+5 Insightful.

In a way, I see a parallel between how open a country should be with how open software should be. The fundamental philosophy behind the two things is the same, in my humble opinion. Just like software, a country, especially the USA, will NOT go bankrupt or even lose its income earning potential if it recognizes that intellect and intellectual property should be nurtured and left free, not be caged and locked away. I may sound over the top while making this comment, but there are very few countries that can pull this off, and the USA is probably one of the very few. Look at any country that has a static population that doesn't travel much or even one that is from the old world, and you will see all the negative things amplify over time - corruption, narrow mindedness, bureaucracy, laziness, to name a few.

If a society does not embrace change or becomes too insular, it will die or will become slow and sluggish to a point of no return. This has happened to societies time and again - look at China and India or even many of the European countries that are slowly sliding down the slope such as Greece. They were once great nations only because they actively traveled and traded and moved about freely - over time, when they stopped doing so, their societies rotted to the point where other puny nations and kingdoms walked all over them. Even after countless wars etc, the seeds they left in the form of systemic corruption, bureaucracy, etc. sustain themselves for thousands of years.

It is sad to see that so many countries still fail to see the danger of insulating themselves from immigrants or from other cultures. At the end of the day, the intelligent, the dynamic, the risk takers, the people who keep a society alive, will get what they want one way or the other. They are also the ones who have the gumption to leave behind everything they know and that is comfortable into an unknown culture. I've often wondered why countries are brain dead enough to not see this obvious fact.

Actually, you are wrong. I'm not speaking for overclockers and in fact, I'm not even one. However, extreme overclocking is very valuable. It tells normal overclockers how much headroom they can expect (at least relative to another chip), it gives an indication of how robust the chip design and the process technology is.

Your car analogy is completely wrong as well. A ricer analogy would be someone who uses a fancy case but does nothing to improve the internals. The analogy would be someone who takes a stock engine and tries to rev it to the maximum possible rpm by using any means. I imagine that many people would find this a valuable metric especially when they are comparing various engines, especially for specialized needs such as drag racing.

IMO, the Trinity is a truly compelling offering from AMD, after a long long time. Yes, it trades lower CPU int/float performance for higher GPU performance when compared to Ivy Bridge, but this tradeoff makes it a very attractive choice for someone who wants a cheap to mid-priced laptop that gives you decent performance and decent battery life while still letting you play the latest bunch of games in low-def setting. Its hitting the sweet spot for laptops as far as I am concerned. I'm also fairly sure it will be priced about a hundred bucks cheaper than a comparable Ivy Bridge - that's how AMD has traditionally competed. Hats off to AMD fror getting their CPU performance to somewhat competitive levels while still maintaining the lead against the massively improved GPU of the Ivy Bridge. All this while they're still at 32nm while Ivy Bridge is at 22nm.

Having said that, what I am equally excited about is the hope that Intel will come up with Bay Trail, their 22nm Atom that I strongly suspect will feature a similar graphics core that is there in Ivy Bridge. Intel has always led with performance and stability, not with power efficiency and price, so they need to create something that genuinely beats the ARM design, at least in the tablet space if not in the cellphone space.

A 300% increase in salary for a 60% increase in living expenses. Sounds like a no-brainer to me.
Going to california, I am, brother. Hope to meet some gentle people there.

Musing aside, I still stand by my original belief that if one is good at her job and is willing to work hard, there's money to be made, respect to be had, and happiness to be enjoyed. Yeah, you can join finance and count your money and pretend to be a leet trader by drinking single malts and what not, but if you're doing it only for the money, you're missing out, man.

Oh yeah, one more thing. In today's world, you have to be willing to relocate.

The only reason your argument *sounds* correct is because you have dumbed down this complex problem way too much.
Please consider the following usage cases - using your above example:
1. If person A wants to listen to Sanjaya twice, i.e. she wants to be entertained for 5 minutes, not 2.5; should she pay more?
2. If person A listens to Sanjaya along with family or friends, should she pay more?
3. If person A plays the song in her restaurant, should she pay more?
4. If person A creates a personal copy of the song and plays the song on 2 different media devices, should she pay more?
5. If person A sells her song to person C and deletes her personal copy, should she pay more?
6. If person A rents her song to someone else (only one person at a time), should she pay more?
7. If person A rents her song to someone else (multiple people at the same time), should she pay more?
8a. If person A decides to do all of the above but with a much lower quality/bitrate copy, does that change anything?
8b. Alternately, if person B copies a low bitrate version of the song, is she still an entitled little shit?
9. If for some reason, person A loses her song or the song gets corrupted or deleted, should she be able to download it again for free?
10. If person B paid 1 cent to person A with the understanding that she will only listen to the song once in the next 24 hours and then will delete it, and honored the agreement, is she still an entitled little shit?

I'm quite sure I haven't covered all possible usage cases - the above are only some naive ones that I can think of. Even so, I personally cannot think of satisfactory answers that sound ethical and economically fair to both the content creator and the content consumer. I suspect that the correct workable answer would be more reasonable than fair, more practical and just, and would lie somewhere in the middle of the two polar stances that people.are taking on this subject.

Aggressive in-your-face "i do what i want" behavior only works if you manage to pull it off without being a jerk to others. What if a guy sitting next to you was coming back from a soccer game and blew a compressed air 120db horn next to your ear? What if someone on the train spat in your face when talking to their neighbor or dropped mustard in your lap while eating a sandwitch and didn't even apologize?

Don't like it? Drive your own damn car. It's easy to have a tough attitude about personal liberty. Difficult when you are facing the brunt of it.

And yes, someone talking for a few minutes on the phone and trying to keep their voice low in a crowded train is one thing. Someone talking very loudly for a couple of hours in a crowded train is completely another thing. There's no rule book for this - the assumption is that as a citizen of society, you would be considerate to others and learn how to co-exist without getting into a fistfight every day. Unfortunately, so many people nowadays are so self-absorbed and grow up with a sense of entitlement, they're forgotten how to be a gentle human being (without necessarily being a pushover). Or they turn their nose at the concept.

Actually, I would argue that your analogy is incorrect. To be a good driver, you need to know:
a. how to control your car really well under different conditions
b. and you need to know the rules of the road really well

You really don't need to know how your car works, at least not in great detail. Meaning, you need to know how to fill gas and do basic maintenance, but you really don't need to know what's under the bonnett.

The reason I am getting a bit pedantic on this is to point out the fact that in today's age, it is more important for a newbie to know how browsers work, how internet protocols work, how the internet is structured and how information flows in general. It is becoming less important to know how your computer internals work. The internals have been commoditized to the extent that it is unnecessary to know how your microprocessor and your motherboard works, just as you don't need to know how your phone works in order to make a call or even to do something complex like manage your address book in your phone.

CNG or Compressed Natural Gas vehicles are quite common in India. It started out a decade ago when the big cities in India started converting buses to run on CNG instead of diesel to curb pollution. Then, taxis got converted. Now, you can get your private vehicle fitted with a CNG conversion kit or you can directly buy a CNG version of your car from the manufacturer. I haven't driven one myself, but have spoken to lots of cab drivers. Even if you ignore the environmental benefits, the running cost of CNG is less than half of diesel or gasoline.

The other take on this is to have more power generation plants use CNG instead of coal. I find it highly inefficient to transport energy chemically instead of electrically. If you were developing software, this is how you would abstract your layers. Human beings suck at change. The only time we refactor anything in our lives is if we are forced to do it - like a war or an economic crisis or something similar.

Actually, that is not necessarily true. I get what you are trying to say, but you seem to gloss over the differences between QA, manual tester, and what the OP was referring to: Software Test Engineer.

To highlight some of the differences:

QA is responsible for "assuring quality". This is different from QC which is "checking quality". More often than not, a good QA is a process expert, with the assumption being that good processes ensure good quality. Their goal is to avoid the problem, not to detect the problem or fix the problem. Where the line gets blurred is the fact that a QA often performs the role of a manual tester. This usually depends on the size of the team.

Manual testing is usually QC - understanding what to test, how to test, and going ahead and testing it. They start off by translating the requirement specification (or user stories if you are agile) into a suite of test cases, add other test cases that might be non-functional or regression related, and finally test the system manually every time before it is released to customers.

Generally (although not always true), a "test engineer" is more of a developer than a tester. They are usually tasked to develop test frameworks using third party tools or even creating their own framework. The former usually involves scripting and lightweight coding and the latter can involve full blown coding. They can be developing a test framework for executing and managing unit tests and functional tests (often white box), and integration tests, regression tests, and performance tests (often black box). While many project teams skimp on devoting this much engineering to testing, it can give huge returns, perhaps even better returns than development can after a certain point.

To be fair, the OP has not mentioned anything else beyond "software test engineer" so the role might very well be manual testing. However, the word "engineer" leads me to believe it is more of a automation role. Having said this, companies often embellish their titles with "engineer" to make it sounds weighty.

For what it is worth, Dark Side Of the Moon is widely considered as one of the most well recorded albums of all time.

The way this is done, dear sir, is to use the mouse middle click or ctrl+click to open up said article in a new tab, and then to avoid switching to the new tab and instead type up a supposedly witty or insightful one-liner to a random comment... erm like I have done.

I like the hard science fiction sub-genre quite a bit. Any recommendations?
What I've read and liked so far (hard sci-fi and sometimes merging with cyberpunk) - Stephen Baxter, Peter F Hamilton, Neal Asher, Alastair Reynolds.

Desperately looking for more authors and books to read. Please help if you can.

Is it a coincidence that most of these authors are from the British isles?

Fair enough, in this case, the captain was indeed worthy of ridicule. All I'm saying is that there may be more to this than meets the eye. I like reading and participating in /. because in general, the audience displays a high level of intelligence. You can see this manifest itself in posts that challenge the "basic premise" and are often trollish in nature, besides pedantic arguments about grammar and accuracy, My post was not a reply to the OP but a general statement that lately, /. posts have become more uni-dimensional in nature and is becoming more "mob-like".

For example, the root cause in this case may very well have been a systemic organizational screw-up that others are now frantically trying to cover up. If the captain did indeed veer off the suggested course and was "showboating", was it because of personal reasons or was he mandated to do so as an unwritten rule?

Again, please note that I am not trying to defend this guy - admittedly, his story and his excuses sound quite pathetic. I just didn't want this thread to become too one-dimensional. Plus, everyone is blaming the captain alone as if he was single handedly running the ship. What about the rest of the crew??

One thing needs to be said here - The captain was probably qualified to manage and navigate a boat. However, you and many of the other critics on this thread wanted him to automatically be a *hero* as well, and found him wanting. I'm not trying to defend this guy, but I find it surprising that so many armchair critics demand such an incredibly high standard of professionalism and performance and even heroism from others. I'm not sure if it is Marvel comics to blame or the media that tries to invent its heroes at the drop of a hat, but really, aren't we all going a bit over the top here?? This is the same stupid media overhype that has wrapped a halo around every fireman and coast guard employee and emergency response worker.

Everyone is doing a job to clock their hours, get paid, and go back home to their families with enough money to feed their loved ones. Professionals in every discipline display the same human strengths and weaknesses - varying levels of passion for their job, varying levels of professionalism and commitment, varying levels of hard work, varying levels of intelligence etc. Don't diss someone's screwup to such an extent that you make them the devil incarnate or Mr. Incompetent. Everyone, naysayer or supporter, will only discover their own levels of competence when they find themselves in the middle of a horrifying and paralyzing crisis like this.

This guy was probably weak and lacked the capacity to handle a crisis of this magnitude, but let's also not fall over each other in making him out to be such an incompetent fool as well. Please also remember that in crises like these, most people also go into "Cover Your Ass" mode and usually look for a fall guy to pin everything on.

We're falling into the same 21st century trap that the media has created and oversold - quick to judge and quicker to forget.