generate static.

Tiles are OK at a pinch (if you already have them) and carpet of any sort is out. It's painful to wheel a chair around on tiles or carpet and if you drop little components there's lots of places for them to disappear.

I'd be a little sad if the father got arrested for it though. Now, one can only hope this fellow is acquitted and then sues the police for illegal arrest of bringing illegal charges or some such. Fat chance of that happening though; the media has got hold of it, we [the police/courts/lawmakers] can't appear to be big pussies or the public will start to question our integrity.

But this post could be considered an incitement to violence and that is a whole different kettle of policemen.

One that I saw done in the NT4 days (I was early in the workforce by then), but never did to anyone, was to change all the colours in Windows to black. It turns out there was a registry way of doing it so you could actually hack it up in a text editor on your desktop and then just apply it wherever you wanted to damage.

Everything, black. Black wallpaper, black fonts, black icons, black black black. Looks like the machine is off when they come back to it.

Some of the guys at work used to make a habit of doing it to people who didn't lock their screen. We worked in a facility with a strict policy about locking your screen, but there were a few people who refused. They soon stopped refusing. Funnier than the look on the poor sap's face was the look on the sysadmin's face.

Unfortunately, too much of that kind of prank is a sure fire way to ensure that IT eventually insist on locking everything down to the standard operating environment across the whole company and re-imaging machines as they reboot. Hooray for knee-jerk reactions.

Early 2000's: my brother got clueless music teacher, but it was more inane - "change the wallpaper again and you'll be suspended, you dirty computer hacker, you".

It seems high school computer classes haven't come a long way.

In the mid '80s my primary school had C64s available. They really were a treat though, having games like Cave of the Word Wizard (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJIubj1PsdY) to play.

I happened to have a C64 at home (by coincidence, since our grandmother sent it to us as a gift). I was more interested in making it do things than playing games on it so I started learning BASIC. I outgrew that pretty quickly. I remember there were a couple of other kids at school in a similar situation and the school brought in a programming teacher who ran special classes for a couple of hours a week (remember, primary school age kids) that really pushed most of us into bigger things. I was programming 6510 assembly by the time I got to high school.

High school (early '90s) had a network of BBC micros. Teacher seemed to actually know about them and he was very willing to sit around at lunch times and after school offering up advice to anyone who was genuinely interested in learning. School curriculum forced everyone to pass the typing test (which a few of us did on the first go, but most others spent a semester learning). I remember this awesome kingdoms game that was available on the network, but I cannot remember the name. I can also remember learning all about how to do nasty things to other people's terminals over the network. Security was pretty lax, and it was frowned upon, but our computing teacher always encouraged ingenuity and nobody ever really got more than a polite "you really shouldn't do that" talk.

Later on (mid '90s) , the high school installed a network of Win 3.1 PCs and a Novell server. Just as much fun. It was really quite amusing defacing the Windows 3.1 splash screen. Same awesome computing teacher, but now the school decided Visual BASIC was the go. I remember being amazed at how other people would struggle with concepts that I found trivial at the time. Being old enough to reflect now, I can see that I found them difficult when I had learned them years before.

It's too easy to slip into a bad routine where you intermingle work and home. YOu might find yourself working all the time, or interrupting work to do a few domestic chores here and there.

Both are bad.

Set up an office area. Keep all your work related stuff there. That way work is still 'at work', even if you don't go to the office daily.

Get good comms. Either an all you can eat phone plan, VoIP, or a company provided phone. You'll find it gets real expensive real quick the first time you have to make a long distance teleconference that churns on for 4 hours. Get your Internet sorted out. Very important to be as quick as possible... You don't want to be waiting to download that 20M email attachment that some PHB sent you. Waiting sets up temptation to slack off for a few mins.

Keep receipts for everything. If your company doesn't reimburse you then deduct it on tax.

I also recommend a couple of inline power meters. Set them up to measure the consumption of all your work related gear. Log it daily. If you need air-con then keep a log of running it. Most countries allow deducting work from home expenses, but unless you have detailed logbooks you'll be stuck at a statutory rate which really isn't indicitive of the real cost.

Oh, and get a good desk and chair. You will be able to get the company to spring for the chair under OH&S provisions. Don't skimp here, your comfort is important.

It would make it impossible for free will to exist.