Sorry for late response, but where did I say "blame the worker"?

I did point out that IMO main causes of accidents are stress,fatigue,haste and inexperience/incompetence/lack of training and "gung-ho" attitude.

Stress, fatigue and haste are mostly down to failed project management- workers are pushed to do long hours, and frustrated or stressed because of lack of progress or bad management or low pay. This is all down to management. Lack of training/inexperience/incompetence is also quite often a management failure- either you train your people, or you don't give them tasks they are not ready to cope with. Gung-ho attitude is mainly cultural or youth thing. It's only down to worker if they should have known better, and decided to cut corners themselves without any reason.

And I do believe safety equipment should be available when the occasion calls for it. Although I have done my share of soldering without feeling the need to wear glasses- but there weren't any people around me to bump into me or disturb me.

--Coder

Yes, wrap everything in red tape and "health and safety", wear a helmet and a high visibility jacket all the time inside the university and even going to bed... That's the answer. Oh, and more stupid courses on how not to break your neck sitting at a desk.

Labs are more dangerous, because they are doing non-standard groundbreaking stuff in the labs, not some conveyor repetitive stuff that people have been doing for 100 of years and every move is known. That's why it's a lab and not a factory- you do risky unproven stuff there. Also, you get young hotshot students/postdocs working in labs, not professionals with experience and a mortgage and a family, so they are more accident prone as well.

I'm not working in a lab, but in my experience accidents happen in following circumstances:

* People are too tired or stressed out. * People are being rushed too much. * People don't know what they are doing. * Well, small number of "Hold my beer and watch this" moments. I guess students are somewhat more prone to those.

So if you want less accidents to happen, make working hours reasonable first (I know post-docs and students in universities work insane hours). And train them better. Of course safety equipment should be available when needed. But more red tape is not the answer, and getting higher-ups involved will wrap everything in so much red tape that getting anything done will require even more hours and frustration, probably leading to more accidents.

--Coder

I cannot survive without mc as well. First thing I install on a new Linux machine. And I judge distros based on if they ship mc with base distro or if I need to get it off the net :) Configuring network without mc is a pain.

And I do install Far Manager first thing on any windows machine I run across as well.

My habit probably comes back from old DOS and Volkov Commander days... Two panels, Text User Interface, F-key shortcuts for everything and efficient operation without mouse was quite a good way to develop user interface. Current GUIs are horrible if you need to use them without a mouse.

--Coder

I think if you do computations, these things should help as well. As far as I know, they should be on Java roadmap somewhere already...

--Coder

Java itself is open-source already- OpenJDK.

There are several JavaEE servers that are open source, Jboss and Glassfish are the biggest two. As far as I remember, Glassfish is the reference implementation. It's as open-source as it can be.

Or are you talking about Technology Compatibility Kits? Or Java trademark? Development model itself? Or what?

--Coder

Radeon performance increases by ~20% in each new Mesa release. I think it should be ~60-80% Windows performance with Mesa 10 and Linux 3.12. It still doesn't support OpenGL 4.x, but it's getting quite good. Latest Mesa also has VDPAU video decoding acceleration (still a bit buggy), better power management, PRIME switching between integrated/discrete GPU also works. Unfortunatelly no crossfire yet.

Given that I don't play latest and greatest games (there are plenty of good 3 year old games), performance is sufficient for me.

--Coder

1. Email is not encrypted unless you use GPG/PGP.
2. Email is transferred not encrypted, so it's vulnerable to interception by 3rd party during transmission.
3. Any 3rd party service provider has your information, so it can be passed to marketers/NSA/RIAA/IRS/blackmailers/whatever.

The only way to get security with email is to encrypt everything with GPG. Most of the time that means using a proper email client with GPG support. However, there are javascript GPG implementations, like openpgpjs.org. I haven't heard about anyone using them to provide an integrated web-mail solution. On top of that, if you are using webmail + openpgpjs, where do you store your keys?

--Coder

AFAIK authors had to fork and rename it to "Jenkins" after Oracle filed for trademark for original name "Hudson".

I hate Oracle with passion, although they seem to be doing OK job with Java.

--Coder

While I've seen exceptional incompetence in Government officials, I've seen things not much better in big corporations. They are a bit better since they kinda need to support themselves, but not by much.

Management is ncompetent- check
Feuds between departments- check
Covery your arse attitude to everything- check
Lots of red tape and internal regulations- check
Endless meetings- check

And I can definitely use "frustration" as a word describing my experience in one of the places where I tried to "cut through the rubbish" and get things done. Right now I don't think there is much difference between government and big corporations- both are big organizations with way too much power to screw with people's lives.

--Coder

While the world watches the researchers and tourists being "rescued", these guys stay to save the ship if that is at all possible. These are the guys who are doing all the work and should be getting all of the attention and respect they deserve.

--Coder

Before you start reading anything, do read Sagan's Demon-Haunted World first. It's a good introduction into telling lies and bullshit apart from stuff you can believe. I think scepticism and logic and scientific method are very lacking from today's education and peoples minds. This book takes a small step in fixing that.

As for other books worth reading- other comments have plenty of good suggestions.

--Coder

They are great on the wrist and I'm still using them and I love them. However, I had a couple that failed within a year. First one died due to some strange software/USB controller issue- OS would not recognize it, and it would show up as an unknown USB device with a random USB ID. Another had a broken wire after 1 year of normal office use.

Both of them were promply replaced for free (still under warranty which is 2 years) after a nice email exchange with Evoluent. I'm quite happy with their service as well.

--Coder