Emphasis mine.

So it's the 'right' thing to do because it agrees with your views? Self-centered to say the least. Rackspace is required to uphold your values even when it conflicts with their own?

Look, I like free speech, but I also have the right of free association. And I would certainly choose not to be associated with this church. So I'm not. Rackspace has that right as well. Does your belief in free speech invalidate their right to free association? Why should it? Which is more valuable?

Not an easy question.

Depends what 'senior' means. In my company the 'technical track' is pathetic. It's like asking to be forgotten, ignored and underpaid if you seek promotion by expanding your skillset. The real money comes in project management - become a systems engineer, a project engineer, a program finance person or whatever. Just get in a position to move money around and say important things like 'How can they put that on our plate? We told them last quarter that the deliverables were delayed as specified in the contract. We can't be more than 12.5% liable! We'll sue!'

So our 'senior' people may or may not have actual important technical experience and the ability to do anything worthwhile. An inept engineer level 1 can choose to take the 'program management' path and become a senior whatever while not being able to write any code.

They just hand out titles today. I wouldn't believe them.

Image everyone gets a free superpower - useful but not game-breaking (like changing reality with a thought). I can fly, Ted can phase through walls, Jenny can see electrical fields. So we all go to work with our cool powers. I'm the fastest man at my delivery service, Ted saves dozens of people daily as a firefighter and Jenny makes the electrical grid more efficient. We all make at least $75K. In fact, everyone does because everyone's powers are useful.

Guess what? We're not all poor. We're all richer than before. We have fast deliveries, people who would have died are alive, and our power grid is better and therefore cheaper - not to mention whatever everyone else is doing. Just because everyone gets paid more doesn't mean it's inflation - it's not as long as they're being paid what they're worth. If they're generating value, we all win even if we pay them what they're worth.

But of course, there are no super powers in the real world. We have to teach people mentally or physically to make them worth $75K/year. That doesn't mean it's impossible or that it would cause inflation if we did. The economy is not a zero-sum game.

You accidentally the whole verb!

There's a lot of 'military thinking' that goes on at defense contractors: everyone should be interchangeable, everyone should follow orders to the letter. Some of that is because of the 'Quality' and 'Security' requirements too. Add together Top Secret clearances, ISO-9000, 6-Sigma, CMMI, WYSIWYG, AFK, WTF and BBW and you get a lot of fun documentation that doesn't really help anyone, needs to be updated every 5 minutes to make it reflect reality, and can't be looked at without five signatures from people you've never heard of and are perpetually on vacation.

In my opinion that's a sword that cuts both ways. Obviously I don't want my job endangered by some manager with a beef. I'd love not to be fired arbitrarily in that situation. But in that case I'm the good guy. The other case is I'm the bad guy: I don't work well with others, I shirk responsibility and half-ass everything if I ever DO get around to working, I make the work environment terrible for everyone else because of missed promises, bad attitudes, excessive complaining and poor hygiene and I *STILL* can't get fired because of protections put into place! And note, I'm not talking about state protections entirely. Plenty of large corporations make it difficult to get fired just to cover their butts. Often these people are toxic, demoralizing and worthless people, but still collect a paycheck because a system (one that BUSINESSES put into place! Amazing!) exists to shield them from the consequences of their actions.

I'd much prefer a world where when you have your job you can't be mistreated, if you lose your job, there are protections for you and your family, but where worthless people can be let go after repeated attempts to right their course.

Christ, if you don't trust your employees don't hire them! If they're not getting work done (you have deadlines right? You have deliverables right? You have SOMETHING to judge them on right?) fire them! Why is that so hard? Adults earn trust and get privileges, kids are spied on to make sure their behavior conforms to norms (and I would even argue taking it to an extreme is bad parenting). Why can't you just get over your trust issues, assume your employees are doing the job until you see otherwise, and handle the lack of delivery when it occurs rather than ALL THE TIME by relentlessly spying on them?

Do you have the right to spy on your own equipment? Maybe. Is it worthwhile? Hardly. Counterproductive? Yes!

Hot damn! I live in Brevard county and I've seen lots of launches but never an orbiter up close like that.

I can't believe that we're putting that into oribt. That's redneck engineering at its best!

True story: one of the defense contractors around here got the idea to bring the technicians in on design reviews so they could offer their expertise. This is after the engineers would all huddle together, design something then hand it off to the techs after which they usually looked at it and said "Seriously!? Are you all idiots?" It's hard to make everything go according to plan when the plan is flat out impossible. So they figured by bringing the techs in on the design process they could remove some of the frank impossibilities from the design of their widgets and improve compliance (or some other buzzword). As a bonus, they offered cash bonuses if their input resulted in a positive design change.

It didn't last.

Because they ended up paying out too much money and stopped the program.

I'm sure there's a bunch of impossible designs running around out there that a diligent tech is fixing.

Bottom line: trust the techs. If you can, hire them. They ARE the best. You won't regret it.

Eh, hasn't happened yet, and the auto train from Orlando to Washington DC has been operating for quite a while. It's a great idea - load up your car, stroll up to DC, take it off, repeat in reverse.

Except it costs $900 to do it and takes DAYS.

Small airlines have sprouted up in the Melbourne Florida area just to take defense contractor people to DC, Virginia, Baltimore, etc. Their tickets are ass-cheap because they have such predetermined routes. The exact OPPOSITE of what you said would happen happened. There's simply no contest between the auto train and a cheap flight + rental. Only if I were moving up north - to those EXACT places it goes would I use the auto train. And then I might just drive instead unless someone else was paying for it.

Cripes, I may be way off but that is an obscene amount of Xanax. My doctor refuses to go over .25mg (but he's kind of a lightweight). That being said, I'm glad that you can just pop one and not get hooked. However, you do realize that Xanax and Ambien are in the same class of drugs right?

This is different in that Google actually paid for something physical and not just a 'It'd be a shame if your nice internet caught on fire' protection scheme. What *I* feared about a lack of net neutrality wasn't Google getting faster because they paid, but everyone else getting slower. These large communication companies have a history of trying to sell the same infrastructure as many times as they can. This is different in that new infrastructure was created instead of old infrastructure unfairly and arbitrarily reapportioned.

And you're assuming that gold has a set 'value' that the dollar or any other currency rises and falls against. If we found a mountain of easily-accessible gold tomorrow the price of gold would go waaaaay down... and not because the value of a dollar went waaaaay up.

Well, it's not apocalyptic, but if you planned on saving seed from your crop (which is a poor poor practice for western farmers, but I digress) and your crop gets pollinated by something with the terminator gene (very possible - it all just flies on the wind as far as the wind will take it) then next year your crop doesn't grow and you have to re-buy your seed stock. If there were enough terminator-including crops around then its possible that you couldn't successfully save seed ever and you'd have to buy it all - possibly contributing to a monoculture of plants that may all get wiped out by a disease.

Of course, if that happened to me I'd go to court with Monsanto, prove I actively attempted to cull their worthless half-breed seed out of my stock and failed, show monetary damage that wasn't covered by crop insurance and force them to pay me because they robbed me of value with their seed. You might win. Hint: the farmers who lose against Monsanto usually try to retain the GMO lines that accidentally breed their corn. It's a bit suspicious when your corn has strong GMO sequences in it 3 years after everyone around you stopped planting that strain...

One more thing: with corn at least the only reliable way to ensure that you don't cross-pollinate with anything else is to manually remove the tassles. By hand. In July. No one does that for non-seed crops (no one really saves seed either BTW).

Generally I get it from the people in the environmentalist movement who seem to be against the application of power to solve everyday problems because it's 'wasteful' somehow. For many, their agenda is to push their own values on to me in the name of 'conserving' things - electricity, air, water, environment in general, etc. A small example: you should dry your clothes on a line to save the electricity a dryer would use (typically despite any other considerations: schedule, availability of clothes lines, it's raining outside, etc). Some environmentalists would deny me dry clothes for a day or more because its' raining outside. That lowers my standard of living.

Not me, but someone much poorer than me. The shame of all of this CFL business is that it's a fairly large upfront cost: you'll spend hundreds of dollars to replace all of the bulbs in your house to save maybe $5-$10 a month. It's definitely a choice I'd make, but I have more than a hundred dollars sitting around. If you live in the People's Republic of California and you can't buy the $.50 incandescent anymore, suddenly the $3 you spent on the bulb is money you can't spend on gas or food or something else. The poor don't see the benefit of saving money on their bills monthly because they don't have the upfront money to invest in replacing all of their bulbs, and when push comes to shove the far left environmentalist position denies the poor folk $2.50 to spend on food. Or $2.50 to spend on cigarettes and booze - it's their money anyhow.

Are you serious? Do you know what a Prius costs in comparison to a cheap car? Add $10K or so. That's a car for the rich. And it's such a marginal improvement in gas mileage it's hardly worth it. Remember kids, you save a lot more gas going from 15MPG to 30MPG than you do from 30MPG to 60MPG. I can't believe any environmentalist would approve of that choice BTW.

For me it comes down to environmentalists NEVER performing a cost/benefit analysis on the measures they propose and the costs are always on the end user - us. Is $3 here and $10 there that bad? Not individually, but together, yes! Some people do NOT have the means to afford the difference between $.50 and $3, and not everyone can spend $10K more to have a car that saves you $5 on gas a month. But the furthest left environmentalists would make cheap incandescents and marginally less fuel-efficient cars illegal and push the cost onto the poor because they always assign a value of infinity to the smallest and most insignificant part of nature (of which man is obviously not a part) and assign next to nothing to the potential suffering of their fellow man.

No! Don't join! If you join you're not a stranger! Just visit once in a while and... enjoy ;)