telnet is the debugging tool I use when a daemon isn't working right. I've used it to see the HTTP headers returned (in the days before browsers made this easier). I've used it to test postfix plugins. I'll occasionally use it to send email when my local MTA is offline. I've used it to get more insight into SMTP, POP, and IMAP configuration errors. It's usually for debugging, but sometimes for bootstrapping.

The only thing I don't use telnet for (anymore) is remote logins.

telnet is a pretty good web client, smtp client, and port scanner. I haven't quite figured out how to use telnet as an ftp client though.

I bought that database as a startup, before the VC funding. If you have a single person drawing a salary, $2500/year is a pittance. Hiring even a minimum wage slave to manage it for you will cost 6x that. And if that source got uppity about the price, there were plenty of other sources.

My point being: Yes, it would be wonderful to have a flat nationwide VAT. In the mean time, the problem is not as onerous as everybody is making it out to be.

No, they should just buy it from somebody that already does this. These databases aren't expensive. I used to subscribe to one that cost me $50/State/year for the US. IIRC Canada was the same price, $50/Provence/year.

Yeah, we paid $2500/year, plus a couple engineer days writing the code to use it, plus a couple engineer days per year resolving customer questions. Way easier than hiring a full time team to do it ourselves.

Zip code is not enough information. Some zip codes exist in multiple cities and counties, and so end up with different rates.

I've always been able to resolve those issues with a zip+4. But this was in practice, and I didn't search for counter examples.

I'm starting to see the allure, but I recognize the trap. Not just career wise, but personally. Many studies show that the key to growing old gracefully is to stay somewhat mentally and physically active. I'm NOT saying you need to go out and start doing Quantum Physics while Rock Climbing. I AM saying you need to keep learning as a person, whether it's related to your career or not. If tech isn't your cup of tea anymore, go take up cooking, or learn to tie fly fishing lures, or learn quantum physics, or .... Me, I'm branching out into cooking, brewing, and massively distributed programming. I'm sure you can find something, the list is endless. If you don't love tech anymore (she is a demanding bitch), find a new love.

The glue languages will never go away. Batch, Shell, Perl, etc. These languages are the duct tape of programming.

15 years in COBOL and 10 years in Perl is changing too often?

No, it's not just you. I'm happy with NetFlix; there's plenty of older material I haven't seen that NetFlix does stream. Even if NetFlix loses half of it's current content, it's still a much better deal than cable.

In general, if I have limited information to make a decision, I prefer the option that let's me change my mind later.

When my daughter was young (she's 9 now), we chose not to vaccinate, because we could always get her vaccinated when she was older. While gathering as much information as we could, we found a large number of potential side effects in young children. That alone convinced me that my decision to delay was correct, even if the decision to vaccinate was still unresolved.

When the follow-up studies concluded that Thimerosal wasn't a risk, we had all the children vaccinated. It was a bonus that all of my children were old enough to avoid the age-based potential side effects.

Part of the problem with bio-fuels is that we've only figured out how to convert useful stuff into fuel. Corn, sugar, etc. The real break-through will come from stuff that isn't (currently) useful, and doesn't need as much attention as modern crops. Stuff like Switchgrass and Bamboo.

Besides, solar power and the electrical grid aren't always an option. There will always be a market for a dense and easy to transport fuel. Think diesel generators in McMurdo Station in Antarctica, or the Canadian Diamond mines. Hopefully that market will be much smaller than it is today, but it won't go away.

Beating the Averages

Degrees are unnatural, use Radians (preferably in tau, not pi). Then to make things easier, we can subdivide tau into 24th pieces, and everybody can say "The time is currently 12 tau twenty-fourths." Then the lazy sods will probably create an abbreviation for tau/24, probably something silly like "o'clock".

It can't be a BLUE HADES colony, it's only 100m deep. It could be a ship though...

Yes, cygwin + at/cron. If you're not a windows admin, it takes a little bit of work to get crond running as a windows service. Once the service is running, the rest is unix. I have a simple rsync cron running on windows, pulling offsite backup.

In the grandparent's case, a slightly complex script that does rsync and some remote md5 commands should solve the problem. If you need bi-directional transfer, I've scripted unison the same way.