Let me get this straight. So you're not allowed to see which sites are on the blacklist but if you link to one you get fined $11,000 a day? How the hell are you supposed to avoid linking to something that you don't know you're not supposed to link to? All Australians are stupid and I'll justify that statement. Those Australians who work in government are stupid for putting together such a stupid thing. And the rest of the Australians are stupid for allowing such a government to exist at all.

Barges into the server market? This almost makes it sound as if there's something wrong with that. I'm all for as many players as possible in the market. Competition can only improve things for everyone.

You're absolutely right in what you say. Our lead programmer some years back was supposedly the biggest baddest programming genius on the planet. He didn't poop in the lobby or harass the women but he was definitely the person you did *not* want to talk to. He was cranky in the morning. He was cranky during lunch. He was cranky in the afternoon. Hell, come to think of it, he was always cranky! He pushed everybody away so that heaven forbid, you wouldn't touch the sections of code that he determined were for his magic touch only. Those were obviously the most critical sections of the code, in technical *and* in business terms.

Fast forward a few years. (Actually rewind because this is in the past.) He was let go. The company damn nearly fell apart because that software, the flagship product, was totally unreliable and customers were fuming. And it was because of the software. Somehow we survived, and along with several other people, I was put in charge of going through the code to determine what it would take to fix it. We looked through it and decided it would be better to commit suicide than to try to fix this thing.

Let me tell you a little about it. First of all, there was no organization. Unrelated functions would be located together, while closely related functions were strewn about across many translation units. Nothing was declared static. Many of the function prototypes and extern declarations did not match the actual definitions. But this is only the very minor stuff. Things that could be done in a single line of code were implemented in the most retarded way possible. (Think Rube Goldberg machine, only in software.) Error checking? Sometimes, and even then, wrong. Every imaginable problem related to the use of pointers, multithreading, files, you name it. And the worst part? He did not use any form of version control, so other than the current bleeding edge sources (what you would call the head of the trunk), there was no source for any other version.

And this guy was some kind of genius? NO! He didn't push us all away so we wouldn't "mess up" his perfect work. He did that so nobody would discover that his work was shit. Pure shit. It worked, this software. That's the miracle. But it only worked somewhat.

We described the situation to management and everyone promptly decided to throw the whole damn thing away and start over. The new system is just fine.

Somebody once pointed out to me that the cemeteries are full of irreplaceable people. In other words, in a world full of billions and billions of people, where to use computer related jobs as an example, so many people work in this sector that the small subset that participates in open source development is so enormous that you can find *any* kind of software in open source, and most of it is pretty damn clever *and* well documented, you can't convince me that there is nobody else who can do some programming job or another, even if the job is something outrageously complicated. You think skyscrapers, airplanes, hell why go that far, the computer hardware itself, you think all that got built because there doesn't exist another person on this planet smarter than irreplaceable Josh or our grumpy idiot programmer? I'm sorry but every single person in the world is irreplaceable. And yet we're all going to die one day. The certainty of that is just below the certainty of your taxes going up every year. When you have some jack ass like that working for you, you weigh all the options like a responsible businessman and then promptly get rid of him. As many here have already said, it's more important to be a pleasant person who can write software than some supposedly genius who nearly (or completely) destroys the whole company.

The solution to this problem is very simple. After you have an accident, you go to your social profiles and document, as accurately and as specifically as possible, exactly how the accident affected you, including the specific areas of your body that have been affected, how much each area hurts on a scale of 1 to 10, what activities you find difficult or impossible following the accident, etc. Be sure to mention the related expenses that you are incurring. To add a dramatic flair, motion to quash the subpoena that asks to see your profiles and produce them begrudgingly when your motion is denied.

Alternately you should always write your profile entirely in 1337 5p33k so that if such a subpoena should ever come, the court will have to obtain an expert witness to translate the content. |\/|y L1f3 ha5 b3c0m3 teh suxx0rz!!

In 1984, George Orwell wrote that you'll have a telescreen in your house, on which you'll watch television programming, but they'll watch you, too, through a built-in camera. You'll never know exactly when they're watching you, so you'll have to be careful all of the time.

Fast-forward to the present. Many computers and computer screens come with a built-in camera for videoconferencing. Instead of building blimps, which entails all kinds of costs and challenges, all they need to do is make up a law compelling every television and computer monitor manufacturer to include a built-in always-on camera that forwards video data to the government. Since this wouldn't pass on its own as a bill, all they have to do is insert it somewhere in the middle of another 50,000 page stimulus package that nobody reads before signing into law. And to make really sure that nobody notices until it's too late, that particular section of text should be formatted in Wingdings. Then, it will be, are you ready for this, in Soviet America, television watches you!

There is this innovative technology called parents. They need to turn off the television set and send the kids outside to play football or go out with friends.

Yap. They really need to build that big laser/water cannon to blast this stuff out of orbit. I heard there's all kinds of nonsense floating around up there. Office chairs from Washington State among other things.

No, I think it's something else. Television programming in general is an outdated and outmoded method to deliver "content." It worked in the 1950's. It worked in the 1990's. But today, many people don't want to live their lives according to the schedule of the television company. People like me. About five years ago, I got rid of my ancient television and never got another one, and that was after the ancient television wasn't turned on in at least a couple of years. I don't need that crap. If I want to watch a movie, which is a rare event, the computer screen is bigger, brighter, and sharper than any television, and the computer plays DVDs just fine. More people are finding that they want to watch stuff on their own schedule. Eventually the idea of television programming as we know it today will be gone altogether. And good riddance. Kids need to spend more time playing outside and adults need to spend more time doing something better than glued to the couch.

I imagine they're doing a superset of what you say. Mr. Idiot gives them his CC#. They sell Idiot a $50 gift card for $1. Idiot thinks all is well. Meanwhile they wait a month or two. Then they start using Idiot's CC to buy other stuff. Idiot goes WTF?! and reports the fraudulent transactions. Hundreds of similar idiots do the same. Some smart law enforcement people cross reference the transactions and find that all people who bought from a certain vendor ended up with fraudulent activity two months later. This happened before. In one example, a restaurant swiped credit cards twice, once to charge the card and once again in a second machine to record the card info. Weeks or months later they'd use the recorded info to buy stuff, until someone cross referenced and found them out. In the restaurant's case, the customers did no wrongdoing. But in this gift card case, the idiots are in some serious trouble. By reporting the fraudulent activity (which they have no idea is connected to the counterfeit gift card they bought), they will incriminate themselves because the same law enforcement people will figure out that the original, intentional, transaction was for counterfeit gift cards. Meanwhile the people running this scheme are in some other country and probably can't be touched. A bad deal any way you look at it, both for Apple and for the idiots trying to rip Apple off for cheap music.

Yes sir, that is exactly what he is running. :-)

Therein lies the problem. Although XP is several years old, it actually does every single thing a user needs from an operating system. As the saying goes, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Why would anybody upgrade any software (not just the OS but apps, too) unless the new version included a fix to a bug from which the user suffers or a new feature that the user actually needs? There's risk in changing something that works. Furthermore there is the cost and I'm not talking about the software licensing cost. It costs time and money to actually install this software. Then it costs more time and money to retrain everybody on the new software. With all this risk and no clearly defined benefit that actually justifies it, nobody will upgrade. I am not some great business genius like the folks at the top of Microsoft, but in my very humble opinion, they should never have developed Vista. The whole point of XP was that it was a departure from the DOS-based Win 9x series. Finally, here was an operating system that merged the solid NT-based core that did business computing with the multimedia stuff 9x could do. Announcing that Vista would be a departure from XP, which was itself supposed to be the departure that would change the world, felt like deja vu. We went through the initial period of incompatibilities as we waited for XP-ready device drivers and software. Going through this again with Vista and yet again with 7 seems like an expensive exercise in solving the same recurring problem more than once. Microsoft should have continued doing incremental development on XP, progressively taking care of user concerns. Over time, optimize the software for speed, patch security holes, implement new features, etc. These progressive operating systems could have been called XP2, XP3, etc. What feature of Vista couldn't have been added to XP in due time? Instant search? That can be added by providing change notification hooks in the filesystem driver and implementing a service that receives these notifications and updates an on-disk index every time there's an idle moment. After all, the filesystem driver "knows" when it's changing something on the disk. There's no need to implement an entirely new operating system from scratch. But what the heck do I know? You can't argue with success, and Microsoft's enormous accomplishments to date have placed them at the forefront of success for decades. It's too bad Vista didn't live up to the world's high expectations. I hope 7 will make it all better.

As with many laws that have ballooned out of control in our country's short history, the so-called IP laws need to be rolled back to their original condition. There are too many crooks in the system and too much abuse. We all know these laws were created to give creative people an added incentive to create because such creations advance the cause of the country. The limited time allowed by the original laws made it possible to earn back the costs of the effort and then make a necessary profit. Yes, profit is a necessary component in the system. But when the terms of these IP laws extend into the next millennium, it serves not to advance the well being of the country but to make useful works disappear from existence as their creators no longer exist or no longer care to provide the product. At the very least, if the terms are not shortened back to sane values, there should be a clause for so-called orphaned works, which would state that if you're reasonably sure the creator of a work no longer exists or the creator does exist but is no longer interested in selling the product, the IP laws cease to apply and it enters the public domain. In other words, protect the stuff you're actually selling. If you're no longer trying to sell it, you no longer need the protection.

We'll call the person I'm about to tell you about, Bob. Name changed to protect the guilty. Bob is someone I know through a friend. He found a U.S. postal money order for $300 sitting on a desk in a library. There was nothing written on it, so he took it, wrote his own name on it, and deposited it in his checking account. Little did Bob know that the proprietor of said postal money order, let's call this person Alice, had the little stub that you tear off the top. And the stub has the serial number of the money order on it. And within a short time of the money order being cashed, the post office can produce for you a nice printout of the money order as imaged by the bank. It was an easy matter to locate Bob. Charges were filed. Bob was not actually convicted. He paid Alice back every cent and somehow convinced Alice and the police to drop the charges. The fact that Bob found the money order apparently lost or abandoned, unmarked and unidentified, helped Bob's case. But it could have been a year in jail. Bottom line, don't steal. Are you willing to risk the consequences?