At least they didn't choose DuckDuckGo - one of the worst search engines I've ever used.

I'm not really sure this is applicable to the real world since most software developers don't live/work in Silicon Valley so the concept of taking a break to go play volleyball or hackeysack is pretty much a "non-starter". I think they should really evaluate the productivity of developers in the two scenarios that most apply to the real world: 1) Your managers are incompetent when it comes to what it is that you do, how you do your job, and what makes you happy. They do, however, understand obnoxious "development methods" resulting in a countless number of ways for them to waste your time doing everything BUT developing software. 2) Your managers DO understand your job and work very hard to give you a productive environment and support you in what you do. They keep everything other than software development off your plate so that you can focus on doing what's best.

I think one of the major issues here is that voting has become a joke. "We" (and I mean the collective American people, not just myself and the others responsible for the next statement) vote for these idiots based on the fact that they have someone sending amusing tweets and know how to talk in circles about things. We definitely don't vote for them based on anything reasonable (like experience, previous ACTUAL accomplishments, etc). If we want that to stop, we need to stop voting for prom queens and vote for a leader.

You're probably just looking for Zorin OS. It's basically something like XP and has all these features to make life easier for people who don't know their way around Linux. If my mother needed a new system and I didn't still have Windows 7 for her, I'd do Zorin.

Yet.

I think ReactOS will become viable right about the time that nobody cares... or is that now?

I think a lot of people have a problem in the tech world because they reach certain "platforms" and decide they aren't going back. Let me break it down: 1) You worked for company A for 10 years and got promoted to Senior Software Engineer. Unfortunately, unknown to you, company A didn't actually know anything about software engineering so you're actually not much of a software engineer. 2) You try to find another job. You probably won't find another job as a software engineer if you don't actually know how to do that job; even if you had the title. 3) There are jobs available. However, they have titles like Analyst or Specialist and those are so "beneath" you, right? You were an ENGINEER for gosh sakes. You couldn't possibly bring yourself down. My advice: Get over yourself and let your skills speak for themselves. Your title and current position don't define you or your capabilities. When you start understanding that, you start developing real skills and enjoying your job.

I'm sad to see that I'm the only one that thinks that congestion has gotten worse due to the abundantly clear lack of thought in traffic engineering. I think there might be two scenarios that potentially account for this: 1) I learned about the idea of planning less capacity than is required to "force people's hands" on using public transit. Idealistically, it sounds great. Like most idealistic plans, the real world doesn't work that way and it just pisses people off and, viola, traffic congestion. 2) I don't feel like traffic engineering is keeping-up with our technology. At least in my area (and in many to which I travel), I see no efforts being made to use the technology we have to better improve traffic. Instead of having connected, intercommunicating and load-sensing intersections, we still have a lot of unconnected, unaware intersections that induce a lot of the congestion problems.