This is what...okay one of the many thing, wrong with the US and much of the other western nations. You cannot legislate social change. It doesn't work. You want people to be more respectful (the meaning of which varies), you need to make that behavior the socially acceptable one, not the legally acceptable one. How much better our laws would be if they focused on safety rather than people trying to make things they don't agree with illegal. I don't even disagree that posting pics of some fatal car crash is asinine behavior, but not a legal issue at all.

The advice about making sure the family knows work comes first during your work hours is good. Make it clear that if you come out to stretch your legs and chat for 5 minutes doesn't mean you are done for the day or can take an hour to mess around, and make sure if you are in the office, no one should bother you unless its an emergency. The biggest thing for me was setting goals based on accomplishments instead of time. You WILL spend time getting distracted by family etc or just taking advantage of the fact that you can go for a nice walk at 3:00pm (if you are allowed to be offline). You will also end up spending time on evenings and weekends working because if you think if something at 11:00pm on a Saturday you are much more likely to do it right then then wait until your "at work" Monday.

Either way, its really really hard to accurately track your time when working from home. Some people seem to like a rigid schedule, but as a programmer I much prefer flexibility. Some people rigorously track their time, but that gets annoying. My solution is to set myself daily / weekly tasks though should be reasonable if I worked ~7 hours day for 5 days and measure myself more on that then on trying to figure out exactly how much time I spent in my seat. You still have to feel it out a bit, but it means you don't have to sweat too much about the fact that work and home will blur together a bit.

I don't think its as black and white as this because on one area; governments and other organizations that have fleets of vehicles are already liable in most cases in the case of accidents, not the driver (excepting gross negligence, various somewhat by state / country...and IANAL).

Organizations like this where driving is just a means not a business that already carry driver liability will be happy to do anything that reduces overall risk visibility. This usage will allow the general populous some time to get used to the idea and it will slowly bleed outward from there.

Why can't I edit my own post :(

Before people misinterpret "hosting" to mean GoDaddy or something and point out that real startups / projects are not hosted, I meant hosted as in machine is in a datacenter not your house / college campus / office. Amazon EC2 and VPS providers charge more for Windows too, as do most datacenters...and by the time you have your own racks at a datacenter or your own datacenter the $800 Server cost per box is even more excessive.

It has zero to do with not being "hip" or young or in college.

I think the main issue that is loosing them emerging developers in the web. Almost all startups are web based these days and Windows hosting always costs more than Linux, usually a lot more because Windows Server SKUs are minimum $800 USD. Bad enough when your starting up, worse if you are successful and need 30 servers.

There is also a gigantic ecosystem of freelance / small company folk who do contract web work that can't use .NET...but it's hard enough to sell people on Python or Ruby instead of PHP and they run on almost the same stack...you try convincing a client their hosting should cost $100 USD / month instead of $50 when the whole project is 5-10k because you want to use ASP.NET instead of PHP.

As long as you consider Glenn Beck and other Fox personalities "the bottom" you could indeed classify the Tea Party as a bottom up group.

I'm also not sure what paragraph 3 has to do with what you are saying, though I agree with you on that at least. I think Politics as a whole would be well served by string laws punishing public slander that proves unfounded and anyone caught lying outright should have to bow out of whatever race they were in.

From TFA:

Amanda Bucklow at mediation firm In Place Of Strife said that even “a long and extraordinary mediation process would have taken only a few days and cost a lot less” than the legal fees spent by both parties.

And now breaking news! Random person trying to sell you some services thinks you should buy their services!

I think this attitude is exactly the issue. Laws about bundling and compatibility should be uniform; in no case should rules be written that target only one company.

Plus MS is not forcing OEMs or Corporations to create images without Firefox or whatever your browser of choice is, so anyone who wanted to could already have Firefox as the default browser.

If we are talking about the handful or people or small shops that buy a windows CD and install it themselves without a knowledgeable IT person (who could download another browser and install it in about 30 seconds), then yes, they will probably keep IE out of ignorance.

Who cares.

I unfortunately couldn't dig up a quotation, but I remember watching a documentary about early Canadian exploration where the royal explorer reported back to the english monarch that there were enough trees in western canada to supply the worlds lumber needs for 3000 years.

Less than 300 years later we have serious issues with deforestation, even with tons of lumber coming from south america.

Given that 300 years ago people still wore metal armor and there were no suck things as factories, add the fact that our rate of technological advancement is accelerating and I think its a little bold to try to say what we will be able to do in 100 years.

You raise a good point though. Urban children rarely have places to play when not supervised...hell most parents won't let their young children out anywhere by themselves (think what you will of the merits of that choice).

So what would you suggest kids do for physical fun if they can't go outside until 6:30 when mommy and daddy get home from work, and then only if they have the energy?

At work I experienced the issue, but I could remote in to my home computer and load gmail etc no problem...I live 3km from my office.

Even /. loaded slowly for me while the issue was occurring, and gmail was totally inaccessible.

I can see why why losers would spend hundreds of hours farming and raiding for an item they can't afford. I can see why the companies running the games would want to take the losers time instead of spending the resources fighting boring time sinks. What I fail to understand is why anyone worth a damn would keep playing a game that openly allows slowly grinding their way to the top. And a game filled only with pathetic losers isn't likely to stay fun for even the losers for long.

Why on /. of all places to I see a bunch of posts indicating that the current graphic cards "aught to be enough for anyone".

Maybe they are now, but until our cards can accurately render true to life animations at huge resolutions for $100 then there will always be graphics advances and need for better cards. The new cards will always start expensive and then go down in price over time. I confused why people think this will change.

Funny, the opposite is why I bought gold when I played WoW.

My friends that played, played for 5-6 hours / day. I was already married with a job, so I could play 1-2 hours some days.

So How did I keep up with level? Powerlevelers. How did I get potions etc for raids? Gold sellers.

The reality is that either way (gold purchased or time spent) the players who can't do what you are doing feel disgruntled and quit. If WoW's population was more busy people than teenagers and college students then I don't think you would see the same outcry against gold...but you might see more about people being rewarded for being able to spend 6 hour chunks in front of the game.