It's possible to make friends at work. I've done it plenty of times.

Until recently, I worked with a good friend. We were friends before I took the job and remain friends. While we worked together, we spent very little time socializing outside of work. In the past year since I was laid off, we have gone back to hanging out on weekends like we used to. Remember than when you're around a friend 40-60 hours a week, you probably aren't going to go out of your way to spend weekend time with them as well. It's when you don't work together any more that you start choosing to spend time together.

Jimmy, John, you guys aren't fooling anyone. We see the looks you two give each other when you think no one is looking. We notice how you always leave work together. The company doesn't have a policy against office romance, but what you did in the copy room last week...that's just disgusting.

-Management

I live in Texas, my hometown is in Texas, and it's run by Republicans. If you think it's got anything to do with political parties, you haven't lived long enough to realize both sides do the same stupid shit for completely different reasons.

I've seen a number of minor accidents caused by people running a light that just turned red. When you "sneak through" you make those of us with a green late wait on your self-important ass to get out of the way.

Red light cameras, when used properly, are great. They do a great job of stopping the idiots who think "just one more" is okay. The problem comes when they are treated as a source of revenue: the camera warning signs get taken down (I've seen this happen in a nearby town) and then the yellow light cycle is shortened to get tickets from people who actually know the light timings. My hometown installed cameras a few years ago, and one very bright member of the city council managed to push a law through which required warning signs within xxx feet of the intersection AND mandated yellow light times according to the speed limit. Their ticket revenue went up and then back down, and the accident rate went down as well.

Likewise, anonymous speed data would be hugely useful to city planners. If people are constantly speeding through an area that has almost no accidents, they could consider raising the speed limit on a trial basis. People who drive 55 in a 45 all the time will usually drive 60 in a 50, so ticket revenue will still be there. Higher speed limits mean being able to move more cars through on the same lanes, rather than having to sink money into additional lanes when a road gets overcrowded.

Wow. Some people REALLY can't recognize a joke when they see one.

Next thing they'll be saying Obama was born in the U.S.

It's what happens when science becomes someone's religion. Creationist groups like the ICR work the same way: start with your conclusion and work backwards, rejecting anything that doesn't support the conclusion. More and more scientists with political motives are doing this sort of thing. It's frightening.

I rather like the idea of "dumb cars" being a factor now, because it means that when the "smart cars" or their users fail to be quite so smart, the cars around them can react without being able to communicate with them. It would be quite dangerous if they all operated on the assumption that every vehicle on the road was talking to them.

I once had someone swear to me they had an unbeatable password:

p@ssw0rd

They were using it on encrypted hard drives storing patient medical data. Yeah, i'll never use that company, ever.

There's no way of knowing how many lives have been ruined by arrests for rape, molestation, child porn, and other such crimes being publicized, then the person being released without charge. Retractions don't get nearly as much attention as arrest reports and news articles, meaning a person's name could forever be tied to a crime they did not commit and were not even charged with.

Another problem is when the media covers the disappearance of the latest missing blonde girl, and then gleefully trots out the name and mug shots of whoever gets arrested first. That person might be completely innocent, but the damage is done.

Before the Republican horde (all four of them on Slashdot) come swinging the mod hammer, I should issue a disclaimer: I'm more republican than I am democrat. It's just that when I picture shambling, brain-eating zombies, I associate them more with republicans. Slow-moving, consuming those who can't escape them, and they look old and dried up. Democrats are more like the "28 Days Later" zombies: rabid, fast moving, attacking anything that moves with a ferocity you have to see to believe.

So you're all mindless killing machines destroying everything you can get your hands on, you just do it in different ways, for different reasons.

NOW you can mod me down :)

I'd heard the Republicans were using computers now. Good to hear it confirmed in the wild.

"The internet" is a vague term and isn't even what the report is about. The report is about IT operations. Sure if you combined all the datacenters in the world their carbon footprint would be HUGE, but then...let's consider the alternative. Let's start by storing all those TPS reports on paper. Billions of reams of paper, probably. We're going to need boxes or file drawers and folders to put them in. And warehouses in which to store them, which we can build to replace the forests we cut down to make the paper. Then of course there's the cost of transporting all this stuff wherever it's needed...that's a lot of gasoline. E-mail would be a lot less wasteful, but hey....Greenpeace is chiding us about producing too much pollution with our e-mail. So we'll FedEx those papers. Jet planes aren't nearly as bad on the environment.

Seriously. There are bigger things they could be tackling. If anything, Greenpeace should be pushing for MORE dependence on networking and IT and a trying to draw the world away from relying so much on paper. Fix THAT problem, then talk about IT.

I've not played SC2 enough to consider myself good at it. That said, I only play when it's with friends. There's one guy I 2v2 with regularly; we've played maybe 80-90 games together, and last I looked had about a 3:1 win ratio. If I had more fun playing the game I'd bother to actually get better at it.

Back when I cared enough about Company of Heroes to play it competitively, I was in the top 100 players as both Americans and Wehrmacht (If you play CoH and know the players from a few years back, you'll know what it means when I say I was automatching against people like Kodachrome and 12azor....and winning half my matches). These days I just try goofy strategies that make my teammates say "what the HELL did you just do?" and my enemies cry loudly on GR.org about how whatever unit I spammed is so overpowered.

CoH prior to Opposing Fronts was a far superior game to StarCraft or StarCraft 2.