Years ago when I did a brief stint as a technical consultant at Chevron, they were really aggressive about ergonomics and desk set safety.

They had discovered that they paid as much in workers comp for desk workers as they did for hardhats. There are a lot of ways to hurt backs, hands, eyes, necks in the poorly designed non-ergonomic open-plan offices. And those injuries are expensive to diagnose and to treat.

The other thing to keep in mind is that at least half of identified Gifted and Talented kids have some learning differences as well. You cannot GET funding for GT/LD -- one must officially be one or the other.

Which circles back around to the fact that it is necessary to sit quietly and learn the way teachers are told to teach or be left behind. And if you are gifted at art or music, well, you are just sol.

The last time I tried to pick someone up from San Jose airport from San Francisco (long story), it took **three hours**! San Jose is only an hour south of SF in the middle of the night. It is more like 2+, with half the country moving to whatever city on the peninsula is farthest from their job. I used to do contracts in San Jose, but no more. it takes too damned long.

Everything that used to be cool and funky or artistic is now a corporatized landrush -- 80K naked drunks peeing on lawns during Bay to Breakers, just for a start. And there really is a place with $4 toast.

And all the museums suck (except the exploratorium) and the best galleries just got shut down because a start up will pay lots more to rent the building.

The City has been expensive as long as I have been here (roughly 30 yrs), but there were always pockets of interest that weren't insane of busy being bid up by the ignorant.

Back in the day, the City ran on financial services firms, which were very conservative. There was something to be different from. Now, everyone is hip, slick, and cool and goes to work in jean or leggings and drinks too much on the job and is vegan (except on Thursday when the company serves grassfed beef.).

I miss my City, even the times it turned out people I thought I wanted to get to know were junkies.

Oh and it is beautiful and the air is clean and the food is very, very good. As is the tap water.

With the run of successful attacks, bitcoin looks more and more like a pump and dump scheme. The early folk get out with lots of actual money and the latecomers end up holding the empty bag. Also -- what is with the Mt. Gox orthography. It is MtGOX, which makes the poorly run site and other issues seem easily foreseen.

Oooooh!! Even grannies can learn. If you could give your arm a rest from patting yourself on the back for being so brilliant you can install an OS, you might notice that 1) lots of olds are not stupid about computers, 2) lots of women are not stupid about computers, 3) lots of old women know about computers. Grace Hopper did not become an idiot the day she got officially old.

No problem assuming the older user (please, could it be grandad in the headline just once?) does not have arthritis in the hands or other problems with holding something and aiming the hand at possibly small targets.

You are naive. Nice, but naive. Yes, some things are a bit better. But are things good? No.

You already force a lot of us out with the threat of punishment -- harassment, assault, just plain being looked over. If you want us to stay/come back, perhaps you could: Write job reqs that don't state flat out that you want to hire a "dude, bro, guy." For those women who got their degrees 12 yrs ago, write job reqs that don't call for a "young guy fresh out of school." When you post pictures of the team you are hiring for, include at least one woman, even if you have to go get one from the web design firm next door. Expect to pay a woman you hire exactly what you would pay a man you would hire. I know, sounds simple, but not so common. Have at least one woman in the interview -- even if it is only the HR person. That will start letting some of us into the boy's club that STEM still is.

Have you tried hiring older workers? You do not get that attitude. Maybe a bit of "trust me, you're doing it wrong," but then, maybe you are.

You are reading the stats wrong. Yes, unemployment for the whole of California is high. That is not affected by the fact that there is regulation of for-profit education. It is because we have vast rural areas and a central valley (most of the state) that is strictly farming based. This is not affected by regulation of business.

The most highly regulated businesses exist in the high population density areas -- San Francisco and surrounding counties, Los Angeles and Orange County, San Diego, and, to a lesser extent, Sacramento. The unemployment rate in SF is hovering around 5%.

It is not private in the sense that only you and the entity with which you are doing business knows the information, but it is also not public. It is protected (in theory, at least). The credit reporting companies get the information because they have a contract with the credit card issuers to report your balance and payment information. Again, theoretically, this is to your benefit, since it gives you a credit history that can be depended on and checked. The trouble is that these companies can be kind of skeevy. I am not certain how I feel about that agency collecting detailed information on individuals. There are ways to de-identify the data and still keep the details separate (that is, not aggregated) and useful.

Thank you. This is such a cogent description of non-violent civil action (was trained by Quakers in the '70s). The other thing that is essential for non-violent action to succeed is a free press. A really free press, that will cover the beatings and arrests. We really haven't had that in quite some time. The press is commercialized. Dissent is herded into "free speech zones" or waits for a Manning or a Snowden to come around. Some news outlets are reporting the release of information about Professor Davidon and the others who broke into the Media, PA FBI offices in the 70s and exposed the illegal actions of the FBI. They leaked the information and their identities were protected. They were only able to remain at large because there was a statute of limitations on the break-in and no-one was ever charged with treason. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, but also the willingness to speak truth to power. Without a press that will report on that truth, one is often speaking into a void. And, especially in these days of panic, it takes a great deal of courage for anyone in the press to report on stolen truth.

No -- you quickly find out who in your circle has been told things they don't want to hear by their employees and are willing to blackball them. Make very certain that the folk you are blackballing don't all match certain demographics or you could be in for a very large lawsuit. That could be won simply on the blackballing (called restraint of trade in CA, not sure what it is called, other than SOP, in AZ.). For years, I have had to note to those doing background checks that one group for which I worked gave a "would not rehire" response for anyone who quit. Their name got known, too. If workers come to know who is doing the blackballing/restraint of trade, you might well find yourself unable to hire decent workers, because they can work places that do not discriminate on the basis of one guy whose nose is out of joint. Oh, and I think I know several of the worst offenders in this, just by word of mouth from applicants.

Actually, it started well before the Intel purchase. McAfee hasn't been McAfee since it was bought by Network Associates and NA took over the name. It was a typical Network Associates product package -- lots of expensive pieces that do not play well together. Enterprise AV is not too bad, if that is all you are going to do. Enterprise IDS doesn't do *nix well and doesn't talk to the AV consolidation part. Not McAfee for a long time. One can only hope Intel can dismantle and keep the good parts and reintegrate the rest.

Sounds like a better use of money than cleaning up after major explosions or paying the jackasses from Enron (both of which we have been through comparatively recently). Having anyone in SCADA think forward rather than backward would be glorious.