These people wouldn't be dangerous if they weren't brilliant. It's something called "the aura effect". When someone does something well, everyone starts to think that they do everything well.

I've seen people like that ruin entire departments. They can code like a demon and produce spectacular and extremely functional software. They do great things and then move on to the next project. They start to form a following, which adds to their notoriety. Small religions form around them.

And then some poor schmuck is handed last year's effort to make a few minor adjustments and finds that it's thoroughly undocumented and uncommented. The call structure averages thirty functions deep, there are more interfaces than there are classes and as many classes as there are functions. Everything is extremely efficient because there is no segmentation of functionality, and subsections have no clear interface boundaries. But because this person is such a great corporate asset, said poor schmuck has absolutely no traction with management in terms of calling attention to this.

More years go by while the superstar wraps entire departments around their coding habits. Great chunks of the company's IP are written in this person's style because he's become a shining example of how things should be done. Maintenance costs go through the roof until enough software engineers with a clue point out these problems and insist on policies that address these problems, and major projects have to be initiated to rewrite huge chunks of existing incomprehensible spaghetti code.

At which point our shining primadonna takes his experience and awards and goes and finds a job with a fat salary in some other poor company.

One of the things that I looked for this most recent time around was a phone that didn't feel like a brick in my pocket, and make my keys smash into my leg. That phone does some cool stuff, but it's darn near a laptop. No thank you.

IMHO as a long term member of the software engineering community, I think that you're covered and can reasonably get out. Your previous employer is greedy, and wants more of a good thing.

Since you're part of a development effort and may have a body of unique knowledge, it would be a good idea to offer to help them transition in a new person to replace you, and to be willing to answer questions they might have on a contract basis after you've left. This is really up to you, though. You're not required to do this, and if they get mean or greedy about it you should definitely cut them off.

This is no more than we can expect from employers these days. We get our two weeks severance and we're out the door, and we consider ourselves lucky to get that. You may want to consider any personal relationship you have with the management, but professionally speaking, I think you're doing just fine.

Not exactly. The demand for alcohol had significantly increased during prohibition, but the ability to produce it en mass was eliminated because of the order that all equipment for the creation of alcoholic beverages be destroyed. The alcohol producers had to rebuild their infrastructure from scratch, including their distribution networks. A lot of the alcohol producing companies and families came back into the business, but a lot of them didn't. It was an unusual case of a new field where huge growth potential was available just from out-competing the other alcohol producers. They hadn't had time to start considering OTHER competitors yet.

I've studied the issue extensively, and don't believe that this is the case. Alcohol as a legitimate industry was severely decimated by prohibition in 1937, and wasn't in much condition to field lobbyists.

The primary people who showed up at the hearings for it were the producers of nylon (DuPont) and the owners of vast logging interests (Herst). There was a significant push by those who enforced prohibition and were looking for something else to enforce (Anslinger), but it would appear that Anslinger was actually backed by the DuPont family in his efforts.

That doesn't mean that it its illegality isn't currently promoted by the alcohol interests. The tobacco interests have actually been in the forefront, and they seem to own trademarks on various brand names like "Maui Wowwie" and "Acapulco Gold". Mostly, though, it's supported by politicians looking for something to be reputably against when running for office.

"by their own accord" isn't as black and white as it sounds. Microsoft doesn't do anything without market pressures. I'm certain that no single factor was entirely responsible for this decision, but I'm also certain that Microsoft didn't wake up one day and say "Hey, I'm tired of doing whatever I want. I think I'll spend fifty million or so to follow someone ELSE's standards."

Of COURSE you need to buy it. It doesn't suck nearly as badly as Vista! Isn't that a feature in and of itself?

"Oh, wow, maybe people won't just buy whatever crap we try to shove down their throats. This is going to take a bit of rethinking of our strategy..."

Sorry, couldn't resist. I understand that the automobile industry is going through the same realization. We can hope that a few others might get the clue...

No, MerlTurkin has it right. Meteors are cold while they're out in space. When they hit the atmostphere, the surface heats up quickly, and the heated parts chip off because of temperature shear and create an ablative barrier to further heating. The surface of a meteor is warm, but not hot when it hits the ground, and the inside is still frozen.

Of course, Mrs. O'Leary's cow wasn't very hot when it hit the lantern and it still burned down Chicago. No telling what was in that warehouse from the posted story.

The speed of most meteorites is almost always based on the speed of the earth flying through meteor clouds, not the speed of the meteor clouds, so it's fairly consistent.

Go through Freenet. There are so many addresses available that they give them away without effort:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5988

I'm wondering how far behind the popular adoption of IPv6, the nay-say'ers admissions that they were wrong will lag.

Progress will never happen. Things will always be the way they are now. There's no reason to change now, and there never will be. Pshaw.

Just because I logically couldn't doesn't mean that I wouldn't want to try, especially if someone else was footing the bill for my efforts.

I can understand why they might want to do this. As a software developer, I often think to myself "I'm SURE I could write something more responsive than this" while playing Second Life. If I had an infinite amount of free time, I'd probably even give it a whack just to see if I can figure out what the big issue is.

I'll second the ghost-town effect. The other day I was shopping in a fairly large store, and there were an entire eight people in the store at the same time. I was thinking "wow, this place is popular!" Most of the time it's like wandering through a deserted museum.

The primary problem I found with second life scripting was that any script that interacts with other scripts runs into serious issues with lag and undelivered information packets. There are no internal mechanisms for dealing with this, and writing delivery reliability code into your scripts is very resource intensive.

That doesn't work. Letting the free market provide balance presumes that there isn't a built-in bias. Fox news is a perfect example. It was purchased and continues to be operated as a conservative news network. They accumulate viewers who agree with them, and perpetuate that agreement by feeding them appropriately biased information. They do this specifically for the purpose of creating a population that's better educated on their point of view.

Similar to your typical monopolistic practices, it's possible to spend money in order to expand your customer base. It happens again and again.

For news agencies, however, it only matters if they claim to be an unbiased news source. At that point, they are obligated to maintain a certain level of neutrality. The Washington Post is identifying that they breached their own moral code to an extent.

Not that I blame them. Not only was McCain negative, he was boring. He just didn't do much that was newsworthy.

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/top_story_on_john_mccain_run_out