It’s always just around the corner.
This scares me.

It may seem strange to most people that people in India are found to be having sex during working hours in cubicles. This topic is generally taboo.

This topic is taboo, and over 25% of the people who read about it have had sex in the office. Their faces may turn red as they read this, or their breathing may briefly stop — and then they’ll rally against the article in their minds and sometimes out loud in order to proclaim their own innocence.

Some companies, such as Capitol One feature gyms and recreational areas for their developers to release stress. EXCELLENT idea. I laud it.

I’m not at all surprised that outsourcing to India has caused the developers there to have an increased workload, and therefore increased stress. However, as most Indian companies probably can’t afford gyms, I’m not at all surprised that they have fallen back on basic human instincts to satisfy their needs. Not only does this help the developers there shed everyday worries, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it encourages stronger bonds among them.

This is not acceptable behavior in America. This article was originally repoted on at CNET News.blog.

Although I’m not going to give my opinions about this type of behavior one way or the other, I WILL make a comment about outsourcing. I hate it. The United States’ major export is scrap metal. We have national debt. And here we are, giving our money away to another country for providing services as opposed to tangible products. We don’t produce enough products in our own country as it is. We are mostly a service-oriented society, and here we are buying services from another country.

We can’t afford to do this. Countries should be given some sort of incentive to outsource to US instead of it being the other way around. The only way to relieve the debt is to get more money into the country from external sources, since the balance of funds between the governemental intake and use doesn’t seem to be changing any time soon. Producing more funds in our own country would only lead to a depression.

Why aren’t we doing anything to alleviate this problem?

The Supreme court ruled against file-swapping software companies that actively encourage swapping of copyrighted videos/music/software/etc.

As long as the companies manage to stay on the side of the line that doesn’t “actively encourage” such swapping, they should be safe. This is a risk some companies and software distributors are willing to take, and some aren’t.

This ruling only applies to companies in the United States. Companies outside of the United States are not restricted by Supreme Court decisions or copyright laws, and will continue to offer such software if it pleases them to do so.

CNET news originally had this story.

Blizzard Entertainment is trying to sue gaming fans for attempting to make a better version of its battle.net servers — namely, the now-closed sourceforge.net project, BnetD. This SourceForge project has a Mirror Site in the UK. The project may be under development by independent developers, but if so — I have no idea where the CVS can be found. If I find out, I’ll post it here right away. Feel free to leave comments.

Blizzard says that the software engineers are promoting illegal use of its software by providing this alternate server because the server does not check for a valid CD key. However, users of the BnetD server who have invalid CD keys and have yet managed to install Blizzard’s games before connecting have already broken the law long before connecting to the server. Blizzard refuses to let BnetD connect to its own servers to validate CD keys.

In short, the people at Blizzard are acting like little children saying “Mine, mine!” in regards to their software. Yes, they programmed it. Nobody else is trying to take credit for their work. However, as they try to establish their monopoly in the online gaming industry by destroying server-side competition, they are in essence admitting that they are a power-hungry company who can’t stand a little competition. Heaven forbid that their customers connect to an alternative server where their requests are actually taken care of and where the response time is fast.

C|Net News’ Declan McCullagh reports on the story at this link: Putting the DMCA on Trial

I found this image on a page dealing with CSS rendering speeds in different browsers.