As a general rule there's two kinds of contracts, fixed bid and time&material. The former usually means a predefined scope at a fixed price, formal change orders and bug fixes are usually free within a given testing period. The other is basically "do whatever I say" and yes I will, but I don't own the specification and I'm not making any sign-offs on what I'll deliver - I just work hours for you. You get various forms of hybrids - I consider agile one of them - but that's the archetypes. I've coded off "specifications" that were a yellow post-it note, rushed it to production with hardly any testing or documentation and if it works for them it works for me. If you're overall not happy with my work stop the contract, but I charge you every hour even when I'm bug fixing my own work.

It sounds to me like you're asking for the best of both worlds, contractors that'll work regular hours during most of the project and do bug fixes for free at the end. That is going to be trouble, every time. Hell, when you say "programming project manager" I'm starting to think they're not even in full control of the code, far less the spec. Contractors tend to love repeat business, have you them coming back for more? No? Probably because they feel railroaded by the process. Do your contractors ever reject your specs? Can they reject your specs? Or are you just telling them these are the specs and I'm saying they're good enough, get to work? What about when things undoubtedly come up, is there a formal change process or you just improving or amending the spec?

Good enough to work by and good enough to sign off on are two entirely different things, try doing a proper fixed bid project and I think you'll find out.

I have that setup.... but it's a dark arts test every time to find the right order of turning on/tuning in the devices in right order to make it actually work. Usually I have to disconnect and reconnect the cable from the PC to my surround receiver as well. I blame HDCP, clearly they have some sort of handshake issues. The TV I had before that would only work with direct source -> TV connections, going via a receiver meant no signal. Again it appears to be a HDCP handshake issue, the pass-through added just enough latency that it didn't work. Kill it with fire.

Around here I would say refrigerators for employee use and/or vending machines are more common, basic coffee is usually free though. For example there's a coffee capsule machine on my floor, but it's bring your own capsules. Every so often I bring soda, but I could also buy it on the first floor at cafeteria prices. Snacking I do too much of already, so I'd rather enjoy that at home than snacking at work. Sure I'd in some way love free soda, but I also know I'd drink much more just because I can and it's free and it's right there. Yes self control is my own task but at the same time you know it's subsidized soda, implicitly you know you're giving up a tiny bit of your paycheck for it and want your money's worth. If I ever worked a place that gave me free potato chips too, I'd probably add 20 pounds before I quit for my own good. To me, bring/buy your own refreshments makes a lot more sense than BYOD.

Sounds like you live in a big city with underground trains, yes there the power lines will be underground and fairly well protected too. More rural parts often don't have that luxury, falling trees, landslides and rock slides can take out the power cables as well. Like you I'm not very prepared but if I lived in some of the more isolated parts - which by climate are much the same - I'd definitively have a generator handy.

Only to make sure that what was said in English was fully understood by everyone in the room or asking a stronger English speaker to express something they found difficult, never heard anything they seemed to assume was private. Seems like a very foolish move as I can speak three languages, understand five and probably pick up stray words from a dozen. Would this possibly be Canadian French and the English speakers in presence American? Because people tend to assume Americans only speak English (or possibly Spanish), it's only 99.9% accurate but I don't see two Frenchman thinking the same anywhere in Europe.

No, first line support is often dealing with people that have a PEBCAK problem, not a software or hardware problem. Or at least not one related to what you're actually providing support for in a supported configuration. I suspect that many companies don't actually want a support line, if you have a problem they'd rather you get pissed and go somewhere else than tie up one of their employees - even your outsourced call center guy. Unless it's a big thing affecting many users in which case you probably know it without everyone calling in. It's not acceptable to not offer support, but you can make it useless enough that most people won't bother. This all sounds like a much cheaper way of providing non-support while still giving the pretense that you do. Let's call it a tier zero before you even get to reach first line support, far less knowledgeable support.

I once had the displeasure of telling our client that the vendor (luckily not our company but our partner, so I could say "they" not "us") did not support the use of the "back" button in their web interface. Any support case that involved using it would be closed as not supported. For bonus points they didn't provide any functionality equivalent to it either, so of course everyone used the back button anyway where it did work. To me it's a bit like selling a four door car where the back doors are only for decoration and actually opening and closing the doors are not supported but I guess if you have enough lawyers and impenetrable contracts anything is possible.

Yes, the claim that Y is actually X is only covered by a small section on misrepresentation. Unless it's in bad faith there's no penalty at all and worse case they're only liable for costs incurred, no penalties or restitution. It's as if the copyright lobby wrote it, oh wait they did....

This. Before, people were mostly concerned with learning the language of the bordering countries because that's what was most useful. Today people have the Internet and want/need a global language of communication. While this graphic is also in many ways biased, English in the World shows most of the world has English as their first foreign language. That trend is only going to grow stronger because there are huge network effects at play here. While the US may be seeing a big influx of Spanish, here in Europe the trend is opposite - few people learn Spanish and the Spaniards learn more and more English. And I don't think it has any traction in Africa, Asia or Oceania.

File sharing is a technology to share files, piracy is shorthand for copyright infringement that may or may not involve file sharing and file sharing may or may not involve copyright infringement. Calling them one and the same is certainly running the "proprietarians" errand in their quest to kill file sharing. It's not like they care about the collateral damage of shutting down non-infringing file sharing, in fact it's a competing distribution channel. Besides, why do you think they're increasingly using the words "thieves" and "stealing"? Because "pirates" and "piracy" no longer have the desired effect, more people associate pirates with the Jack Sparrow variety who is something more of a bad boy-hero / Robin Hood than Somalian cutthroats. Not to mention the ample opportunities to use pirate symbols, co-opting a brand is easier than building one.

First of all you're complaining about a "brand problem" of a movement that probably wouldn't even exist if they hadn't put up the pirate flag as the rallying point, getting off the ground is more important than how gracefully you do it. Secondly if they'd gotten lost in the finer semantics of language nobody would care, wasting precious media time arguing that it's not piracy but copyright infringement. Except it's not short, catchy, made for headlines and they'd probably lose. Media loves the pirate branding too you see, without it they wouldn't have gotten a fraction of the attention. Near as I can tell, neither the Swedish or German Pirate Party - who have come the furthest - have a problem with their pirate branding, but more with what the rest of their politics should contain.

The wider "mainstreaming" effect you're talking about is more seen in the other youth parties and possibly a few more concession in other political parties (I'm talking about here in Europe now, US is a lost cause). None of the other parties really cared much about their environmental policy before the Greens put it on the agenda, likewise none of the other parties cared much about IP before the Pirate Party put it on the agenda. Some of the left wing parties have framed it in terms of digital public property, some of the right wing parties in forms of market liberalization - less government regulation. Piracy is perfectly free of left-right connotations, while "sharing is caring" I'm pretty sure would become socialist politics and so inedible to the right. For all its flaws, it still has more potential than the alternatives.

Private property has collapsed much more rarely than fiat currencies, as a matter of degree. But if you find yourself in the middle of the Civil War II, chances are very good you'll be relieved of all your "tangible assets" by an army while your claim to the land might survive the war. And refugees are almost always robbed blind by bandits and armed gangs, if you're first driven from your land. I'd rely more on stealth, feigned poverty and forged surrender than mere accumulation of assets. Chances are you're not the biggest and baddest thing out there and any hoard will attract a lot of unwanted attention. On the other hand, I have to live somewhere too so I'd rather just try transferring my assets there ahead of me and escape by a long distance flight. I'd rather relocate across the globe than rely on a prepper bunker.

Well let's take a process like "quenching steel" compared to regular steel, you still have all the same basic ingredients, you heat it up and cool it down but really the rapid quenching brings out new and novel properties in the steel. It surely should qualify for a patent, it's not like the regular steel smith has a patent for everything his smithy could do - yet the smith has never done or even thought about doing. In the same way it would be absurd to patent the Turing complete machine and say all software is merely the application of machine states. On the other end of the spectrum if you add 0.01% table salt and claim your quenched steel+salt isn't infringing on any patent because it only says steel, the courts will laugh at your attempt to trivially avoid the patent. Most software is like that, trivial changes of inputs, instructions, ordering etc. are "new" but not in any sense novel while software with new functionality that's never been done before sounds novel and non-obvious to me.

No, because the obvious answer is yes. But do you have to lump it together with tests to measure specific knowledge? I've had years of regular full time onsite university education, if what I need is to prove my ability in a specific topic then that should be possible without requiring a meager and largely irrelevant addition to my general interpersonal skills, particularly if my available hours, location or other duties make it impractical or impossible. At least anything that can be reasonably accomplished through exams and exercises, I don't really see how we could let loose doctors and lawyers without real world experience with real patients and clients which necessitates a controlled training program. Most fields are not like that though, if it's all on paper or computer or with inanimate objects then you should be able to read yourself to a degree in most STEM fields.

As the highly abused saying goes, the proof is in the pudding - in this case the grey matter. If the brain is capable of having this processing and storage capacity, interconnectivity and power requirements then surely so can we, if we don't it's because our silicon-based technology is inefficient and inferior compared to the organic "technology" of the brain. Using custom silicon that mimics the brain - rather than trying to emulate it on a Von Neumann architecture - it should be doable in the same realm as supercomputers, I saw one research paper that said based on the size of emulating one and one neuron it should eventually be possible to do it at the size of a car with a 10 kW power supply. Still, the real issue is that they're not usable for anything else than research since we really, really don't have a programming model for a system like this.

Yes, but good luck finding out what that jurisdiction is, at least they don't seem to have much luck in locating and shutting down hidden services. If you only really need a DNS name that'll stay constant and that doesn't need to be "easy" then the onion system would be just fine, you own them by virtue of owning the private key and they all look like ebiueabv35rwas.onion. Unlike an IP you can move the key around and run your site from any box you want, which is the most essential part of DNS. You probably won't type it up but if you find it on some web page somewhere and bookmark it you'll have it.