Mladen Jankovic wrote:

a) you cannot resell games you own and there's no refund if the game doesn't work for you, b) you're screwed if someone steals your account, c) sometimes it takes longer to start your game, depending on how good your connection is.

a. True b. No, you can recover your account, they have instructions on how to do this and its easily done. I have a friend that had this happen and he's fine now, although he procrastinated recovering it for a while because he didn't know recovery was possible. He is a non-technical type that fell for a phishing scam, I doubt it would have happened to most folks reading this board. c. Steam itself only requires internet connection to install the game. A few game publishers put DRM in that doesn't work in Steam offline mode, but that's the game publisher and has nothing to do with Steam.

Actually I did answer all three of his questions, I addressed what my degree was in, what I do and how I got there, and my opinion on when it is a good idea to obtain a masters. Not trying to be combative but you said "not one responder answered your questions", which is not true at all, lots of people did. Perhaps not using a pop-quiz format where every answer is delivered on a single line in the exact order asked, but that requirement was unstated :)

My degree is in CS but I started developing at such a young age (12) that I was already experienced in many langs before I ever started school; I say that because I have no doubt I would have ended up doing the same kind of work with or without a formal degree, although I will say that much of the formal CS education (things like algorithms, data structures, operating system architecture, the more arcane theory behind relational databases) etc are extremely valuable, I'm not sure if I would have learned them had I not studied at a university. If your goal is to be a software developer as long as possible, then no a masters is probably not going to help your cause so I would not invest a great deal of time or money into that. However if you ever plan to teach or otherwise work in academic environments, publish books, etc it can definately help. It could potentially help at the mgmt level as well. I have toyed with the idea of getting a masters in software engineering, more or less for fun than any sort of career expectation, but I keep getting stalled by the realization that there is almost always something that I could be spending my time learning that is much more relevant to the kind of work I do. Does that make sense? I like all the academic stuff, but I don't think that graduate level classes tend to have that "indispensible" quality that some of the under grad classes like I listed earlier have. Regarding NAV, I've never worked with it but still can relate, I've often found myself in situations where I'm faced with a stodgy old technology which is uninteresting and hard to work with. I'm now in my 40's so for the most part if the job is not aligned with my own career plans I basically tell them how I feel and move on to something more aligned with my professional/personal goals. When you are first starting out you are building experience so that can be tougher -- yes you can expect that kind of thing for the first decade or so of your career. I remember working in proprietary languages that nobody else was using and hating it, and I still do lots of things that I don't really care to do, but I expect that I will be spending a certain percentage of time working on things that allow me to retain my passion for programming. If I am expected to do what "the man" wants 100% of the time and he's not showing any respect for my own career development, then I simply go elsewhere. Be sure and at least explain this to him before you take off, give him the chance to make it right. He might have thought t