You mean some of the girls I meet on internet are guys?

From market share etc perspective it is all as you say or it looks like if you do not look too close at corporate world. I guess Still I do not see the point to pay for application that are free on desktop, I do not see the point of struggling when typing shit in and I am also fed up with the "corroded" micro-usb problems which some of these devices have. You really have a dichotomy here: for professional purposes you usually need something more or some serious tuning at least. For general public that struggled with common purpose PC anyway the deficits are not visible really but benefits like mobility are. I think that explains this. What this means for me and GP is I suppose we will wait for m$ to clean this shitty market and then I'd consider buying a tablet again (maybe). Please not that that the last sentence comes from a unix guy - I worked almost whole professional life on unix machines using windows only as terminals if at all. Bitter is it not?

I for one welcome our new GM Salmon Overlords

important is that the well does not have round corners so apple cannot sue.

'tis all depends - we are resources for them as the company indeed is a means of providing profit for its owner(s) at least in normal cases. This said if company interest in particular area goes beyond next quarter then you may argue if they are able for recognizing self interest theys hould be dealing with you in a professional manner and this includes all the niceties as well as reasonable transparency etc. If that does not happen the company may be falling apart internally because folk on the floor is busy coursing management as well as looking for another job instead of looking at the benefits they can provide for the company with their work and cooperation. So if you take it really on economical level it shows that if company has plans to be there next year maybe they should be investing some into way the interfaces towards the floor folk work. Usually however the shit comes from above in literal way: HR behave like a bunch of assholes because they are treated like a bunch of assholes by their supervisors etc.

This money that we spend on searching aliens is of course a waste. The same can be said about almost anything except food and medicine all the rest is not really needed for survival of our species. This is one thing. The other is - once we stop spending money on such wasteful things like this (or other) program we waste it another way by sending troops somewhere or some such silly thing. But in general you are right - searching for aliens is futile.

I though it is Germany - a country in love with all formal - that is so fucked up that there is a word describing doing other things that tought or generally changing paths and associations with this word are not at all positive (I meant "Quereinsteiger" which dict.leo.de translates as career changer). This country hates resumes that have holes for thinking - if HR people are nice they point out to me that I accidentally did not fill in 18 months (during which I was just traveling, enjoying life and spending money I earned so far). SO even in this country people that study odd things like in pilosophy have no or little and not so good career chances after university but hey 10 later they usually earn more than any silly engineer that spent time learning his arse away instead of 'thinking'. I suppose what that means is that if you are intelligent enough to study some odd things you may just as well put this intelligence to good use and instead of life of slavery (salary wo/man) try to become a manager and then boss maybe? Even in Germany this is possible and a word is that HR of big companies in car industry look for people with such odd education - so how is that in the land of the free? I mean it used to be a land of opportunities and where people just do what they want and some of them becoming reach in a process? Why limit yourelf to become a teacher - that is not the only option. I guess if your sis is studying things odd like japanese lietrature from old ages she must have some brain cells - if she has a bright spirit then maybe she can use that as a starting point of something Interest instead of working for some asshole?

Sometimes no regular chance is better than the regular one as the regular job has tendency to get optimized out of existence these days. Be inventive and employ yourself. I am not saying it is easy but you can see such 'shitty' education as a good starting point - by limiting employment chances it in fact removes majority of limitations other education paths provide together with a chance for so called normal employment. Well it does not have to end up this way but it may:)

this is true also when you look from management perspective - overoptimised organisation is not capable to adapt to change in environment because it can only do what it does well. This said - not all of optimizing is bad. Companies grow fat and this fat need to be cut somehow from time to time. I have been working motly in big corporations and there is another thing that they do not have - easy way to change. In fact in some situations it was easier to fire the whole dep and hire a new (usually but not always smaller) one to be able to do things differently. What I want to say is that it is not always doom and gloom - sometimes the corporation can reinvent itself again and again. It is difficult and painful but it happens.

This is a nice silly peace of nonsense that got modded up here. You seem to hate the reality you live in that you stopped thinking which is a pity. If you did not you would realize that there are no soldiers that just kill and slaughter but there are groups of soldiers of which some stand on your side and prevent you being slaughtered so they should be better killers than the others or else...

As long as there is a chance some people may attack others you need a military force to prevent being on receiving side of such attack. You may talk nonsense all night long but the fact is that you do not prevent slaughtering by scrapping military service but by trying to civilize and control it. But silly idiots like you do not see this. Yes I am also for peace in the world and all this but in certain situations I prefer to have an army on my side because the other side (whatever that may be) may not have understanding for your peaceful ways. Instead of dismantling the service you try improve it in such a way that it possibly avoids unneeded brutality and does the right thing - that is also more cost effective.

well if you think that that root cause may have been reckless financing 'innovation' combined with lost balance in an economy that was tilted drastically towards finance sector and this 'innovation' was allowed to flourish by (among other reasons) removal of regulation then no. This said I would advise on restrain in attributing anything to a particular government - they can screw things up but usually they just have some influence and not real power to change things either way. Then again you may thing about this way: there are certain things that majority of people in your country considers worthwhile having and which if not paid by taxes or restrained by laws would not exist at all - successful struggle to cut gov will cause people creating those services on lower state or county levels and this making them less effective. What I wanted to say is that small gov as an ideal is just pointless - where are areas where properly organized gov outfit is needed, there are areas where it is not. The problem with simplifications is that as a tool they are useful understand reality better and win elections but they have limits and do not describe the reality beyond those - you must be aware of these limits when you use simplifications (small gov is good) or otherwise you are just a screw up as you think the other side is (whichever that may be).

so you neither you read the article nor you can draw conclusions - must belong to tea party or what? The state (or emperor) taxes people not because it is morally good or bad or it is such a big fun. Taxes are collected for two reasons: keep the state running i.e. have those corner stones of civilization like justice system, police, army, administration needed to govern that etc as well as to spend it on things that whoever has the power thinks is good. This may include the circus or some other policy - i.e. effectively redistributing the wealth. Now the way the wealth is redistributed, who gets it and who pays for it is a matter of applicable laws and decisions that folks in a given country have to come to agreement for - for this a certain amount of social cohesion is needed or appropriate oppression apparatus as well as indoctrination in schools ('free market fixes all' is not much different from 'Kim was the greatest leader' in that it is not really true) - this is in fact redistribution already as in an ideal state police and justice system do not need oppress people into anything so one may argue having institutions like say DEA is just as much about redistribution (of money and power) as in case of public schools etc. Once we understand that we can start thinking about two other things: what we want to support with our taxes including prioritizing of targets etc and how we are going to fund those targets with tax. If one find out that money kept in bank is to be taxed because it benefits the society in which banks operate then so be it and we should only hope that decisions like this are based on merit not on basis of wishful thinking and political indoctrination and they get modified if found not working or being inefficient in that what they do. OC reality is different I know but that is ideal to fight for.

for this reasoning to reflect reality not only the 'rich' would have to invest so that benefit the country they get a tax cut in which does not seem the case - they invest globally and they invest in a way that is tax optimized. This is of course assuming that comparison of consumption v. investment is done on base of how it merits local economy and local population which is also not true - the actual reason why some say so is probably abduction by aliens because I cannot understand how they come to the conclusions that are either neutral or harmful to them while being also a fantasy.

I also think that GOP still has something to learn - the great teacher knew how to solve the problem of faulty statistics

that is not the way groups of humans live/behave/work and group of developers is a group of humans also when they do not like to see it that way. In any group of humans that do something together there is a leader or a group of leaders (as in diarchy in ancient Greece&Rome etc). The way they are chosen i.e. formally or by accident or it just happened that way as in case of Linux & Mr. Torvalds matters much less than how effective the organisation works with them i.e. it is not only quality of the leader(s) but also quality of teams. In small groups leadership tends to be less distinguished but the 'one sticks out' situation starts to be visible when 3 persons work together. IT may be that leader of a group does not want to be as visible and this works well anyway but if you have a group a communication towards the group usually ends up as directed towards few individuals instead of a whole group. Sometimes a group takes a conscious efforts to be uniform instead of structured but it ends up with some gurus having more say than others.

It is interesting to see how communes and kibutzes worked - majority fell on the idea that all are equal and there are no leaders - this works only if you have highly motivated and befriended people that know what needs be done. In any other case a resulting chaos and supporting laziness make such organisation fail terribly. That is experience I have made over last 30 years of work.

good flame congratulations!

How true. I have one comment though:. you say that "pragmatism > idealism" and that it is then sort of bad. That is not entirely true, neither it matters that much. Pragmatism may mean for instance that because you value your own time and want to avoid waste in the future you actually care for structured, well commented code (whichever way it is done). What I wanted to say is that it is not pragmatism that stands in the way but idiocy. I would even go as far as to say that idealism is bad for developing working but also well structured and documented code because idealists do not like to cope with a reality and this means that instead of taking measures that help produce code that is readable and working they tend to do fancy things that do not put things forward forcing others to cut corners because they had to wait and ended up short on time etc. To say it differently: it is not very pragmatic to say: "code whatever important that it compiles" - you pay the price eventually also when you do not notice (because you have no direct comparison).