Nice. I have no mod points but I did laugh.

...maybe they weren't being lazy and instead wanted to be able to make money from both Square Enix and Blizzard even if the player used both services. I bet Digipass makes more money when they sell two of them as opposed to just one.

It doesn't come off as impressive when you throw all 28 years of your computing experience into your brag. I don't think malware was prevalent when people were coding with punch cards.

<quote><p>That's not malware. That's a targeted attack. We're talking about garden-variety, drive-by download, infected porn site malware here. We're talking about flies, you're talking about a unicorn.</p></quote>

Hidden software that logs keystrokes and sends the results off to a remote system has a lot of value. It doesn't need to only hit a targeted system. When they see results like:

mail.yahoo.com apoc@yahoo.com 123jass8

In the log file they know they have a new account to search through for any valuable personal data. Same with bank accounts, ordering online, etc, etc. They have the advantage of not needing to show pop-ups on the victim machine so it never appears to be infected. The website the victim visited is what handles the installation of the software so they don't need the infected machine to spread it around. The website can even have legitimate uses and an established community. Victims may even return to the website over and over to post comments on interesting stories and nothing ever appears to be malicious. The page they are visiting isn't dealing with illegal topics, porn, etc.

As a side note I suggest you check out a fan-page I run for Bennie Baby collectors: http://www.benniebabybrigade.com

I have more than a few friends that are firefighters. This is in Texas so I can't tell you exactly how it works in the rest of the USA but my friends all work 24 on and 48 off. During the 24 on they stay in the firehouse away from home. During their free time at the station (during no calls, no chores, etc) they can do whatever they want in the building. Halo tournaments between stations are fairly common. My wife and I have been invited numerous times to play at the station while our friends are working their 24 hours. They are paid for the entire 24 hours. This is in a town with a population of around 35,000 - 40,000 so it isn't a huge city and there is more downtime than at most stations I'm sure.

"The reason you are confused is because you have fallen prey to companies misuse of the term salary. They would like you to think that salary means "x dollars for 40 hours a week and we don't pay you for overtime". If you are docked pay for not showing up, you are an hourly employee, not salary, irrelevant of what your HR department says."

Exactly! So many people get hosed by this. They tell you salary means you get paid a certain amount every week no matter how much you work. If you miss a day and you lose 8 hours of pay you aren't salary. You are butt fucked.

I do feel lucky that my current technical position is hourly. I work Monday - Friday 40 hours a week and I'm on call around one week a month. During the week I am on call I get paid an extra dollar an hour during the regular 40 hour week and on-call pay for any time spent working after hours. We get a minimum of two hours of on call time for every call we take (even if it takes 15 minutes). I am expected to be within 30 minutes of the office during my on call week as well. I get an average of 5 calls per an on call week. I tell people that when I hear the pager go off it makes an annoying beeping sound but when my wife hears it go off it sounds more like, "cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching."

I've been running Windows 7 on my Dell Mini 10 Netbook for around 5 months now and I've been very pleased with it. I wouldn't have tried putting Vista on the thing at all with the 1 gig of ram it has but Windows 7 doesn't give me trouble really. I enjoy it more than Vista by far. It just seems more agreeable (if that's possible when talking about an OS).

That stated: "Autonomy and decision making are keys to retaining excellent staff. Being micromanaged by ones boss is the surest way to lose talented people