chokma

If you want to upgrade to 11.04 with a PAE kernel and proprietary Nvidia drivers, be careful: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-common/+bug...

There is still hope - the government is about to abolish the state-guaranteed monopoly.

http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article12492654/Bahn-verliert-... [German]

Of course, public transport is a complex issue - the government as the current owner of the railway system is still trying to protect some routes, so we have to wait and see how the licensing for long-distance routes is working out.

And the Deutsche Bahn (German Railways) is also the biggest provider of bus travel, so it will be quite hard for new companies to get into the market.

I also do not understand the usefulness of "secret" questions ... mostly the correct answer would be far too easy, so every one with access to my website, Twitter or Facebook pages would be able to answer it (or trick it out of me or someone who knows me).

So now there are a lot of accounts with some very strange answers to their secret questions - answers so far out that I would have to write them down along with the complex password... which makes them completely redundant.

> And for years strawberries, mushrooms and deer were off limits on the food table.

There are still areas in Germany were wild pigs have to be tested for radioactivity, as some of them are too fond of radioactive mushrooms.

(lang=de: http://www.zeit.de/2010/46/U-Strahlende-Wildschweine?page=al... )

> This is an incredible power. The power to effectively drain the bank account of every customer who has ever done business with you.

And in the case of EA/Mythic Entertainment / Warhammer Online, this has happened last year http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-430817

(billing past and present customers multiple times, sometimes incurring huge overdraft fees and leaving some stranded without access to money over a weekend as the banks would block their debit cards)

After university, I was unemployed for a time and two things helped me to find new jobs and dramatically improve my income level: a) learning Perl on my own during the unemployment period* and writing two open source programs, thus demonstrating my skill with the language and impressing my first employer; b) getting a three month state-paid Java course (SCJP) and getting to know the Java-API and environment.

Self-motivation, training, a certain amount of luck - there are numerous factors to getting a good job. For some lazy slobs, it may be getting their welfare money reduced. But for others it may be getting a longer period of welfare and training so they can learn something new which allows them "to do what they love". I think it is not enough to talk about getting people into any kind of job, as if having a job, no matter what, is sufficient or necessary to justify their existence. We need to help people get into the right jobs, and those jobs need to be paid fair wages.

* Programming was(is) more fun than playing DAoC all day.

The cost to turn unemployed clerks into construction workers is not close to zero. They would need training, equipment, supervision, health benefits etc. For this reason, when here in Germany someone suggested to get all those unemployed to shovel snow during the winter, the local politicians did not want any such workers - while the unemployed would receive next to nothing, the cost to the community would be higher than having professionals do the job. Forcing people down on their luck to work for free is going to put pressure on the wages of those who do the same work for a living.

I will donate for a plugin or extension that I want to install on every system the browser runs on. Like NoScript. (Well, as a Firefox user, I would not spend money on Chrome extensions...)

Hm, looking back on my install base, it looks like I will have to donate some money this year on Adblock+, RequestPolicy, Certificate Patrol, Web Developer's Toolbar, Firebug.

But you do not need to take off Saturdays, which counts as part of the weekend for most (this depends on your employer). If I want to have a week long holiday, it's five days.

Generally, if you live in the southern part of Germany, you also get several catholic hol(i|y)days, no matter if you are catholic or not.

According to studies cited by Sonjy Lyubomirsky (http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~sonja/ ) in her Book "The how of happiness" (a happiness book from a scientific view), the genetic predisposition is about 50%. 10% is your environment, and the rest is what you do with your life.

So, there is room for improvement for most people, although not as much as some happiness-gurus may like them to think.

>"The problem is that doing this while working full time is freaking hard. Doing an entire year of development after hours is just brutal. The longer the time to launch the more likely you are to not see it through to the end."

I agree. Working that hard is difficult to keep up. 6 hours a weekday and 8 hours a weekend is 38 hours additional work a week...

I am currently working on an open source browser game as a hobby project, and am discovering that it is much more work to get it right than I thought. But I decided in the beginning that it should be live after the first week or so and now I publish the current alpha every other week. Sometimes, this requires more refactoring, but I think this is balanced by the fact that the game is already in a state where it is not a closet project.

If you make a commercial product, be sure to have potential customers and a marketing plan before you sink a whole year of work into it. A customer of ours spent half a million for a _good_ piece of software and now its been waiting for other a year to gain traction. Business customers are interested, but it seems like the marketing department is utterly fubared. They even cannot get around to set it up internally to solve their own needs...

The goal of getting 9000 readers to sign up for a newsletter which costs $2 a month is certainly ambitious.

The concept reminds me of http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fan... where it's postulated that to survive as an artist, you would need a 1000 true fans.

I think it is great that one can take an off-the-shelf video camera and make a movie. And this sparks a whole world of creativity. Each day a 100 years of video are uploaded to Youtube.

What we need is a way to compensate professional artists and performers in a world where the cost to distribute is effectively zero. Some stuff (for example a "Michael Moore"-style documentary on the oil spill) is complex enough that it is difficult to produce it without having a way to cover your costs. Does Cory Doctorow's way of doing this scale to movie production?

Oh, and we need camcorders and the like to integrate free codecs - the ones currently available by default often produce H.264-movies which need a license if you want to profit from your work in any way...

And it's a sad thing when someone's identity hinges upon his being part of the elite, his sports team winning or making lots of money. Those are things to enjoy, surely - but if they get to be cornerstones of your personality, it's time for a reality check.

Sure, that is the way life is for many people, but ... to think that Apple intentionally makes thousands of humans waste hours of their life doing something they hate. A company that is not inherently evil would strive to make the consumer experience joyful and uplifting. But this ... reducing humans to masochistic consumer zombies with large bladders instead of brains - it's a waste of life.

The novel about this is Neal Stephenson's Anathem... where people strive to keep just the necessary information alive (like, "Where did we store the atomic waste a couple of 1000 years ago?").

No matter how your data is going to be stored, it will eventually have to be copied to another medium. And if you want to store it "forever", you will get data corruption, either because of transmission errors or because the storage medium fails. Keeping the data redundant is not enough for guaranteed data safety, as no matter how many copies you create, one day all of them can fail at the same time.

But you can take steps to ensure that your data is realistically safe for say a 1000 years (which is not by any means "forever", but then who but an archaeology AI will read your data at that time). The Long Now Foundation is thinking about stuff like this (http://www.longnow.org/).

An interesting question is, how do you ensure that your data will not be intentionally wiped out, because it is deemed (religiously, politically, legally) offensive? A metal band's CD cover is now considered dangerously close to child porn here abouts (Scorpions, Virgin Killer). That may be enough to make some people erase your data for decency's sake. A dead man can not fight a cease and desist order.

A different view on the matter would be: you are going to die, and your data is going to die eventually. And even if it is around, it's likely that no one will want to read it anyway. But your existence will have consequences for the rest of (human) history, as just by living you provide an input to the human race. This input may be in the form of biological data (children) or pure information (a blog article about "forever storage" which inspires the next great startup founder to do great things). Just go on, do something positive besides leaving a huge carbon footprint and atomic waste that lasts for a million years.

"If you disagree, then apparently, "clean" just means "looks like what I saw yesterday and the day before"."

  Well
  , sometimes the way it was done yesterday simply _is_ the right way to do it
  . Of course
  , one can occasionally try to challenge fundamental grammatical conventions like putting punctuation on the end of a sentence instead of the front of a line
  . To me
  , "clean" or "beautiful" code is both easy to read and understand and follows the conventions and best practices that have proven themselves over and over
  .

Nomic is a fascinating game.

For those about to try it in school: You should probably add a fixed rule about not ending class prematurely and going outside to play (my students needed a rather long time to come up with this loop hole). But it was an interesting hour which served as an introduction to the 10 commandments.

> As I find it significantly easier to develop social relationships in English, I often wonder whether this lack of formal 'you' contributes to the economical prosperity of the English-speaking countries

But then, the formal 'you' contributes to professional relationships. Think of it as a safeguard against overstepping an invisible line of proper conduct.

It is really more difficult to say "Sie Arschloch" than "Du Arschloch" because the formal 'you' clashes with vulgar language one would use around drinking buddies.

try{ assert ! relationship.isCustomerOrBoss() say."You asshole!" } catch(VulgarLanguageException e){ say."That's not acceptable." }

It's not working. (Ubuntu 9.10 64 Bit / Firefox 3.5.6) - the learning screen does not show any words.