Thanks for letting us know you watched An Inconvenient Truth.

I'm amazed every time I use a map on my phone—every damn time. It's amazing.

I got my first smart phone (the G1) between two trips to San Francisco. It's completely amazing the way it affected my vacation. Maps, Yelp, and other services... wherever and it just keeps getting better. Consider my G1 from a mere 4.5 years ago compared to a Nexus 4. It's really quite insane.

In the sense that a car is nothing but a "better" version of the first wheeled cart. I mean, what the hell have we been doing for the last 7,000 years? Geez.

"Mobile devices" is an annoyingly broad term. I made my daughter's birthday cake yesterday with the aid of a smart phone sporting a recipe and videos on some techniques (like making lemon curd). Not everyone with a mobile device spends a majority of their time on social networks. The fact that I have information with me everywhere I go in a convenient form factor is just plain awesome.

When I'm bored I work to solve it, not numb it. A smart phone is a very useful tool in that endeavor. The people who drool their time away on useless nonsense will do it with or without a smart phone.

Tolkein? Is that you?

After getting totally burned on the train wreck that was Master of Orion III, I swore off buying any title when it was first released. (I made a special exception for Borderlands 2 and I REGRET NOTHING.) This has since proven to be a smart move. Not only does the game end up getting properly vetted by the gaming public, it also gets patched, comes down in price, and runs exceptionally well on newer hardware.

Arkham Asylum? Fantastic game with a great story and top notch voice acting. My patience saved me $52. Borderlands? Same deal. Civilization V? Half off and I got a bunch of DLC that otherwise would have been much, much more. I've enjoyed a lot of games more by making sure the value proposition is more in my favor.

On the flip side, it's also saved me from some gaming agony. I'm glad I waited to see how Diablo III would pan out because none of my friends play it anymore and I doubt I would enjoy it based on their feedback. I'm having similar feelings about SimCity and have even gone so far as to dust off my old Rush Hour discs to play that instead.

I've gotta wonder what any of you gain by buying every game as soon as it drops. You're paying more and getting less certainty about what experience awaits you. Who needs that?

Doing away with government pensions in general would solve a world of problems.

On the upside, that's a system that's going to bury itself eventually anyway.

Haha.

My thoughts exactly. And I really don't think some of that is true anyway. I would say the most of my "scuttlebutt" and "hallway chat" type communication happens with a remote coworker since that's who I get along with the most anyway.

For all the people here talking about the value of "office time" (they say face time but they mean office time) I have yet to find it. Meetings are mostly useless. Talking without a digital aid of some sort is inefficient a lot of the time. Video chat + IM is my preferred method when I need to really COMMUNICATE about something technical. I can trade links, code all while talking through something. There are people IN MY OWN OFFICE that I do this with because it is superior to talking face to face.

The people I know who suck at telecommuting generally suck when they're not. Whether it's Facebook and Imgur in the office or at home, it's still wasted time.

At least half the time I really need to get work done, I stay home. There are times when I'm working with physical equipment that going to the office makes sense, but when I'm tuning servers or something my location is totally irrelevant. There are just too many tools in this day and age to make telecommuting fantastic not to do it. Plus, how much can a company save on office space? This is big consideration if you're a small operation.

In this day and age there is simply no reason. I work on a small team right now and the guy I do the most work with is remote all the time. Between IM, email, phone calls and video chat there is no drop off between him and anyone else I work with. Office time != face time. I agree that face time can be very important, but there are just too many tools available these days for physical location to matter.

Whups, lol, year fail.

I hear this fallacy a lot.

When I work from home, I'm still pairing up with another developer over skype/tmux, and I am super productive doing it.

It's 2012, there's no reason remote working should incur a penalty in collaboration.

Why does everyone wonder why locally produced food costs so much, instead of wondering why the over processed megacorp garbage is so cheap?

Pointers are pretty essential to a kernel.

Does that quote imply Doug Stanhope believes in God and free will?