Not really, some are backed by explicit laws targeting that specific issue, but also backed by strict enforcement. For example, race discrimination is strongly enforced. Employers actively try and prevent it because they know there is a strong cost to it.

The same isn't true of discrimination against men and what they wear in the workplace, there isn't any active engagement against it and there isn't even a strong societal backing against it and so it goes under the radar, because employers know that no one is going to haul them into court for it and that it's not something they're going to suffer reputational damage on because everyone is doing it.

Or to put it another way, as I pointed out the laws on discrimination have zero impact on this particular issue - their existence is largely irrelevant to the problem, compared to issues such as racism or sexism in favour of women where they have a much greater impact and are much more actively enforced.

And become a pariah amongst the directors?

Without explicit legislation to make it clear to employers I don't really see how a more general law on discrimination, that is never actually used to protect males in the UK is going to do anything to change societal attitudes. Certainly I've seen companies change their behaviour in general and allow casual dress all around, but I've never seen a company do it on the basis of discrimination law, nor am I necessarily even sure they would win the case. Is it discrimination? sure, but how many successful discrimination cases have there been about males being discriminated against over females? Fathers for justice would've been out of business years ago if the general discrimination laws actually protected males in this manner in practice, they really don't, nor do they seem intended to given the lack of will to make sure that they do.

"Having said that I find that they are generally well balanced and fair in my country, and apply equally to both genders. I have benefited from them, and I'm male (e.g. I now get the same relaxed dress code as women do)."

I thought you lived in the UK too? I've certainly seen no such benefit from law changes. Many of us males still have to wear shirts and suit trousers and often a tie at minimum, whilst women come in wearing whatever they really want to wear as long as it isn't casual to the point of ripped jeans or whatever.

I suspect if you've seen benefit in being able to dress down it's just a company policy. I've not seen any evidence of legally enforced change on that front.

Not at the time I posted they weren't. The rebels were still delaying and stalling.

Nonsense, you're just a classic case of "I never really bothered to learn a proper agile process, I just guessed a bit at it and went on a bit of hearsay and it all went wrong".

Agile has it's place, and it can drastically improve some forms of development. I don't think any Agile processes declare that you should just start writing code without any idea of what you're writing. SCRUM for example encourages use of a feature list known as the product backlog (i.e. list of things we'd like to do) which you then work through in two week sprints. You can setup a burn down chart where you log each item as it's ticked off and build a chart from it that predicts the finish time of the project based on what's remaining in the current backlog.

This means that when someone comes along and says "I want to add this feature in" they can do exactly that, but the point the burn down chart intersects with "features remaining" extends off into the future a bit further so that they have instant rough visibility of the impact of their request to change.

Your understanding of Agile is exactly backwards, it doesn't make things worse, it makes things better by aiding visibility of impact of change and by allowing you to keep control of costs - if that chart looks like it's tending off too far into the future, you can just cut the project short and accept that the lowest priority features will be axed as a result but that at least there will be no cost overrun.

You shouldn't really be re-writing anything much if you develop code competently in a modular manner, but if you do, at least the person demanding the re-write gets to see what other features will be cut, or how much more time and cost there will be from their actions when you use something like SCRUM.

Am I saying Agile is the be all and end all saviour? Not at all, I think SCRUM works poorly for smaller scale projects - a SCRUM team should supposedly be between 5 and 9 people whereas an awful lot of the world's software is still built with only say 1 to 3 developers. I also think most Agile zealots themselves have no idea what they're doing but are mostly just blaggers screaming "Hey, let's all be a bunch of cool hipsters and have stand up meetings randomly and not getting anything actually useful done just because!" but that doesn't mean it's an inherently bad tool overall and if used properly. There are still a lot of large successful businesses and software houses that do quietly just get on with using it properly for what it's worth and who are better off for it.

Agile's biggest problem is this assumption that it's a thing you can just start doing with no understanding or training, that's completely nonsense. Like everything else it's a change that has to be phased in a sensible manner by people who actually understand it. Too many people just try and implement it with about as much clue about it as you've shown just so they too can feel cool by jumping on the bandwagon and say they use Agile and then it fails spectacularly as a result but doing it this way is a bit like sticking someone with zero fighter experience into a fighter jet and watching them brag about how they're going to do a "4g inverted dive with another aircraft" because they saw Tom Cruise do it on TopGun and think they want to be cool like him. It isn't going to end well, it's going to fail spectacularly, though just like Tom Cruise, they will if nothing else be an absolute twat.

Don't really agree, I often use the same languages at home as work and I prefer it that way because I'm more productive due to being intimately familiar with the technologies in question.

Most the work I've done in the last year has been C#, and I've been using it at home also. I'm much better off working like this than using say C++ for game development in my spare time because I can simply get more done. As an indie I'm not writing the latest and greatest FPS so C# with things like Unity, MonoGame and so forth are more than adequate for what I need and also the best option because there's nothing that'll get me up and doing what I want to do any faster. Sure I could use Java and OpenGL, or C++ and OpenGL or DirectX but I want to actually write games, not write engines.

I don't see what using a different language would get me, other than less productivity. I simply use the right tool for the job and if the job is getting game development done then why wouldn't I use the same language as at work?

It seems pointless to artificially cripple yourself by excluding a potentially superior tool for the task at hand just because it's also what you use at work.

I don't really know what you mean by "more easily separate them", I find it easy to know when I'm sat at home rather than in the office, and I find it easy to tell that I'm doing game development rather than business development so I don't see what difference a language change would possibly make. But then, I'm also not sure what you mean by "can the language hate, it's fine for small projects". It's also fine for extremely large projects, so I don't really know where you're coming from there.

But perhaps I've been developing long enough and have used enough different languages over the years (C, C++, Java, C#, PHP, and Javascript for example) that simply using a different language for the sake of it isn't really something that particularly excites me anymore. I just want to get things done using the best option possible after weighing up all the options available, and if that's the same as the language I'm currently using at work then so be it, and so what? The only reason I'd switch language is because it's either a better option, or because my goal is explicitly to learn or brush up on that language.

To me the language is a triviality, it's such an irrelevance in the grand scheme of things, it's the design, the problem solving, and the end product that make the difference that keeps me interested in my spare time, I couldn't care less what it is written in, the language is just a small implementation detail, an important initial thing to decide upon, but small in practice once the decision is made. Getting caught up on language and library details is the antithesis of being a productive programmer - you shouldn't be thinking about the language or the libraries at all, the language should just flow from your fingers naturally without thought. It's the problem solving that should be taking up all of your thoughts so I'd wager if you're getting caught up on language details to even notice that you're using the same language as at work or not and that that in some way frustrates you then you may well lack familiarity with the language, its tools, and its libraries more so than you're willing to accept. Switching to something different again will only prolong the time with which it takes you to acquire that necessary familiarity to be productive.

However you may and wish to try and twist the argument to cover up your misunderstanding that's still not what is deemed in law to be criminal infringement because it's still not commercial activity.

You may dislike the word profit but that's generally the key factor, the only exceptions are if you're say doing it to encourage your business to grow in other areas - i.e. you can have this "free" illegal copy if you buy something else from us.

Using BitTorrent in a personal capacity is by definition not a commercial activity.

What laws are broken exactly? I used to work in schools, granted it was some years back now but there was never any such law that said you had to keep children safe, mostly it was just parents/teachers who had no idea what they were doing or how well these things work.

A friend who is still currently a teacher also tells me he's not aware of any laws mandating filters at schools and in fact the advice he's been given by his local teaching advisory service is to start focussing more on educating kids precisely because the feedback from teachers has been that the filters are ineffective.

Just because we got by without computers before Google images doesn't mean that's okay. We also got by without fire, and medicine but it doesn't change the fact we're better off with these things. It's called human advancement. It's kind of a big deal, especially in education.

Source?

What'd be interesting therefore is to know how many of the few percent who opted in later opted out after finding what a nuisance it was. These figures only refer to those who initially opted in and say nothing about whether they stuck with it.

Number of people continuing to use it will likely be even lower again.

No, only when there is a profit motive in supplying does it become a criminal case. If you're supplying without charging it's still very much a civil case.

Well, it's not for free. The industry is paying ISPs £750,000 one off + £75,000 per year. The ISPs have to pay £250,000 towards it and £25,000 per year.

I'd be amazed if they even ever see a return on that investment. As someone else pointed out in the UK you don't get the absurd escalation of penalty costs in court that you do in the US, you actually have to prove damages and only get actual damages. Even if they do litigate that amount they'll gain from doing so would be so small it wouldn't cover the cost of staff time in collating the information to be sent to the lawyers, even if the lawyers fees themselves were covered.

I really don't think this will achieve anything other than getting a few kids told off by their parents.

I think the problem was that the rescue workers at that time were also the rebels, or at least, were under the barrel of their guns :)

But that's exactly the point isn't it? The assumption that software magically "just works" when you move it on to shittier hardware is complete nonsense. That's never been the case, not even on the desktop.

When you buy cheap you're not just buying cheaper hardware, you're buying a more cheaply QA'd phone, you're buying a less tested phone, you're buying a phone that has had less investment in bug fixing. Your analogy of Intel's i series is completely off base as it's not simply the process version that changes - everything from the wireless chip, to the screen size, to the quality of memory, to the amount of storage space, to the graphics processor will also often change. All that can make stuff that works on high end devices just fine fail miserably on low end devices.

It's all part of the package - the idea that it's cheap but the software should be just as great is complete bollocks. Software has a cost too, and just as you pay for better hardware quality and assurance by upping the amount you spend you also pay for better software quality and assurance by upping the amount you spend.

Right and it's the same with equivalent cost Android phones too, but the problem here is that he's bought a cheap crappy device and decided to complain that it's cheap and crappy.

He wants iPhone/High end Android quality at budget Android price, which is stupid.