The problem with H.264 isn't Mozilla. It's patents. The Mozilla guys are just being cautious (remember Unisys' GIF patent?)

About your anecdote 1, obviously there's bad management. That's what project managers are for, you know, to keep track of to-dos and if any of them require contacting the client. Arranging meetings, etc. Have you arranged that meeting yet? No? Well do it, now. How many projects are there? Does the company have a list of todos for each project? You know, like using Microsoft Project (TM) to keep track of each one of them?

The company I currently work for has weekly meetings for each single project. Don't get me wrong, these aren't "meetings with powerpoing presentations etc.", but operational meetings. How much we've advanced, if there are any problems with development, unknown bugs, need feedback, things that really concern us developers.

  As much as those meetings seem to be a pain in the ass, they're necessary to keep the engine going. Sometimes I've found that my approach to a certain project was going in a completely wrong direction. True, it's good to let developers work, but don't give them the full responsibility for the project. Programmers have so many things to work in that we lose track of things like customer support.

In other words, if a worker ends up procrastinating and delaying a project, here's some advice for the company: YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.

Sorry if this is a bit off-topic, but sometimes I have to get these things out of my system.

Scrap that. We need to protect the internet FROM them!

I was just thinking the same thing. Take a look at this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_semaphore

In the stone age, you can have fire. So with a little animal grease or wood, you can have torches. SO far, so good, right? Now, make up a good semaphore code and easily to transmit numbers. Maybe you'd need to use three torches instead of two. Hey, with a little rope, wood you could make a mechanism to make the torches spell binary. (Up: One, Down: Zero. Perhaps you need a "ground" torch to show the zero signal).

So what happens when you can easily transmit numbers over a certain distance? Assume you have enough friends with semaphore towers. You could transmit numbers over a really long distance.

But let's not stop there. Assign each tower a unique number and certain flags for "give me your id", "acknowledge", etc. Now you got a fucking protocol.

Now invent some signs to tell the operator to give the message to a certain tower's id. Now give the operator a series of tables (you can provide them stone tablets or something) telling which towers can send a message to which towers. Congratulations, you just invented routing.

Given enough operators and towers, and train the operators to handle the protocols, and congratulations! YOU JUST INVENTED THE FUCKING INTERNET.

How's that for stone age?

How about this idea: Instead of stopping the holocaust, you bring back all the people you can who died in the holocaust to the present. Of course, you also doom them to live in a future where most of their friends are dead now. So, technically, you didn't change the past and everything will be more or less, the same. Hey, how about this - you bring them back to the time just before the Nuremberg trials! But then again, things would get somewhat complicated and everything will focus more on the time machine than on the holocaust itself. Man, this is difficult!

I'm still amazed nobody has posted the TV Tropes article named "Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act" (which quotes the parent's link, btw).

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ptitlekz83hawz?from=Main.HitlersTimeTravelExemptionAct

My favorite line:

That's a good thing. It's literally embedding a natural limiter for a genetic experiment. The stronger the silk, the less probable the organism will be able to escape and reproduce outside. If the thing does reproduce, I expect the offspring that will make it will be the ones with weaker silk, bringing balance to nature again. Unless, of course, stronger silk gives them an unknown reproductive advantage, which I really hope doesn't happen. (Crap, now I really got scared).

One of my favorite examples of this trend is Yagami Light, from Death Note. He is given possibly the most powerful and badass superpower ever invented. He decides it to use it to clean the world of criminals - and hence, he becomes one but that's just a technicality, right?

Things start turning dark(er?) when he has to get rid of the police who are after him, when his initial plan consisted of only killing the bad guys. Finally he resorts to killing his own father to save his ass. All in the name of the greater good.

Meanwhile, inside the FICO facilities...

An alarm buzz sounds. A pigeon grabs a white card from a stack. Next to it, an operator reads the card and types it in a nearby computer.

A few miles away...

Sorry, sir, your FICO score tells us you're disqualified.

Yes, but this is slashdot. We DO know what absolute zero is. This story doesn't belong in here, it belongs in digg or reddit. No wonder the submitter is an anonymous reader.

Only if your name is Iñigo Montoya.

I second this. Currently I've been exposed to Starcraft (the original!) by Blizzard. It's good news that the game got so popular that Blizzard themselves patched their latest version so you wouldn't need to put the damn CD in there.

So now I'm looking for a place where I can purchase the product legally and get my legit key to play in battle.net.

So, with or without DRM, it's the game that makes me want to buy it. Still, kinda sucks that Blizzard are so DRM-obsessed.

Obligatory webcomic links:

http://www.vanvonhunter.com/vvh124.html
http://www.vanvonhunter.com/vvh125.html

I thought the project had been retaken a couple of months ago.

Source: http://www.3drealms.com/

You hit the nail on the head. I've recently been promoted to a more bureaucratic place at my company, and I've come to realize that a lot of things I considered of uttermost importance in software development were not as crucial as I thought. Now, I'm not saying they're not necessary. But I overestimated them. Also, I've learned that it's the sales department which makes the companies earn their income. No income, no salaries. No salaries, no employees.

Linux devs who have never understood the management and marketing side of companies, simply lack the vision needed to improve and promote the kernel/OS they love so much.