Completely off topic, but TVCatchup provide an XBMC plugin which completely avoids the advertising they add. No idea why, since it presumably destroys their business model, but it's great.
I moved from Natwest to First Direct a couple of months ago, and have had a great experience so far.
Their online banking isn't quite so nice as Natwest's, but that's more than made up for by the amazing phone service. I've had to call a couple of times (once to replace a lost card), and almost instantly been put through to someone who can solve my problem.
Your cat may already have an RFID tag - they're used in the process of "chipping" cats so that they can be traced if they find themselves at a vet without their owner. If there is one, it'll be on the back of their neck.
> That bread you find at Kroger, somebody had to work to make it appear in your cart.
In any community there is likely to be someone with a passion for something. Whether that something is making bread, helping the sick, or teaching children.
It's true that there are some jobs which people aren't naturally inclined to do, but in the society being described I think that communities would become smaller, and more cohesive. Some the of the jobs required to maintain a large city no longer need to be done, and those that do still need doing become less of a strain and can be distributed amongst people.
> A programmer's salary is great, but why can't I work 20 hours as a programmer, and 20 hours as a tree-planter, or teaching rock climbing to high school kids, for maybe 55% of a programmer's salary?
You can. You just have to learn to negotiate.
I currently work 4 days a week, with the other day being split between helping with a youth club, and Open Source hacking, and throwing a mountain bike down hills. I had to spend more time looking when I last changed jobs, but that also ended up with me in a job that I love for other reasons as well.
Yup, police with submachine guns are completely routine at Heathrow. They're also not an uncommon sight around certain parts of London these days - all the big government buildings have a couple of policemen with MP5s hanging around the entrances.
I'm starting to use service objects, which are responsible for coordinating things when multiple models are required to perform an operation, or complex business logic is involved.
This strikes me as being similar to extracting bits of a model out into modules that then get included back into that model. It looks like you're reducing the complexity of the model, but in fact you're just hiding it elsewhere, without making it any easier to stub things out.
One advantage of "Heroku's" nickel and diming is that the money is actually being split with other companies in most cases, and those companies core competency is providing exactly that service, whether that be a Redis server or email delivery.
You do pay more than just throwing another service on a machine you're already running, but you've got a fairly good chance of it being massively optimised.
If you're hiring dedicated people to manage your servers bare metal becomes even more appealing, especially if they know what they're doing and can allow you to burst out to a cloud provider when you need extra capacity fast.
I'm agreed on the week of work, since as you say, no one in a proper job is going to take a week of holiday to come and work for someone who may or may not employ them.
Probation however is a standard clause on every UK employment contract I've seen, usually with a 3-6 month period, during which either side can get out without penalty if it isn't working out.
I'm in a similar company at the moment - it's not quite GitHub, but the atmosphere of smart people working on things they love is there. Since I started they've also started adapting to the "Work when you want, where you want" approach as well ;)
When looking for work a big requirement was that I could work from home, and have Wednesdays off - filtering down the opportunities was just a case of mentioning that in the initial contact with a company I was interested in. No one you want to work for is going to be offended at you pointing out something that could be a problem early on in the process so long as you go about it politely.
"you have a PM screaming at your engineers" - and there lies your problem.
I'm the sole engineer for a distinctly non-engineering company (we deliver food, and I'm the only person with any sort of engineering background).
However, we work in a very similar way to GitHub. We have a motivated team who love our product - and that rubs off on our working practices. No one is ever told they have to work late, or they have to hit a deadline, but things get done at an amazing pace. At some point soon I'll be working on an internal CRM system, but because I care about the company, and the impact it will have on everyone else's ability to do good things I'm excited about that.
I love that you have a problem with people calling copyright infringement "stealing", but no qualms at all about calling it "piracy" instead, which is an entirely different affair.
Certainly the last time I downloaded a TV program I did using BitTorrent, rather than boarding the content producer's boat and taking it with force.