Actually, I don't give a rat's ass about games, just the antisocial tendencies they seem to encourage among some of their devotees - it's not the game, it's the asshattery. And as long as the asshats of gaming band together and are a problem for the rest of the web, I'm sure your fellow non-asshat gamers will eventually isolate you as well. Have a good time playing with each other, you little homoerotic man boys.

No - he's actually wanting Cook to not speak out. Period.

We see here how Republicans love free speech. maybe they should run their party in Saudi Arabia - after all to not do so elsewhere, where things are even worse for Liberty and Freedom would be hypocritical.

Maybe North Korea, too.

Yet in the US social progress needs to come IMMEDIATELY, as soon as someone stamps their precious little foot?

If it's actually PROGRESS, why wait? Because another minority (hardcore religious Christians) stamps their feet? Amazing how that works...

As human beings, we have limited agency. Tim Cook's words hold great sway here in the US. Much less in a place like Saudi Arabia.

Why do you want him to waste his political capital in fruitless words about the House of Saud and their backwards religion when he can affect change here and now? Why are Republicans all about doing ineffective things? I guess Sean had an expert in that when he brought in Fiorina as a guest!

The whole idea ... is to keep the country divided.

Well, then why do you stick to whatever side you're sticking to, rather than compromising? Why are you dividing, rather than uniting? Be the bigger man and go over to the other side! Unite us again, O' great sage!

But I don't think that this is appealing to you. Odd that...

Everyone in the tech world knows Fiorina's an idiot. I guess now the California Republican Party can find it out, too. Lucky them!

But I don't know why I'm complaining. She makes Hillary look great! The more clowns the R's pack into their car, the more their makeup rubs onto the ringmasters who are trying to drive. Fun times...

First, your statement "there is no inherent chemical dependency involved any more than with any other activity", although prima facie true, as the neurological basis of psychological habituation is fairly-well understood and the same mechanisms are involved. However, this facile statement hides the fact that people become psychologically habituated to certain activities to varying degrees - saying that the mechanism is the same simplifies OCD into nail biting, even though treatment in each case would be completely different.

Second, this disregard of severity of psychological habituation (I'll call it PH for brevity from here on out) seems to be matched by a notion that a communication medium has no bearing on how well material delivered through that medium can reinforce behavior, leading to astonishing statement "people think that adding a computer into the equation makes it magically different"! This is astonishing mainly because by trying to be sarcastic, you've actually stumbled upon the truth: Different mediums for reinforcement DO lead to different levels of reinforcement. Each medium provides a different experience - aesthetic experience, information content, activity levels, etc., etc., etc. In fact, it would be pretty fucking amazing if a new communications medium did not reinforce particular behaviors very well.

Finally, it's odd that you see the internet as a neutral distribution medium. The atomized and fragmented nature of the internet makes it a lovely market for short, facile responses such as yours. It eschews long form thought and substitutes trope. In many ways, twitch response is a perfect metaphor for the internet - all reaction, no thought. And FPS games take this to a new level - all reaction, no thought, pretty much all the time. It is no surprise that you come to the defence of games as it is a perfect avatar for you. Your inability to achieve even shallow thought, coupled with nothing but sarcasm and a few common rhetorical tricks are the perfect prestidigitation for our commonly awful internet age. I fully expect to see you up-modded here.

P.S. I normally don't swat at flies. But in this case, you gamesters are all swarming around a decaying corpse that you helped devour. Get the fuck out of the way so smart people can perform an autopsy.

Well, it's a better designed language than Java ever was, so there's that. What more do you need?

Did anyone else cheer about that?

Did anyone actually know about it? Did it make it out of noise bubble from all of the other amateur sex tapes coming out around that time? Basically, if you've ever been naked and you're a celebrity, it's going to come out. It goes with the territory of being a celebrity, Taylor Swift's whining about that notwithstanding. Bottom line, be a celebrity, be seen naked. Just as it's harder to claim defamation when one is a celebrity, it's harder to claim damage for photo release. Bottom line, be a celebrity, be seen naked. It goes with the territory - choose or choose not.

Pair programming is one of those ideas so awful that it could only come from a university

Actually, people have been pairing for a long time. At least since the 1980's for Ward Cunningham and Kent Beck who, along with Ron Jeffries invented XP. Being lucky enough to work with Ward (who also invented CRC cards, the Wiki, and was seminal in the birth of the software pattern movement, as well as the Agile software movement) in two different companies (Tektronix - a once venerated electronic equipment manufacturer - and Wyatt Software - now a part of the Watson-Wyatt company) I can attest to the fact that these methods were used in industry first. And, as Ward's no slouch, I'd try to check what you're missing here before you get your viewpoint on pairing ( which does work for some folks) as wrong as your history.

I don't know... Maybe it's because I worked in a security company. But we did have engineering networked off from anything having to do with the rest of the company, the virus labs were air-gapped (and electronic memory gapped, too, as many a demolished cell phone and flash drive could attest to), and we didn't tend to keep idjits around. But most of the normal software engineering teams I've been on have had wide latitude to install stuff - mainly because waiting for IT to do/approve ANYTHING usually took too long. And, now that I'm a contractor, nobody bitches about what I have on my laptop.

There is no excuse for keeping medical information from the patient himself under the guise of "privacy," especially when governments get free and full access to the same data.

Where do you gt this last part? Unless you're on government insurance - like Medicare, Medicaid, TriCare or some such - the government absolutely does not have access to your health care records without a warrant (NSA snooping notwithstanding). They do get quality metrics to show that meaningful use is being carried out, but this data is sent in as numerator and denominator counts for the metric only. I know this because I'm working on this sort of reporting now for one of my clients.

As for the rest of your rant, Mr. Libertarian, I guess you Obama (and, thus Obamacare) haters are spewing shit to try to discredit it yet again. I guess the "Government gets all my medical data, " meme must have focus-tested well. I think my sister's market research firm got that data for your runners.

I figure most of the folks on Ritalin who aren't actually using it for actual ADHD are using it to self-medicate for depression, so it's all good.

You know, you shouldn't lead like that. It took all my willpower not to be awful and make an "Ow! My Ballz!" reference.

In the 3 years I've worked here, we've lost 2 employees this way.

Well, if you haven't noticed yet, your employer's doing something wrong. You need to give developers a bit more freedom if you want decent bits.