One thing I've noticed is that for whatever reason H1Bs seem to have a hard time disagreeing with management. I'm not sure if it's a cultural thing or if it's because the company has them by the balls or some mixture of reasons, but I think a lot of the preference is due to the way they're easier to command, instead of having to be convinced.

The phrase "a solution looking for a problem" was originally coined for the newly invented laser - everyone could tell that it was wicked cool, but nobody could come up with a good use for it besides maybe pumping a ton of power into it and setting fire to something far away.

I hope they succeed, but... all that talent, and they couldn't think of a name better than "Space Command?"

Yes, and it's a perfect name. Did you watch the video? They're hearkening back to Asimovian science fiction stories (there's even a theremin in the background music!), when things were simpler and more optimistic. Just look at the semi-retro style of their spaceships; they scream 1960's scifi, and they look exactly like the kind of ship that would be built by an organization named "Space Command".

One of my (Fortune 100) clients has McAfee enterprise and I can vouch for the fact that it's horrible there too.

Oooh ooh I have one too, one place where I worked used Symantec Endpoint Protection (which is kinda like more expensive Norton for paranoid CTOs). For some reason, trying to install stuff over the network from a shared drive would actually crash the firewall, rendering the computer unable to connect to the Internet until you rebooted it. There's got to be an exploit in there somewhere, I'm sure, but I never looked in to it.

Even people from Beijing think Wuhan is a shithole, that's how bad it is there.

BTW, why didn't your wife volunteer at the local atheist shelter, or the local atheist soup kitchen?

Because such things don't exist? I'm pretty sure you'd have a hard time finding a charitable atheistic orgamization that espouses atheism, and if you did my wife would probably be disgusted at the thought of volunteering there too - no matter what your goal, it's abhorrent to prey on people in need.

She did, however, find a nice secular aid organization, which provides housing and support with minimal strings (all they ask is for donations once you're back on your feet, but then so do churches). It's the same sort of thing, but far more charitable.

The interesting question to me about this is always how much of a Church's revenue flows back out as social works. If a church uses the money to build a more beautiful sactuary, or a recreation center that primarily benefits the members, then it's not much more charitable than paying a monthly fee to Bally's or a country club. If the money, however, is sent back out into the (or another) community, primarily to benefit non-members, then you're talking about charity.

Everything the churches do has strings attached, and those strings are intended to tie you to the church's religion.

For example: my wife wanted to donate some time to a local shelter for victims of spousal and child abuse. The place was amazing; the people had nicer houses than we did, maid services, meal services, everything.

The only catch, as it turned out, was that there were weekly masses that the victims essentially had to attend, and almost all the volunteers were from local churches - which basically means that while you're not watching your kids (e.g, because you're in mass or out looking for a job), they're in sunday school.

My wife ended up leaving in disgust, because the place was literally preying on the weak and powerless - they would take women and children who have nowhere else to go, and give them food and housing with a big helping of Jesus. That's not charity, that's cultish indoctrination.

Pretty much none of the various church charities are really charities; at best, they're a free sample of what the church wants you to think life with Jesus is like, and at worst they're just a way to grab people at the lowest point in their lives and force them onto the path the church wants.

Regardless of my personal beliefs, I see no reason for evolution to exclude a deity or vice versa.

The reason why evolution excludes a deity is because we have found no mechanism by which a deity can affect evolution, nor have we found any empirical evidence that a deity has ever affected evolution.

If you want to say that deities affect evolution, then you must provide evidence of either of those things to support your claim. Otherwise, there is no reason to believe the evolution + deity hypothesis, as opposed to the current state-of-the-art theory of evolution. You can't just go around tacking junk to theories and pretending that both theory and theory + junk are equally supported by reality.

Now, if you want to go full-on deist and say that your deity started evolution and then stopped interfering, that's fine; that sort of deity is compatible with evolution, just like it's compatible with pretty much everything except for real-world religious beliefs.

right now kickstarter is in the idealistic phase. you give money to people you don't know with great expectations. it doesn't take many silver tongued con artists to put a dent in those expectations. then the cynicism kicks in (no pun intended)

Look, I may not know these people personally - but I think Brian Fargo's resume speaks for itself, as does Jordan Weisman's. I may not know who Matthew Davis or Justin Ma are, but I can see (and so did the IGF) that they have a really great start on a game. If any of them don't deliver, it's going to be because something happened and they couldn't, not because they scammed thousands of people.

The only people who'll get bit by Kickstarter are the ones who don't do enough due dilligence on the projects they're backing; a Kickstarter with no prototype, no vision and no developer pedigree just isn't going to go anywhere.

That's what ended up nearly happening with Nekro and the Hardcore Tactical Whatever by the way - they almost failed, because they lacked at least one of the three and the other two weren't present enough to make up for it. Nekro has a great vision, but they don't have much of a prototype and its developers just don't have the pedigree; if it wasn't for TotalBiscuit, the project probably wouldn't have happened. The Hardcore Tactical Whatever had no vision and no prototype, even though it had some of the developers of Rainbow 6 behind it.

Double Fine Adventure, Wasteland 2 and Shadowrun Returns, on the other hand, all have great developer pedigrees and awesome visions; it's okay that they don't have prototypes, because we all know that Tim Schafer, Brian Fargo and Jordan Weisman can come up with great games - and if they don't, it'll be because development is a bitch (and at least on Double Fine's part, it'll all be on film!)

Yeah, you can solder a much smaller project - and it would probably take twice as long to solder the circuit than it takes to wrap it.

This stuff is for prototyping and playing around with, not making production models. You could give something like this to a kid who doesn't know how to solder as an introduction to the idea of making circuits, for instance.