Home TV screens being bigger mainly.

Also, there are now other forms of entertainment to take into account too like computer games.

I think if you take the amount spent on movies, tv, music and games all together you will find that it has not change much over the past few years. It might have gone down a little actually but that is probably just due to the means of delivery getting cheaper so the costs to and user going down as well when you take inflation into account. I think if you compare the cost of an album in the shops now to in the 60's the price has actually fallen.

The big change though is that piracy has become easier from a technical perspective with the advent of digital recordings so people who refuse to pay for their entertainment find it easier. Also, there is the notion that nothing is lost by that extra copy somehow making it acceptable.

Are you sure? I earn $1 in about 5 minutes so it seems fair to pay that to me, especially for the amount of time and effort someone has to put in to create a song that I like. The problem is that to most young people (who engage in most piracy) that 1$ is worth far more since they earn less. A cup of coffee that last about 5 minutes costs twice that and can't be consumed twice.

When I was a kid I would go round gathering up supermarket trolleys to return that people had walked off and left the coin deposit in. I could not understand why the hell anybody did this, now I can. If I lose $10 I am slightly annoyed but nothing more, to really piss me off I would have to lose a few hundred. If get too drunk and miss the last train home I just get a cab all the way, that costs about $80.

This is the real problem, the vast gap in earnings between those of us who have a real career type job and the low wage McJobs that are open to young people. That vast gap in ability to earn money means that the price points chosen for lots of products like DVD's and music now are very high from young peoples point of view. Young professionals are often the target market for music and entertainment now, and that means if you are still a student the prices chosen seem obscene.

Yes but it did enable Iraqi oil to be sold on the open market again, unlike before when it was blackmarket sale only. It could have gone on like that for decades too as no fucker in Iraq was ever going to rise up and get rid of Saddam. The only people who might have are Iran and they are the last people we wanted to have the Iraqi oil fields.

The second amendment now is just a way of making sure the american arms industry has a good market for its products at home. Any idea of it helping keep the US population safe has long since gone out the window, it is about the companies the donate to the NRA wanting to make as much money as possible and that means having as larger market for their products as possible.

Guns make individual people feel safer, they do not necessarily make society as a whole safer.

It made sense when it was enacted a few hundred years ago before massive but also densely populated cities existed but things have changed and will carry on changing. Most other countries have been able to let their gun laws evolve but in the US this is more difficult.

So people who are never going to rise up against the government however tyrannical it gets, have no need to hunt, live in a built up area and have no need to protect themselves from anyone apart from their neighbours and fellow citizens can get a gun. Maybe this would be ok if you could stop criminals getting them but that is impossible when they are so easy for normal people to buy. I can buy a gun, then just give it to a criminal with very little comeback but making a healthy markup. Changing this would be a damn good start but even that the NRA is against changing as it would mean less guns sold and that would affect those donations from companies making money from the civilian market.

I understand what caricaturing is, I do not understand why the hell you put it in quotation marks if it was not a quotation.

Ok, your first problem is that you are going to need a job.

I hate to break it to you but sometimes managers can be a little caustic, they are generally very well paid but have to put up with quite a lot of stress. Sometimes, this makes them get angry with you if you are contributing to that stress or they feel you are. They should not, they know they should not but we are only human and sometimes we make mistakes. You are just going to have to get used to it.

I have worked in a few different roles (shop assistant, telesales, rigger, developer). The only job I had where people were always polite to each other was when working a rigger because you had an awful lot of very large, physically able men who would seriously make a mess of you if you were rude. In every other job I found managers sometimes get stressed and pissed off. They might try not to, but if you make mistakes you will sooner or later either get shouted at or you just get fired. People always make mistakes so sooner or later you will get shouted it, even if only because the underlying reason was the boss having a bad day.

The difference with the linux kernel is that every time this happens everyone hears about it. That should not stop you getting involved though because you are unlikely to have to deal with these people as you are just not good enough yet. In about 5 years you might be if you can get your million hours of C coding in but by then you might be more tolerant of people being caustic. You might not, but cross that bridge later. You might find you contribute to other open source projects where everyone is more polite, the kernel is one of the most stressful and complicated so not all OSS projects are like that.

If you ever spoke to me like that I would punch your lights out :)

Not necessarily. He mentions in his reply that he does not hold grudges. Many people are like this, we forget about disagreements quickly and don't let them tarnish future communications.

It means that some people might be talking to him politely, because he is talking politely to you at that time because there is not disagreement over the current topic of conversation. How you communicated yesterday over a different topic is of no relevance. if you force it to still be relevant because you bear a grudge then that may be something you need to resolve, not them.

In my opinion after reading what she reacted to like this it is obvious that this is not a reaction to the actual email she replied to, as the email she replied to was obviously a joke about accidentally squashing someone.

It sounds like she replied to that but was actually taking issue with something else, probably the caustic nature of a bunch of male developers who all incredibly passionate about something that has very much become their baby. They no longer (and probably never have) viewed their work on the kernel as job. It is a hobby that they started getting paid for.

As to whether she is right I guess it depends. I know of many careers where rudeness is accepted, you just get used to being spoken to in that manner if you know their is no maliciousness behind it. I always remember by stepfather taking about journalism and how his editors spoke to him, they would still all socialise together though as soon as the broadcast went out and both parties always knew that there was no real ill meant, it was just one way of blowing off steam that was acceptable in their workplace.

Lol, that site is about as far from impartial as you can get.

Not sure where that came from, it is not a quote from my reply to you or wikipedia. You do not source it, so not really sure how it pertains to anything unless it is what you are saying, in which case I am just confused by the quotation marks around it.

That WAS the main thrust of the criticism on the wikipedia page linked to originally though.

I was not really thinking about jobs moving over seas, I was thinking more about them simply never happening. Once a company exists in a particular place, then you are right, there is no way they would move.

I was thinking more along the lines of if the US lacks STEM graduates then there will be less startups and also that if you are looking at getting a new project off the ground you would outsource it to a country where it could be done more quickly rather than waiting the time it would take to hire enough people. Assuming you already have enough people though then this is unlikely to be an issue as you say.

Are you sure? If you have ever lived in a slightly scary city environment and clocked that you were being followed this might not be your attitude.

For me though it always comes back to this: If a black guy had been walking round the streets of his local neighbourhood following 17 year old white kids and ended up shooting one who had no violent criminal past would he have been found guilty or innocent?

If the answer is that he would be more likely to be found guilty then there is a problem somewhere that needs solving, whatever the cause.

Or the work just gets done overseas. It is probably roughly 50 / 50.

I can find you just as many articles saying you shouldn't go to wikipedia looking for factual information either :)

I think it is worth noting though that the main thrust of criticism is not that Gladwell's writing lacks facts, it is instead that they take issue with how he draws conclusions and oversimplification.

That is an oft used criticism though from academics who have a tendency to other non-academics dumbing down their fields for public consumption. The problem is though that someone needs to do this as academics do not work in an ivory tower, their work often impacts on society as a whole so there needs to be some attempt at translating it into words that society as a whole can actually understand. Some academics can put things across in plain english with plenty of nice easy analogies, some are not interested in trying or are unable to. I think Gladwell is fairly good at making modern philosophical topics more accessible, that can only be a good thing even if he does do it in an imperfect manner.

This is very dubious. I think a good test here would be whether you could get a refund from a retailer under the same conditions. If not, and you do an end run around the retailer to the credit card company then that seems to be a bit strange, even if you can do it legally. Doing an end run around either a store or an online distributer in this case is a bit weird so no wonder Valve just treat all chargebacks as a stolen card.

So you gave up because you couldn't be bothered to work as hard as people from China and Korea living in the US? If that is true that is pretty pathetic on your part and may explain much of why the US needs so many H-1B visas.

There are other possible reasons though why chinese and korean students do better at Maths. I remember reading this a few years ago in Outliers by Malcom Gladwell: http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/outliers_excerpt3.html

Its a good book and I would recommend reading it if you can be bothered.