Brasil is a communal society; we could care less for individual rights. Heck, if the entire country goes out on the streets naked every February, there is no need for individualism.

That being said, it's really hard to enforce a law in Brasil, mostly because it is a matter of national pride to find a way around the rules. They can put as many transponders as they want, but if all the population gets are tickets, then even the dealerships will have an "unofficial" - official - system to remove the tags.

The same thing happened with DVD players way back. Companies tried to force consumers to only get players for region 7. Except that, when you bought a DVD player, the salesman himself would write a code in a piece of paper that you could use to unlock all the regions.

Of course, if the system is used properly, then people won't bother. They could care less if some random guy knows if they are going to churches or brothels.

would be:

- loop recursively through all the files in the hard drives
- symlink them to another folder with the same structure
- share that folder

lather, rinse, and repeat every time you add/remove a drive. Not the most efficient or fancy solution in the world, but if you now bash you can write that in 10 lines of code

Most. Badass. Article. Title. Ever.

In another study, scientists put the accelerometer on kid's right hands. There was a dramatically increase in exercise activity, specially between 11:00pm and 2:00am. Researches are still puzzled why this has been only observed on boys.

This is a cultural issue. In the *NIX world, this process could be possibly automated because, as a CLI app, pipes could be used. Now, Windows users think that using RDP and doing things manually by dragging and dropping icons every monday after lunch is better than an automated bash script on cron. Windows has a lower barrier to entry because of the dumbed down interface and heavy corporate marketing, but in the long run, I wonder how much time and money this approach actually saves.

And the PHP community has been doing this for a long time. Except that most their GUIs are mostly free and, of course, web based. I often find it a lot easier and cheaper to just load up a PHP app in a LAMP box than set up a GUI app in windows and access it through RDP.

Thats because for a long time *nix has standardized people to not be able to write on other directories other than their home. On Windows, that was different: before XP (NT), everything was pretty much world writable, and it seems that the user directory name/structure changes every couple of versions. Also, directories names are very ambiguous and too nested; configurations can be store in Local Settings, Application Data, and now some are being put directly into (my) documents folder. If microsoft sticks to the KISS principle, then they might have more success in this area.

IMHO, this law has nothing to do with the environment. Most likely, its a corporate lobby to give them an excuse to raise the price of incandescent bulbs. In other words, legalized price fixing.

That's not the case here. U.S. has acquired both debts and assets. If you want a bank analogy, here it is: you buy a nice car. You spent all your money on the car. Now you have to take a loan from the bank to buy food, but you are not willing to give up your comfortable car. Since the car depreciates over time, the bank owns you and your car.

I do .NET development for a living, and I have to say that I do not enjoy it. Microsoft does things in such a way that it makes easy for stupid people to write stupid programs. My coworkers love the whole drag and drop controls stuff, but honestly, when you look at the codebehind it becomes a spaghetti mess. We have files that are 2000 lines long that could be written in 15 if we used django, for example.

That said, the whole drag-and-drop culture has generated (.NET) developers that do not understand the best practices of writing maintainable code. Whenever I use something more "advanced" such as nHibernate, people start to get lost. Of course there are always those people that actually know what they are doing, but, amazingly enough, they use .NET + VS only at work and would prefer other environments if they got to pick.

Don't get me wrong: as a language, I have to say that C# is quite remarkable. It has features that many of other languages don't. The framework where it sits, on the other hand, only makes sense to the developers who wrote it. If you are making forms, its nice, for anything else, it will start to get on your way.

In fact, I do. I feel much more productive writing Python in Gedit than writing C#/.NET in VS. If you want a full ide, PyDev works beautifully. Most of my django development I don't even have to do any SQL or use any SQL client: I just manipulate models directly on the Python shell. However, if all you know is to drag and drop and click on shiny things, then that might be over your head. I have heard wonders about Ruby as well, even though I have played with it very little.

Next time you are going to criticize other environments by using a vocabulary that matches the IQ of monkeys, at least have the guts to not to post as AC.

Reminds me of a sad story.

On the christmas where the VooDoo 3 came out (circa 99), I was hoping that my parents would buy me one - they are not the kind of people that you can ask them for gifts, you just do subtle hints and hope they get it. Well, they didn't give me. Instead I got some stupid toy.

My cousin, on the other hand, got one from his dad for christmas. I spent almost a week depressed, and then I would come over to his house and drool over the graphics.

Good days...

The main difference of netflix and DirecTV is that DirecTV might as well use your ISPs internet for upload only. They already have an entire satellite system, and I wouldn't be surprised if they used that to stream their movies to a receiver, instead of using crowded ISP pipes, bypassing ISPs stupid caps. If that indeed happens, it will be definitely a game changer.

I wonder why companies that strongly support open source software are being bought by other companies - is there any correlation?. First Sun, now Novell. I sure hope that doesn't happen to IBM...