Even with cold this and last winter, 2010 might still have been the warmest year ever in modern history.

Apparently it takes only a few months for people to forget that the rest of the year between the winters was pretty warm.

Please refer to your dictionary and find the difference between "anecdote" and "data".

There's so much wrong with your post that I don't even know where to get started, which is a positive sign that you're probably just trolling, but here goes:

I don't know how many cold winters you've seen in your town or even country but that doesn't matter. For me that's been the previous winter and this one; the two winters before that were warm (as far as winters here go) and wet. (Also, the last couple of summers have been pretty warm here and in many other places even if the winters were cold.) But anything in the range of everyday experience counts little when we're discussing phenomena that happen on time scales of at least several decades. Only data and evidence gathered over those decades as well as the preceding decades, centuries and millennia will help there.

Even the word "drastic" gets a slightly different meaning than it would in everyday weather discussion: in everyday life it's "drastic" if you're shivering cold today, but that bears no significance to trends that happen during decades. The last two years don't count either, nor do the two before that, but if you look at actual data globally and from a longer period of time, you can see that the previous decade was statistically warmer than the previous ones.

On the other hand, change that takes place during, say, a couple of decades can be drastic if the same kind of change would usually -- statistically, according to data -- take several decades more or even centuries. The change probably wouldn't feel drastic in your everyday life as it happens but that's not what we're talking about here. These things happen with lag, and large systems change slowly -- a few decades is a rather short period of time in such phenomena.

I don't understand why perfectly smart people so often don't get this.

Well, the last couple of winters have been a rare occurrence. The very fact that you've noticed them as a "drastic change" pretty much points towards that. If they went on for a couple of decades we'd have data, but right now it's just a rare event. Do you have any actual reason to believe that they aren't?

Preparedness costs. This winter as well as the previous one have been unusually cold and snowy here, and (some) people complain. Some of that may be for a reason, but let's face it: the circumstances have also been rare, and often it just doesn't make economical sense to invest much in preparing for something that's rare and exceptional. Would you want to pay for that preparedness? (It might still make sense to do that, yes, but then you have to at least face the fact that it's probably going to cost more than just letting rare occurrences happen.)

Cultists of data are rather preferable over cultists of inference from cold last week.

To be honest, there's a vast difference between a 10-year-old (or even younger) and an 18-year-old. Vast. I would expect 18-year-olds to have sex and watch porn, or 15- or 16-year olds (amongst each other), but not 10-year-olds.

The bigger question is, is it better to have these controls at the source (or, rather the middleman known as the ISP) or should the parents be responsible for this. I'd vote for the latter, although I can sort of understand the rationale behind the desire to have an opt-in scheme instead because a lot of parents just aren't tech-savvy enough to know how to do it at the client end even if they wanted to. I just don't think it's enough of a justification.

The other obvious concern is that what counts as porn is a rather ambiguous matter an will most likely lead to a lot of non-porn get blocked, even more than in the child porn case which has also caused false positives.

Sometimes it feels like there are approximately two people in the world who understand the political structure of the EU, so it's not particularly surprising that a random Slashdot staffer isn't one of them.

Neither am I, really.

The thing is, with these guys the par is 1, so it's awfully difficult to get birdies.

Note to self: if you're trying to sound like a smartass, it's better to check that you don't mix server with kernel yourself.

The three years are used for experimenting with different kernel configs and compilation flags so that you can make the server all of 100 kilobytes smaller and 0.1% faster.

But hey, you save 100 KiB and several microseconds for each day you spend doing that!

I took a look at the IRC meeting log and agree that there may be a conflict of interest, regardless of whether there's a corporation such as Oracle involved.

The parallel you draw doesn't work, however. Since both OpenOffice.org and any fork of it are both free software projects building on the same codebase, improvements made to one can often be employed in the other as well. It's possible to make this difficult (e.g. by conflicting requirements for copyright assignment) but unless something like that is being done, the relationship between an original project and its fork may not be purely black-and-white competitive. The relationship between something like Wine and Windows is more so.

And #2 isn't likely considering that any such species would probably have machines do the physical work so they wouldn't actually need slaves.

I agree -- but let's remember that a month is a pretty short time. If you can manage to do something only for a month, it's not sustainable, and it's not reasonable to compare it to the regular effort at any job. Crunches are possible but they should be a true exception, not the norm.

I might agree somewhat if GP had talked about 25 hours a week or something, but 40-50 hours of true working time a week in a programming job without slacking is bordering between heroic and impossible.

Nobody I know can really program -- or do another similar mentally intensive and somewhat creative work -- very efficiently for even 8 hours a day without having small breaks every now and then. If you don't have those breaks consciously, your brain begins to have small breaks every now and then, your concentration will falter more easily, and you begin to make more mistakes. Even if you think you're constantly working at full steam, your brain probably isn't. The difference is that making those breaks conscious (and not having superiors watching you all the time as long as you get your job done) is a lot more comfortable and less stressful than trying to force yourself through without them to no avail.

Of course there's the occasional case of deep hack mode now and then where you can focus on your single task for hours and hours on end, at least seemingly without loss of productivity, but most people certainly can't keep that up all the time. Perhaps some exceptionally focused people can do it a lot of the time but most people certainly can't and would just be cheating themselves if they pretended so.

For that vast majority of people it's simply inevitable that working 40-50 hours a week (as GP said he did) will mean mental breaks every now and then, much more often than 2x10 min + lunch per day. I'd say that regularly working upwards of 40 hours a week in a programming job doesn't make much sense in the first place, though, for the very reason that most people will have their productivity suffer if they try to do that. They simply wouldn't get much (if any) more work done in total if they tried to do 50 hours per week rather than, say, 35. The total work done would just span over a longer period of time with more breaks and non-productive periods in between, whether conscious or not.

If GP's managers in the job he described didn't understand this, and they were actually monitoring him to make sure he (supposedly, not actually) was getting things done all the time, they were fighting against the very reality and were doing so at GP's expense, and probably also at that of the employer because GP wasn't at his most productive. I fully understand his frustration with the situation.

An anecdote is always just that, but sometime last year I was working part-time around 25-30 hours a week on a project (mostly non-programming, though, but in a software project nevertheless), and if I wasn't at the most productive I've ever been, I was at least damn close to it. That is, I've got more things done within an single week than I got within a single week at that time but the productivity I was able to sustain for a few months was almost certainly higher than that of any other period of similar duration. I was highly motivated and was working pretty intensively and productively (not entirely without surfing/youtube/whatever breaks, but with relatively few of them, and with strong concentration), but I certainly couldn't have kept the same pace for even 35-40 hours a week, much less 50. I'd probably have got less done in total if I had tried to do that. If someone had forced me to do that and expected me to do it without any slack, they'd have also shot themselves in the foot, not just me. My managers were smarter than that.

I appreciate high motivation to work but it should be motivation towards getting things done, not towards sweating your ass off. The amount and quality of "done" in a programming job doesn't scale with the amount of effort infinitely, and maximising the latter rather than the former just makes no sense.

Obviously.

That doesn't mean what they're doing here isn't beneficial to the community around them as well, though. If fulfilling the selfish goals of a corporation (such as Google) also happens to benefit the greater community around them, that means something in the free market system is working. That's a great situation IMO.

We should encourage that. We should encourage corporations doing things that are good for the community. By demanding and encouraging community-friendly behaviour and shunning community-unfriendly behaviour we can drive commercial endeavours towards being good for the community even if their motives for that are selfish.

This is, of course, an idealized model, and I don't really believe it works exactly like that in reality, but it's enough of an approximation to be useful. You have to choose between selfish corporations, so why wouldn't you pick the one whose actions are also good for you and the society, not only the corporation itself.

With that said, Google has also done their share of evil, but this news sounds like good news to me.

I'm not sure if there's a subtle joke I'm missing or something but it sure does, also accessible right from the front page through the navigation bar.

Not to mention that for every "non-normal" person who becomes successful partially thanks to their eccentricity there are a whole bunch of non-normal people who predominantly suffer from it. They just aren't quite as visible because, well, you know, they didn't become successful.

Sure being in the top 1% or even the top 10% of anything probably means you need to have something that distinguishes you from the rest, pretty much by definition. But how many people are "non-normal" and don't fit in the top? And do the bottom 10% also have features that distinguish them from most other people?

Saying that fixing deficiencies is generally wrong because many extraordinary people have deficiencies doesn't make much sense. Not that anybody really went so far as to suggest that here.