Working in isolation can sometimes be more productive. But if the work is moving on quickly, people away from the office have latency. Also, certain spontaneous things just cannot happen. I remember rewriting a critical internal component of a rather core library since the original version, my rewrite, the other guy's rewrite and my re-rewrite had reached the limits of their flexibility, generality and performance. Like I said---a critical part. So I wandered over to discuss it with someone, and started some pair programming. A third person overheard and joind us. We probably ended up arguing back and forth oover the design on every line of code.

The end result hasn't needed to be rewritten or even modified in 7 years.

And honestly, it's a piece of code I'm proud of.

I've also found it harder to work with genuinely remote workers and I've found that the team spirit or whatever it is is harder to achieve. I've also worked at a Very Large Orgnisation, where we were all on-site but the critical people (for me) were within walking distance, so I could go over to their office. That was probably the best of both worlds in some ways, but I wouldn't like to rely on such a setup since that project was run by someone who was an utter genius at project managment, so it probably would have worked whatever happened.

Also on a final note, I would point you at:

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

search for "door closed". The piece is a very well written peice (and not very nice) about research careers, but I think that section has enough in common with programming. After all in both, you have to move with the times almost brutally and continously solve new problems and learn new things to stay on top.

It wasn't DHS "stealing" a boat, it was them refusing to release it without a signature.

Ans there you go misrepresenting the facts too. You missed the part where they refused to provide the correct paperwork. In orher words, they refused him any legal means of getting his boat.

For no reason.

We don't know whether the agent in question had the authority to make changes to the legal documents.

Oh yeah, and she quite clearly told a half truth (technically true, but intentionally deceptive) to the person she phones.

Stop complaining about it.

But I like pretending to be a professional photographer, 3D animator, enterprise network administrator, web-scale programmer and professional musician on the internet.

While the desktop is always a bit broken,

Indeed it is! That's why I like Linux, where I don't have to suffer the desktop metaphor. FVWM FTW.

There might be some certain enterprise features missing,

Well, I'm sure if you paid someone, they could throw in a licensing server, a dependency on an obscure version of java with no option to upgrade and some very expensive 19" rackmount hardware which is inexplicably slower and less reliable than a commodity rackmount box.

"Needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" (ST reference) is the basic theme of China.

You are forgetting that most of the western world, having industrialised earlier has been through the "let's trash the environment" stage, and after decades of rivers which burn or stink so badly they make a capital city nearly uninhabitable or spills of toxic waste which cause all sorts of nasty deaths, the western countries have solwly and painfully come to the realisation that it's actually not a very good idea to do all that.

I think this has little to do with cultural values and much to do with industrialisation being difficult and because it is easier to mess things up than not, and therefore comes earlier on in the process.

Also, it's a product of industrialising countries nort really quite realising how much they can mess stuff up until they experience it.

I didn't "have a family" by "blind luck".

Then what do you mean by: "Thankfully, I had a family to fall back on."

How on earth is that anything other than blind luck?

I would have done the same without that support.

How: you said you fell back on support. How could you have fallen back on family for support without the support?

and the self-fulling prophecy of "the bossman owns me, I must do whatever he says" is not rubbish, it is reality for too many people. It should not be.

No, that is total rot because it is not a self fulfilling prophecy. It happens because people have no support and do not earn enough to have significant savings.

Yeah. Even if it might not be desirable, "destabilization of the industry" is NOT a legal argument

And even if it was a legal argument, it's a complete lie.

Claiming that maintaining the status quo which has been in place since the beginning and not making a massive, pervasive change could be a destabilising change is a total utter lie.

Oh come now. You know very well you'd get arrested, since the story has no credibility. Now, if you were also carrying your firstborn...

This is completely wrong

No, it's completely right: the traditional way to use a database is to blob everything together in to one huge table, preferably with many NULLs, then limit your query to SELECT * FROM Table; and finally process the results directly in VB6, with bonus points for a buggy parser for unpicking comma separated fields.

Note: he said "traditional" not "sane relational".

Sarcasm aside, his reason for not using a relational database is that he'd need to use more than one table and then he'd have to perform joins on them, which sounds very much like saying the reason not to use SQL is because the problem fits exactly into what SQL is designed to do.

But hey, his new solution is in the cloud so it must be better.

people given US security clearances have a VERY intensive background check done on them,

Well, except members of congress who can get clearances of any level necessary for an investigation, regardless of their level of criminality and dodgy financials.

Actually, these days it's pretty unusual to have a congrescritter without dodgy financials.

Obviously, all this data is classified as secret or above, and is almost certainly not for release to foreign individuals.

The USA, UK, Canada and Australia all have the administrative structure in place to share classified data with each other. Naturally not all classified data is to be shared, but classified doesn't imply not for fireigners.

The funny thing is that the NOFORN stuff is an entirely different mechanism done as trade protection, and while you can share it with any 2 bit sleaze bag multiple felon with US citizenship, you can't share it with your trusted allies sharing a clearance level.

Brilliant!

That's okay; if the grammar and vocabularly of today's 20 and 30 year old Americans are any indication,

No, you've got the reason all wrong.

The reason for the one way communication is that the F22 pilots can't talk back due to having passed out from lack of oxygen.

What you have said is roughly:

By blind luck I had a choice

But my point is that the mentality of "you have no choice, big business owns you" is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That's utter rubbish. If you didn't have your family then you would have had no choice.

The nice thing is that there is only one way to be good but so many ways to be evil.

Microsoft loath competition, but seem to be at worst ambivalent to their customers. I think they might even quite like them in that they recognise on some level that customers are somehow key to their success. I mean they created bob and clippy, but out of misguided good intentions, rather than evil in that case.

Sony seem to exist for the sole purpose of making their customers lives miserable. I have never encountered another company which seems to despise their customers and delight in creating new schemes to make them suffer.

But that's just two. There are so many more. Blackwater (like to kill people), the big government contractors (like to steal taxpayers money under the guise of contracts), patent trolls, copyright trolls, union carbide, etc...

See so many ways.

"This thing that a subsidiary caused happened 10 years ago! NEVER FORGIVE!!!"

So, it's a thing that happened on THEIR BRAND, and their reaction: "fuck you", and then more recently, they had the largest credit card breach in history. Their reaction? "fuck you again".

Sure that event hapened 10 years ago, but the sony brand, going back much more than those 10 years has shown itself to regard the customer with utter contempt.

That was one highlight, don't pretend they've changed just because it was a long time ago. But if you want to completely ignore their behaviour and go buy your new shiny, don't let me stop you.