Not only stupid, INCORRECT. Before I was a programmer I worked in a high end restaurant. I made minimum wage (plus tips) and had to pay for any food I ate, the cheapest entree being right around my take home pay for any given day. Getting caught even eating a breadstick while on the job could get you fired, since they were $8 a basket (or two free with a pasta entree). Stuff like steak and lobster was a week's pay.

I did not spend 5 1/2 years in a University racking up $30000 in debt to continue to work for minimum wage in a restaurant. That is what Philosophy majors do, not Engineers.

Free software makes sense if someone is paying you to develop the hardware the software runs on and you can make it proprietary to the hardware, but once you take away the hardware, how do software developers get paid? In the RMS model, the hardware providers pay for software development, but for most real world software houses, this doesn't happen anymore. The next level down would be customers pay for software development, but my experience is customers don't know what they want until they have it.

As a compromise, the company I work for publishes all of our data formats (at least in my division) and nearly everything exports to XML. That means competitors and free software can create their own implementation, and people have. I even know of some GPL3 implementations of parts of our software. They're pretty crappy and very buggy, but they're free. We also use software like Solr and pay for Solr support, which shows non commercial vendors and commercial vendors can coexist - but we could never do this with GPL.

I was going to suggest the same - I had my house long before I had others to occupy it (er, about a year before I started dating my wife-to-be, but 2 1/2 years [total] before we were engaged and she moved in), and I'd probably list these things chronologically, myself. No kid though, we're DINKs.

At least you didn't try MOO3 - seems just the opposite happened with that one. I logged about 6 hours on it after launch, uninstalled it, and never played it again. Heard they patched it extensively, but the thing practically needed Extreme Makeover, Game Edition for me to ever like it. Incidentally, I still play MOO2 occasionally in DOSBox.

While at it, could you point to where Congress authorized the NSA to spy on domestic calls? It isn't in the Patriot Act.

Actually, it has its roots in the Patriot Act - Congress allowed the NSA to spy on foreign to domestic calls, whereas before the Patriot Act they were not allowed to operate at all on US soil and had to defer all domestic spying to the FBI (as it should be).

The problem is, they took a 1970s court case where the FBI used call metadata (i.e. a list of phone numbers) called by a known criminal who had repeatedly been convicted of threatening young women and making terroristic threats to get a warrant to tap the criminal's phone line when he was making terroristic threats to yet another young woman. The FBI then got a warrant and tapped his line and he was busted calling and threatening this young woman. He then sued the FBI because they hadn't gotten a warrant to get the metadata in the first place, but the court threw it out, so the NSA uses that as justification that they can collect all phone metadata from all US citizens. The tiny problem is the NSA isn't supposed to spy on Americans by law, they're supposed to defer that to the FBI. If I recall correctly, the FBI usually requires a warrant to even collect metadata, but that case was an exception since a person's life was in danger and they had a suspect.

I'm glad Civ I didn't keep statistics. I played the mac version probably 1500 hours straight (yeah, I'm kidding, but I did log insane hours on it). Mac Civ I was closer to PC Civ 2 than PC Civ 1 (especially graphics-wise), and I logged a lot of hours on both mac and PC Civ 2, as well. I didn't buy into Civ 3+ as much, only about 180 hours on Civ 3, 120 on Civ IV, and 155 on Civ V. Civ IV and V include expansions. The Total War series has a similar trend for me, and while I was late to the party and missed Shogun, I logged thousands of hours on Medieval.

I only made it about 75 hours. The cardboard character and repetitive combat got dull. The dragon stuff was amusing for a while, but I got to the point where even the dragons fights were just tedium. It plays too much like its predecessors and all quests are just skin deep with no real overarching consequences. It just reminded me of a quest in Oblivion where if you were female (I played Oblivion through twice, once as male and once as female to see what differences there were... basically minimal, and the game was short if you wanted it to be), a group of female bandits offered for you to join them, but your only option was to betray them and then kill them all. I wanted a choice where I could join the bandits and maybe got to rob a couple of caravans and then maybe faced consequences for it later. If the only choice I get is the one developers made for me, it isn't much of a choice. About the only choice you have in these games in major factions to join, and those have no impact on anything, really. Ooh, I'm a vampire. Ooh, I'm a werewolf. Ooh, I'm bored.

I hate to be cynical, because they are good games, and they did keep my attention for 75 hours (but Morrowind was 300+ for me...), but I feel like I should have some investment in keeping the townsfolk alive rather than just slaughtering them and not feeling bad at all about them. Gothic (the original, the sequels went downhill, probably because the original programming team left) made me feel this way 13 years ago, so I don't think it is too much to ask.

I don't recall any issues with Witcher 1, but Witcher 2 and Skyrim both had serious video driver issues on release and not patching them caused relatively quick crashes for some people, includnig me (for that matter, Witcher 2 died on the intro video for me without a video driver patch). Oblivion had a lot less video issues, but was built on top of a very dated engine that was dying a quick death (in fact, it was largely abandoned by the time Oblivion shipped, with most of its programmers laid off).

I had some issues with saves on both Witcher 1 and Witcher 2, both of which were fixed by going back to an earlier save. Backtracking sucked, but was really the only solution.

I've done a couple of 100s, but I'm hoping that never happens again. I was working Quality Assurance and Systems Engineering on a project for a major customer when 9/11 hit, and exactly 1 month later, the entire team was laid off except me and the documentation writer (all four devs and both full time QA people). We had a fixed deadline to ship to that customer, Jan 1 with 1 month manufacturing lag, so I had to be done by Dec 1, and coding wasn't even complete. The substitute programmers burned the midnight oil and handed me a first working copy mid-November and I worked 117 hours that week first configuring the environment to be like the customers and then testing (tests which were thankfully mostly scripted, but there were 1100 of them), sleeping all but one night in the office, usually about 2-3 hours. Round 2 (after bugfixes) was the next week, where I tallied 106 hours, mainly because I was not allowed to work on Thanksgiving day.

I couldn't go to my managers to ask for help because a) my manager and his direct report got laid off, b) my new manager didn't know the project at all and had just been bumped from peon into management (but she eventually turned out to be the best manager I ever had), and c) training alone would suck up two weeks of my time... but 70% of QA was laid off, so there was nobody to train - everyone else had to be on board for a March product release that had just lost 1/2 its staff (again a customer commitment).

Two months after that, we hired our first 1000 workers (roughly) in India and it probably took 2 months to ramp them up. They may cost 1/3-1/4 as much, but early on many of them were worth what you paid for, which is not much. The cultural taboo of reporting bugs being an insult to the programmers that wrote the code didn't help. After about 5 years, their quality improved and then we started hiring Chinese and had a similar ramp up. Now I think both groups are quite decent, but I don't think firing over 60% of the US workforce without transitioning knowledge was the brightest way to transition to that (and yeah, that is jumping in with both feet...).

The day means nothing to me, but it means the world to my wife. If I don't please her on VD, I get no sex for a month or worse because she's mad at me, and I pretty much need to remodel the entire damn house to her exact wishes to get back in her favor. A few bucks on a card, dinner, some flowers, and some activity are worth way more than the punishment for not appeasing her, and she's generally a really nice person, just hits that depressed funk if I'm not romantic one day a year. I guess it's the price I pay for marrying a manic-depressive, even if she is generally relatively stable (not to mention out of my league, score 1 for the geek).

You apparently haven't been put on the shit list for not doing something for Valentine's Day, even though you personally think it's an overpriced corporate money grab. Then again, so are diamond rings and my wife wanted one of those, too, even though I told her diamonds were known as rocks until the 1920s and she should request a real gemstone; by rocks, I mean that in the worthless way. Personally, I'd take a Captain Crunch decoder ring over the platinum and gold band I got, but that is just me.

There may be a setting to bypass that. While I don't know about Time Warner, I have DISH and the default is for the DVR not to allow external recordings, but you uncheck a menu option with a three letter name (SCV, I believe) and then they are allowed.

My guess is they'll be prevented from buying further media - if they were also acquiring Time Warner media, I think all hell would break loose, but the cable and media parts were split. I really dislike that Comcast is allowed to own NBC and Universal, as it creates all kinds of ground for price gouging, but the US regulators are in the pockets of the corporations, so I only suspect this will get much, much worse before it gets better.

Not necessarily - I've seen flywheels used to store mechanical energy. Supposedly if these are operated in a vacuum with magnetic bearings they are very efficient both at storing and recovering energy with little loss (mechanical bearings have quite a bit of loss). Both molten salt and mechanical storage lose energy over time, however, so if the storage is longer term, batteries are better.

Not sure about Andasol, but the main problem with solar and wind is not storage so much as it is line loss, which I've read can be ~40% because most of these sites are remote (I've heard nuclear can be ~30% for the same reason). Solar is also pretty much worthless in some countries this time of year, like Norway, so northern climes either need to rely on wind/water power or long transmission lines. I've also heard total efficiency of wind turbines can be 30% or lower (lack of wind, transmission loss, etc).

One thought I had was build a "superconductor to the curb" from the solar or wind farm so you just have transmission loss to the houses, but that still probably isn't economically feasible since current high temperature superconductors require temps around -140C or less.