Having spent about 2 months programming in Python and walked away disliking the whitespace constraint, I can flat out say you are mistaken.

Don't get me wrong, I like Python a lot... but I consider the whitespace for block notation to be one of it's worst features, and the root cause of other misfeatures.

Are you seriously implying that a not allowing 6 week vacation without work is the bar at which a job is unreasonable? The fact that he could take 6 weeks on the road working remotely from the car says wonderful things about his job and the flexibility it allows. Taking away the ability to work from the car (cellphone in the car) is a perfectly valid argument here and to say otherwise is just being an idiot.

While most of your comment is fairly accurate, the following is somewhat less so:

Sure, taking 200-300 units more than you should have would be a world of suck, but if you had access to food to eat or a sweet drink or glucose tablets

I've been a diabetic for ~25 years and currently take 8-20 units of short acting insulin with a meal (depending on what I eat), plus 50 units once/day of a 24 hour insulin that's taken separately. I once accidentally took 50 units of the short acting insulin and it was quite an adventure. While it's possible I could have handled it with orange juice and lots of testing, I decided it was worth a trip to the hospital for 4 hours waiting for the insulin to finish it's time in my system.

Taking 300 units of the short acting insulin (which kicks in in 10-20 minutes) would almost certainly be a life threatening situation, worthy of a quick trip to the hospital, plus drinking a lot of OJ to hold me over until I got there. While it's certainly survivable, there is also certainly a fair chance of death. Access to a sweet drink is not nearly enough to deal with that much of an overdose (at least, for me)

Caveat: The short acting insulin I take is one of the most powerful insulins (requiring a much lower dosage and acting significantly faster than most).

The same way that not every single American wants to bomb every other country

True, but it's still ironic when an American complains about a country invading another country pro-actively yet claiming it's in defense. The common actions of a group that a person belongs to sets the expectations one has about the individual members of that group. Admittedly, that doesn't mean that all members of that group act that way, or that you should treat members of that group as if they WILL behave that way.

That being said, the Chinese government really needs to follow the rules of IP that other countries generally do if they want to be able to expect those other countries to treat the IP of their citizens with any respect.

irony: an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected.

The Chinese government and people are known for ignoring the IP rights of folks from other countries. A member of the Chinese people complained about an individual/company from a foreign government not respecting his IP.

You're more than welcome to label that as "not irony", but that doesn't mean you're right and everyone else is wrong.

Given how the Chinees government and people as a whole have next to no respect for the IP of other nations, it is funny that a citizen of China is suing to protect their IP. The companies in China are well known for stealing the IP of companies from other countries and, on top of that, the government helps and/or participates in it.

Its not about being good enough to write it in C or C++. It's about being more productive writing it in a higher level language and only taking the time to use something lower level when it's worth the cost to do so. You don't write in Python/Ruby/Tcl/etc because you're not good enough to write in C or C++. You write in them because you know they're a good tool for the job you're working on, to get it done quickly, cleanly, and maintainably. Sometimes, using more than one tool for the job at hand (ie, some C code at core parts) is necessary, but just because you need a manual screwdriver for one part of a job isn't reason not to use the power screwdriver for the other parts. Honestly, using a lower level language only where it's needed is an argument that many higher level, dynamic languages have been making for years (I know Tcl has). It was a perfectly valid argument years ago, and it's even more so now.

No, it has benefits to me AND to my productivity. To name a few of the benefits purely to productivity:

• No travel time to/from the office means more time to get work done.
• My computer is always setup and ready for work so, should I get a thought on how to do something in the middle of the night, I can walk into my office and work on it without delays.
• Less cost to the company as far as office space, supplies, etc
• Reduced interruptions to getting work done; no noisy people talking in the cube next to me, etc
• My entire library of books is available to me at all times (less of a benefit nowadays than it used to be, since so many things are online)
• If I need to handle something personal (ie, doctor's appt), I don't lose an entire day of work, only the time to get over to the doctor's office and back. Along the same lines, if my child is home sick, I don't miss a day of work to be home with her.

Honestly, the benefits to personal productivity are enormous. Sure, there's costs, but to dismiss the benefits out of hand is ... ignorant at best.

Nobody says that being in the office doesn't have it's benefits... but working from home has many benefits, too. Just because you aren't aware of the benefits of working from home and how they compare to those of working from the office doesn't mean they don't compare favorably.

At the end of the day, I prefer a situation where I can go in when I want to and stay home when I want to. It usually works out that I'm in the office 1-2 times per week, and working from home the rest of the time.

While I agree that focusing your entire life around succeeding at your job is not the way to live your life, I disagree that you need to work just enough to be able to do the things that are unrelated to work. The comfortable balance point is different for everyone and, for the lucky few (which I count myself a member of), the things they really enjoy overlap substantially with their jobs. The last time I was laid off, I had 4 offers on the table when I made my decision for the next position. I could have taken the position for a Wall Street firm making up to six figure salaries, or the position that was 9-5 and nobody ever worked more, or the one I actually took. Sure, I work some long hours (a 2 month stretch of 70+hours/week), but sometimes I don't. I get to solve some problems that are extremely gratifying to me both professionally and personally, which is a huge benefit. When you're off visiting Europe, I'm figuring out how to reduce an hour long ingestion process down to 60 seconds by researching more efficient data structures and algorithms. At the end of the day, I'd wager good money that I got just as much enjoyment out of my research and implementation as your did riding around the countryside. Plus, I get the side benefit of it also being good for my career.

It's not a matter of whether it's more dangerous or not, it's a matter of whether it's dangerous enough to be worth the cost of disallowing it. I'm of the opinion that it's not. The same holds true of radios and passengers... both result in worse driving, neither to an extent that its worth banning them given the cost of doing so.

On a side note...

I contend that if you're stupid enough to think not being rude is more important than driving safely, then perhaps you shouldn't be driving in the first place. If I'm on the phone and I get into a situation that requires my attention, I pay attention to the situation, not the phone. The same EXACT thing is true of a passenger. Both my wife and I have told each other on occasion, when the other was a passenger, to stop talking because we need to pay attention to the road (heavy rain, traffic ahead, etc). If you're not willing to do that, get off my roads...

> There is plenty of evidence that cell phones are a major cause of driver inattentiveness and accidents. As there is for radios, CBs, babies, passengers, etc. Obviously, banning all these things from the car should happen at the same time. The point is that we need to decide what things are worth the risk of allowing them in an automobile and what things aren't. For those things that are, the driver needs to be responsible for making sure they take the steps necessary to mitigate the risk (more room between you and the car in front of you, ignoring the passenger/baby/person on the phone when there's something more to pay attention to on the road, etc). Personally, I think requiring hands free operation of a phone while driving a car is reasonable. It mitigates the risk of talking on the phone to some extent (making it more like talking to a passenger) and is easily accomplished (even if it just means using the speakerphone). Taking away hands free is more of an inconvenience than it's worth and introduces additional risks (like many cars pulled over on the side of the highway halfway in the lane because there's no shoulder, etc). It's just not worth the cost involved to ban it.

Apple is happily having other companies banned from releasing their smartphones in various companies using patents. One can hardly expect the Android base to not respond in kind.

You must not be doing the same whiteboard problems I have. The ones at Google in particular can easily fill up an entire whiteboard with code, but they're only one example.

Even more important to me, paper/whiteboards don't have the ability to move code around. I'm an extremely non-linear coder; I write the code as it comes to mind and add the pieces needed to it as I see they're needed. Not being able to move code around, refactor, wrap blocks in checks, or even just add lines of code in above what I'm currently working... kills me.