These specific companies still advertise? Why?

Gotta say as much as I "hate" Microsoft, having been an OS/2 guy in a past life, Linux for half of the '90's, brief fling with Apple products in 2000-2005 and then Linux again, the Surface is a decent looking piece of hardware. I'd consider buying one if I could install Linux on it.

I've also overcome my hatred of Dell recently after realizing that they do actually build real machines and not just those "my first laptop" ones that your company issues you. You can even find a Dell Precision laptop on their website that you can have them install Linux on for you. You'll want to wipe their Dell version of Linux for something else once you get it and you really do have to hunt for the machine on their web site, but it IS there!

That's definitely the only reason I can think of to put a "LASER" on a satellite! No other reason at all, nope!

I want one against Fox News, with the stipulated punishment ranging from severe wedgies to face punching depending on the level of stupidity that came out of the anchor's mouth that week.

It could also be a sign of depression or of just being broke AF this month.

Longmont's municipal fiber is $60 a month, pretty good deal. We've also had one minor outage in the last 5 years that was fixed within a couple of hours without us having to call in.

I haven't gone looking for routers that can handle more than a gigabit. I imagine you might have to buy 10 gig gear for that. That stuff's super-expensive and doesn't handle wireless from what I've seen.

Who asked you to be world leader in the first place?

No idea. There seemed to be this assumption that seems to have started after World War 2. If weed isn't legal in your country or you have banking regulations you'd rather not, it's probably because of the USA. If your country has oil and some cunt's in power, it's probably because of the USA (Saddam was our guy before he wasn't our guy anymore.) Most of us were completely unaware that such shenanigans were going on in the world. Most of us are like most people everywhere, we just want to work and live our lives without exploding, or being killed by the police. It's just that couple of percent of in power who are huge assholes. We apologize for the inconvenience.

What moral high ground?

Again, it seems to be assumed. We're taught in school this is "the land of the free" and "the great melting pot". It's only later we start to learn about the hypocrisy behind those statements. A lot of us assume that we're the good guys and that our government is benevolent and kind. I imagine there are some number of people who still believe in Santa Claus, too. Some of us would really like for our government to focus on fixing the affairs at home instead of butting into everyone else's. Again, we apologize for the inconvenience. I'm sure that's a great weight off the average citizen of Iraq. That was irony, if you missed it.

Yes it will be, so why all the whining?

I'm not whining, I'm just calling it like I see it. We in the USA have enjoyed a position of privilege for quite some time. The future isn't so bright, so it's time to start lowering our expectations. The toilet paper rationing of the last year is just the first taste of that. I'm sure there will be much moaning in the country when we have to start reusing it.

I'm going to call that one right now. If you want to change it, you'll have to make your own damn Internet. With Blackjack, and Hookers. Oh wait, Tor already exists. Now you just need to figure out how to get people to use it.

The USA has clearly abdicated its role as a world leader in all areas. We've surrendered the moral high ground to lecture even the worst despots in the world. We've been taking our technical expertise for granted for decades while also under-funding the educational system required to maintain it. We've been failing to invest in infrastructure. We're all too happy to allow our citizens to starve as long as our taxes don't go up. Now we get to sit and watch as others claim the future we thought was our God-given destiny. I suspect the world will be a much better place without us to bully it around, though we'll probably still try until someone get sick of it and smacks us down.

I have a 9+ at the moment and the battery's starting to swell, causing the case to come open. I don't use any of the internet crap on it because they want me to sign up for "Samsung Internet" and fuck that. I also can't fish the phone out of my pocket without accidentally hitting the bixby button, which you can disable if you want to sign up for "Samsung Internet." So I've decided it's the last Samsung product I'm ever going to buy. I honestly don't even need a smart phone at all, it's really not the device I envisioned when I wanted a portable computing device in my pocket in the '90's, and the platform really sucks for everything. It particularly seems to suck at being a phone, which is the one thing it really needs to be good at.

The entire hiring process is broken. None of the job postings tell you what you'll actually be doing, they just list some random skills that probably don't even apply to the position. The guy who actually needs someone to fill a role has no actual input into the wording in the job posting. The people doing the actual recruiting don't understand anything about programming, the business model of the company or what you'll actually be doing. And if you actually manage to land an interview the company therefore has to take their experienced engineers away from production for several hours to try to figure out if you're a man and not a cabbage or something. And most software engineers are really bad at talking to people, so I'd argue that your results would actually be better if you just flipped a coin as to whether to hire the guy or not. I won't even go into the number of interviews I've had where they asked me all these blue-sky questions about algorithms, data structures and logical short-cutting and then when I finally got a look at their code base none of that stuff was present. If their design was even half as good as the questions they asked me in the interview, they probably wouldn't have even needed another guy to help them maintain it.

A lot of this could be fixed just by having the recruiter know something about programming and the business model of his clients, but that would require him to work more closely with his clients than most recruiters do. And any recruiter who knows that much about programming would make more money as a software engineer anyway. No one seems to be particularly inclined to change the system, so it'll probably stay that way. You'd think that if a company came along that could suck just a little bit less at all of this, they could clean up in the market, but so far no one actually has.

I want a seamless diamond car body. Or at least a diamond windshield.

Flying a wingsuit takes a fair bit of training, but there are loads of ways you can get that flying feeling right now. You could go to an indoor skydiving facility and learn how to fly your body; most of the people I take can get around the tunnel with a minimum of instructor intervention at about the half-hour of flight time mark. You can get to a pretty decent level of free-fly skill with a few hours of training, but it's not cheap. You could also go skydiving. It takes about 200 jumps before you can fly a wingsuit, but they start training you in tracking before you even get out of the training program and that actually feels more like flying than flying a wingsuit does.

If you stick with the skydiving for a couple hundred jumps, you can get into a wingsuit. That's a pretty big step that a lot of skydivers rush into. That first jump is pretty dangerous, since you're kind of finding out if you're ready to fly a wingsuit after you get out of the plane, which is a really bad time to find out that you're not ready. So my advice would be to take your time getting to that part. Or maybe go to the wingsuit wind tunnel in Stockholm and learn to fly in a possibly safer environment.

If you actually want to go somewhere, you could get into paragliding or start working on a private pilot's license. It sounds like you'll get to the flying part pretty quickly if you do that.

All these things are fairly expensive, but you do learn a lot in the process.

The problem isn't the markup, the problem is the engineering decisions required to build a program that does what you want are still hard, because programming is hard. Whatever markup you build for yourself or decide to use, you're still going to have to decide how to serialize and deserialize your objects and interact between the various component parts. You know, the hard bits. Having 30 markup languages or libraries, none of which do exactly what you want isn't helping. You still have to evaluate each one, or decide to build your own thing, based on what you need. That's going to vary dramatically depending on what languages your project uses, and you're going to have to know non-trivial things about each one of the libraries you're evaluating to handle data transfer because nothing is ever truly able to just be dropped in and used without understanding what it does when you're trying to accomplish non-trivial things.

Sure, if they'll increase our compensation when their move to that shitty cheap health plan increases the cost of our medical care by 400%. Wouldn't consider it, you say? Well wide acceptance of work from home not only increases their access to workforce, it increases our access to companies we can work for. As always, we'll choose the company that provides the best standard of living. Don't expect loyalty from people who you've never given any to yourself.

Yeah, all Oracle had to do to drive Java adoption was not be shitty. Too bad for them, they don't know how.