bildungsroman_yorick asks: "Many unlucky workers in their careers have encountered the bureaucracy, the careerism, the project death march and the office politics that hold people back from performing to high standards of work. In some office environments that I've encountered half a supervisors workload involves giving your workers room to operate and protecting them from the bureaucracy and politics. I have come to realise that it's the natural way of business culture to behave this way and the only way I can let my workers be productive is to be one step ahead of the politics, even if that means breaking the rules. So what I'd like to ask some of the more savvier Slashdot denizen: What are some of the bureaucratic black arts that you've performed in your workplace to work around the office politics and get your work done on time and to a high standard?"

wmshub asks: "Slashdot has covered stories where big mean companies threw poor little people off of web sites with names too close to that of the company. But what about when you are the company and the cybersquatter isn't even using the name? I have a small (ok, basically just me) company. The web site that exactly matches my company name has been registered since 2001, which is before I legally registered my company name but after I started doing business. Despite being registered for 4 years, the site is still nothing but a pile of banner ads - not even a hint as to why they want that particular name for their site. I contacted the owner, but they are not interested in selling (at any price, they said). If I read the ICANN guidelines correctly, domain name owners who have 'no legitimate claim for the name' can be evicted by people who do, so I think I should be able to demand they hand the name over. Has anybody ever tried this, or heard of a case where somebody with very limited funds (ie, not enough money to hire a lawyer) has been able to evict a squatter? Or do you always have to hire a lawyer and pay thousands in court fees to make this happen?"

An anonymous reader asks: "The argument regarding the principle nature of hacking - be it an art or a science is not a new one. This paper hopes to discuss both the meaning of the term 'hack' and the underlying arguments for it being defined as an art or a science, in reference to the base principles and basic methodologies of the discipline. So in your opinion, is hacking art or science?"

As as follow-up to an Ask Slashdot from earlier this week hatch815 asks: "I have recently been extended an offer to come work as an engineer for one of the internet search companies. In responsibility, this will be a step back, as I am currently in a management role, but as a career direction, it will provide me with unlimited exposure, learning, and advancement. The place where I work now is a small non-IT centric shop. Although I am management, I am at the top of the ladder. The tough decision is the pay decrease I would take if I did take this new position. Is the prestige and exposure worth giving up responsibility? I am too stuck in the big fish small pond mentality? Is going back to the forefront better than the psuedo-management I do now?"

Laurentiu asks: "In every IT department out there there's a wealth of heterogenous information floating around: code snippets, HOWTOs, FAQs, docs, spreadsheets, post-it notes etc. Asking Joe where he put that file won't work forever. So what is, in your experience, a good way to manage this knowledge? And what software would you recommend for such a task?"

andyring asks: "In a few weeks, I will be going with a group from my church down to some of the hardest-hit areas in Louisiana and Mississippi to volunteer in the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. We will be there six days, and have 10 people going so far. At this point, I don't know much more than we'll be in either Slidell, La. on the northeast shore of Lake Ponchartrain, or Pass Christian, Miss., right on the Gulf Coast near Gulfport/Biloxi. Not knowing what we'll be faced with, and having somewhat limited room for supplies, tools and equipment (probably a U-haul trailer), what would you bring on a journey such as this? Any Slashdot readers between Lincoln, Neb. and the New Orleans area interested in contributing to our effort, such as donations of equipment/supplies/tools/etc?"

Kranfer asks: "Recently, I cleaned out my PC to find not only dust... but also feathers from my from rather large parrots. I have struggled with keeping my PC dust free for years, but I have yet to find a workable solution that will keep the dust from stacking up every few months, inside my PCs at home. I was hoping that my peers on Slashdot might have thought up some innovative solutions to this common problem with any PC. How does one cut down on the dust entering a PC and sticking around? I run an Antec File Server Case with each and every fan slot taken blowing out, and even one of those Harddrive coolers and PCI slot coolers. What have you done to rid yourself of the dust and pet dander inside your PCs?"

meteorologist asks: "I work at a small college (300 students) in a small town (1500 people), and on our website we have a weather section. The problem is that it can only get weather information from a town 40 miles away. There is one local reporting station, but it reports exclusively to weatherbug, which slows down computers, and inevitably leads to spyware infections. How do I go about setting up a weather meter (temperature, humidity, wind velocity, and so forth) so that its results can be integrated into an already established website?"

TimCrider asks: "TeamXBOX is running an editorial about how console game developers can get the gaming communities more involved in the games themselves. Does anyone have any suggestions on how console developers can help build a gaming community?"

8tim8 asks: "I was looking through my uni's record library yesterday (where they have lots of old jazz records) and it made me wonder, Is there anything like Project Gutenberg for audio or video files? I'm not talking about just a place to download old audio or video files, I'm talking about somewhere that has lots of old broadcasts/movies, and has actually checked to verify that what they have is in the public domain. It seems like there must be lots of stuff in the public domain...is there a place that let's people access it?"

An anonymous reader asks: "I work as Sys Admin for a sporting company, and I'm the only 'Computer Guy' there. Recently I've been doing a lot of work writing code for their webpage and other related areas, and since I was up for contract renewal I raised the question of Intellectual Property. Now, in the contract there is a section which says that computer records/lists and such belong to the company (ie player registrations and other semi-sensitive data), but beyond that my manager was quite happy for me to own the code that I've written. Neither of us is very good with writing contracts, so he said 'Draft a document and get back to me'. Now what sort of stuff should I put in it?" This is a situation many of us may hopefully find ourselves in. For those of you who have been through this before, how did you end up structuring your contacts? Please note, when it comes to contracts, nothing beats seeking professional legal advice.

greywar asks: "While the preferred method would be simply use Linux, unfortunately my company is using Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 with C++. I have been asked to recomend if we should upgrade to the new upcoming visual studio 2005. Has anyone got any real life experience with moving a project of about 220,000 lines of code, 60,000 lines of comments from the old MSVC to the new Studio 2005 which is currently in Beta? What benefits are there, and what things do we lose? What problems will occur?"

uptime asks: "I've got a friend that needs some help with his web server availability. On two separate occasions, his server has had a problem that caused it to be unavailable for a period of time. One was early on and was probably preventable, but this latest one was due to two drives failing simultaneously in a RAID5 array. As a web business moves from a small site to a fairly busy one, availability and reliability becomes not only more important, but more difficult to accomplish it seems. Hardware gets bigger, services get more expensive, and options seem to multiply. Where could one find material on recommended strategies for increasing server availability? Anything related to equipment, configurations, software, or techniques would be appreciated."

itri writes "A co-worker recently sent me and article about job burnout. Although it's a year old, the points seemed to resonate well with me. The nutshell of the article is that job burnout is caused by lack of the sense of accomplishment, working for a narcissistic boss, and a conflict between the employers and employee's values. Is it really better working for a company that cares about your satisfaction? Are there any companies like that and (more importantly) are they hiring?"

BSDanimation asks: "I want to create slide based cartoon-like animations with speech bubbles and simple programmable 2D effects in a widely accepted format like MPEG or AVI. I have considered using Ming to code a Flash animation, but then decided against Flash and would prefer to stay away from such proprietary formats. Blender seems nice, but is too complex and a complete overkill. OpenOffice presentations seem promising, but I am not sure if it is possible to program effects and speech bubbles in it and export such presentations into a format other than Flash. What free UNIX-like OS based open source software is there for such simple 2D animation that would also allow me to distribute my animations commercially without any licensing restrictions?"

AugstWest asks: "As more research comes out showing that high voltage electricity sources can cause cancer and other health problems, I was wondering what the geeks among us could come up with for electrical shielding ideas. I've got a high-voltage transformer just off my backyard to power the train that also runs practically through my backyard, and it would be nice if I could somehow shield us from it. Of course, if the shield could also be an induction coil to sap power for my house, that wouldn't suck either..."

kuom asks: "Every couple of years, I face the same problem: running out of hard drive space. No matter how big of a hard drive I get, I seem to find ways to fill it up within a few months. The size of my hard drive grew from 2.5G to 13G, to 20G, to 40G, 80G, 120G, and most recently, 200G. Today, I have a combined hard drive space of 280G, but I again find that I only have about 2G of free space left. My collection of family photos, web site content, TV episode captures, music files, and my archive of ISO files for various operating systems, they just eat up my hard drive space so fast. I could get a 400G hard drive, but I figure maybe it's time to think about something long term, something like EtherDrive or StorageWare. But the price tags are definitely out of my range. Slashdot readers, what do you suggest for home data storage?"

pbaumgar writes "Boston.com is running an article discussing their top 50 Sci-Fi TV shows of all-time. What are some of your favorites?" From the article: "Number 10 -'Sliders. 'Sliders' should have been a widespread hit, but it was ahead of its time. The show was about a wiz-kid genius Quinn Mallory, played by Jerry O'Connell, and his band of three companions who slide among Earth's alternate realities. Toward the end of the series, the show quickly slid in quality as three of its stars - O'Connell, Sabrina Lloyd and John Rhys-Davies - departed and were replaced by others. A tragic demise to a fine show." They don't even give a nod to greatest-trek-of-all-time DS9, so I don't know about this list.

It doesn't come easy asks: "The argument over the definition of a planet continues. So far, two definitions are favored but without much consensus so far: base the definition of a planet simply on an object's size. Pluto would be near the lower limit and the newly discovered Kuiper Belt objects could also qualify, giving us 10 or 11 planets so far; or define the single dominant body in its immediate neighborhood as the only qualifying object for planetary status. If no one body dominated (such as the millions of individual asteroids in the asteroid belt) then none would qualify for planetary status. In this case Pluto would be disqualified (Neptune would be the dominant body in Pluto's region of space), and the newly discovered Kuiper Belt objects would also fail to qualify. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) working group charged with pinning down the definition of a planet may vote on the proposals within the next two weeks (or they may decide to start all over again with something new). Maybe Slashdot readers can give them some help. How would you define a planet?"

DumbSwede writes "PhysOrg.com reports that according to calculations by B.M. Kuzhevsky, the head of the neutron research lab at Moscow State University, neutron levels far above normal background levels exist during lightning strikes. While only a small percentage of rainwater contains atoms of deuterium, the lightning still provides enough energy to create fusion events. Frequent Slashdot readers no doubt remember recent articles on Fusion induced by sonic compression and more recently by pyroelectric effect. Perhaps more controversially, and yet to be discussed on Slashdot, the NIF has possible plans for a hybrid fusion approach that uses not only deuterium and tritium, but uranium and plutonium as well in what amounts to a miniaturized version of how thermonuclear weapons achieve fusion. Fears are that this could lead directly to micro-H-bombs. This year has also seen the final selection of France for the ITER experimental Fusion Reactor site. With all the recent discoveries and developments in fusion research, my question for Slashdotters - are we on the verge of something big that will make fusion a practical reality in a much shorter time frame than the often quoted '30 years away, and always will be'?"