Did it ever occur to you that many of us have just adapted to the environment that you (the royal you) created?

Let me put it this way: If I remained at the employer I worked at 10 years ago, my salary ($50k/yr at the time) would still most likely be less than 1/2 of what I'm making today, and that's counting the 'OMG we're hurting so bad financially but look - we're still being so generous!' 1-3% annual raises. Nice folks to work with, but yanno? fuck that.

BTW, it's not just money - I left my last non-contract job because the dizzy idiot that I reported to was very friendly and somewhat politically astute, but she had zero sense of mentorship, and decided that I was "too valuable to move into a management slot", in spite of the fact that I was bored out of my fucking mind in the role I did have, but apparently I knew too much to be so easily replaceable. A month later and I was gone.

TL;DR? I'm not there to look out for her career (or yours)... I'm too busy looking out for mine.

If you don't want mercenaries for employees, then pull your heads out of your backsides and stop treating us like chattel.

Depends on which Trimester we're talking about...

Give it time - apparently ISIS has a bit of a beachhead there.

I agree partially with the point, but there is a bit of a difference between a huge publicly-traded corporation that had to jump through a zillion hoops to form up and gain a presence, and the fly-by-night one-man scam 'store' that some dude set up online.

Yeah, Enron, Worldcom... they disappeared, but only after a long drawn-out process. It was kind of a big news thing when each one of them were slowly drawn and quartered into oblivion - and there were a shit-ton of assets to garnish/seize along the way. Amazingly enough, the board of directors were all rather easily found and many were dragged into court.

At the other end of the scale, we have "Bob's l33t g4m3r p4rtz store!!!11!". It can cash out its bank account and evaporate into nothing within an hour, at least after enough credit card transactions clear/post to make the scam worthwhile (but long before the chargebacks and cops come flying in). Assets? Yeah - that consists of a domain name, a PO Box for the checks (maybe), and approximately 150MB of crappy cloned website full of copied pictures/text, sitting on a $10/mo hosted webserver? Oh, and good luck finding the dude who ran the scam - he's likely on another continent anyway.

I mean c'mon... perspective, man!

I believe GP was talking about home users, and it seems pretty obvious that he was.

After all, if you don't already have that privacy/security shit squared away in your enterprise, then, well...

Depends - sometimes the nature of the OS ecosystem doesn't have room for such BS. If you install/update your freebie applications through apt-get, YUM, the OSX .dmg 'Drop-it-in-the-Applications-Directory' format, or Apple's App Store***, you don't get any wizards or 'options' at all, and for some very obvious reasons. No package (at least so far) delivered that way will screw around with your browser settings or plugins, or add stupid search bars (unless what you're downloading *is* a search bar), etc.

*** Apple's App Store I think explicitly forbids such crap, but not 100% certain of that. Also note that any downloaded OSX application that contains a .pkg file or similar thing (Java does this) will send you to wizard hell, just like an .msi and/or .exe will.

Agreed... though funny enough, it probably still won't show me that window. But then, this is probably why:

# yum update jre jdk

In all seriousness though, I am curious as to whether or not they'll screw around with the more automated/*nix-like updates, or if it's just the typical 'doze and OSX users who will have to keep an eye out.

Actually, that depends on the RV in question. I specifically retrofitted a used 35' RV trailer for hunting in Utah (October at 10,000' ASL tends to be a bit snowy). It cost me roughly $1500 to do it on my own. I did it by carefully removing the wall paneling, replaced the thin fiberglass insulation with dense foam-based sheets, then covered that with new fiberglass insulation packed in as tightly as possible. Also packed more fiberglass insulation wherever I found any dead-air space (behind cabinets, etc) and double-layer sheets of dense foam insulation up in the undercarriage. Next came pre-cut sheets of foam insulation that fit into the windowsills and air vent shafts at night. A pair of 80-lb propane tanks and a pair of Group 4D truck batteries (recharged by generator) completed the ensemble.

Was perfectly warm in spite of sub-freezing temperatures and the same tiny propane furnace that the thing came with.

Also, newer RV trailers are actually built pretty damned well, with many models built specifically for cold weather.

As someone who lives in a rural area** , I agree (I don't want my house burning down because some dumbass thought it'd be cool to get a GoPro video and block the firefighters), but that's not going to help the poor bastard who is making a retardant run and accidentally comes up on one.

Given the fairly limited range of the radios used to control said drones, why not just arrest and jail the idiot who is operating the drone for hindering active firefighting operations? Even better, fine the dummy for any costs associated with an aborted retardant run (ever price-out jet fuel? charge 'em that for a few aborted runs and I bet that no one else would even want to try.) The authorities usually cordon off a *huge* zone around an active fire (especially areas in its projected path) with mandatory evacuation orders, and further orders to bodily remove anyone dumb enough to be within that zone. They emphatically do not screw around with this... which leads me to wonder who would be dumb enough to risk the ire of authorities and property owners by pulling such a stupid stunt.

** Yes, I know what a defensible zone is and I fully do my best to insure one around the homestead. I also sit down with my wife and audit/arrange things every spring (sometime before fire season) to insure that an evacuation order means that either one of us can grab the important/critical shit (and the dogs), and get out of Dodge within five minutes, maximum. It's a good practice to have if you live in a forested wilderness, truth be told.

Here's a clue - corporations that damned large and powerful have already figured out how to profit from the whole AGW debate no matter which way it ends.

How? Well first off, they know full well that the world's appetite for plastics, kerosene, gasoline, and nearly all of their products will not slacken in the slightest, so they have plenty of time to adapt to any changes that may come. Meanwhile, these same companies are doing what large corporations all around the planet do: they Greenwash the hell out of their image, and pass the costs of doing so onto the consumer. Carbon tax? Hah! They've got that figured out as well, and again, guess who gets to pay for that? (hint: Not Them. It'll be passed on as a cost of doing business.)

To top all that off, you may want to look into who the biggest investors and shareholders in the Green Energy sector actually are... those same petroleum companies are right there, holding stock and encouraging the whole shebang, because they're more than poised to buy up the first one that actually makes enough headway to be a threat (mind you, not to squash the company, but to profit like hell off of it.) I wouldn't be surprised if many of these alternative energy enterprises are owned in whole or in part by a petroleum corporation, with the alt. energy company being a shell or 'independent' division. Again, no conspiracy or tinfoil involved; it's just a bit of pre-positioning for future profits.

You're more than welcome to disagree, but consider that these same corporations are looking decades ahead, and know full well that they have to hedge their bets against diminishing/expensive supply, rising political instabilities (read: Venezuela and the Mideast), and no-longer-rare governmental money-grab attempts. Only a total idiot would run his company any other way.

So tell me - given the fact that the eeevil petroleum corporations are happily and quietly positioned to profit from this thing no matter which way it goes, why do you think they would bother?

Gotta agree - a link to the actual site that, you know, *sells* the damned things would be nice...

I'm currently sitting very near to several. They're not shrinking violets or failures, though.

BTW - I'd still love to see that evidence.

...what sibling said: Horseshit.

Seriously - I've put up with that same damned condescension and arrogance from faculty and developers alike (e.g. how *dare* some grunt EE with a backwoods Arkansas-flavored accent lecture me about mistakes in my design!), peer pressure, etc.

Here's a clue - *everybody* gets to put up with those obstacles; the difference between success and failure lies in how well you not only fight back, but transcend them.

And what do you mean by "limited job prospects"? I don't know where you live, but skill in certain languages will get you feted and chased after by recruiters out on the West Coast no matter how your biology is plumbed. Same if you're DevOps or a DBA...

But, I guessing that as a guy, you're just guessing (or worse, relaying what you were told by people with agenda afoot). Seriously - Show us verifiable evidence of this discrimination (and I mean factual, verifiable evidence, not some SJW's unverifiable sob story) - I actually want to see some.

...mostly because IT doesn't require a whole lot of physical labor and/or physical agility? Sure, you might have to pick up an odd server or router chassis here and there, but even that's only work for the sysadmin server monkeys, not the code monkeys.

Cheap coders... duh. ;)