Actually, I never went to college. I'm a self-taught software engineer.

The question that the OP was complaining about was not "why"; the question was "how", combined with the lack of willingness to take the initiative to find out on their own. Asking how to solve a problem, because you aren't self-directed enough to figure it out on your own, is very different from asking why a problem needs to be solved, to give you a better understanding of the problem, so you can make a better solution.

You're projecting your unrelated problems onto this post.

It's not that nobody can get Fios in Boston, it's that most people can't get Fios in Boston. Fios, RCN, and Comca... ::ahem:: "Xfinity" are all available in Cambridge... but 1/4 mi from MIT towards Central, and I can't get Fios or RCN.

Guess so.

Donky Mark?

(though probably anybody who's hanging out in a bar where a bunch of line cooks hang out at after work probably knows the difference)

In many fine dining kitchens the usage of the term recently has moved back towards older titles like "Chef De Partie" for line cooks, even if they don't have anybody directly under them in the brigade, and are collectively referred to as 'chefs' even though "The Chef" that is in charge of the brigade of any particular is still called "Chef." I guess if you can't get paid more than $8/hr then at least you can sound cool to people at the bar after work.

That's like saying you're going to mechanize painting pictures. Being a gourmet chef requires creativity, and good judgement. There's also a lot more variance in vegetables and meat than in pre-fab parts, and having the judgement to properly massage that variance, while maintaining it's uniqueness, is what makes gourmet food, gourmet. If that variance doesn't exist in the materials you start with, then it's decidedly not 'gourmet'.
This could, and already has affected mid-sized corporate restaurants, by outsourcing food production to commissaries, only needing to be microwaved or scooped out of a steam tray.

Also, chefs, even good ones, often get paid less than factory assembly line workers.

Askjeeves tried to get people to ask their search engine questions in plain english, and through their failure, proved that people just don't like interacting with browser search engines that way. Processing queries for a service like Siri, however, would be a much better match for Watson's skills.

I'm getting a bit sick of 'smart' searches... or, rather, not being able to disable the 'smartness.' More often than not, I really don't want a search engine making assumptions about what I meant, rather than just taking what I enter completely literally, and I *never* want it to insert results that don't contain all of my search terms because it scored exponentially better with the other items in the query. Chances are, I added in the term they were ignoring, specifically, to drastically reduce the number of results I got, because I wanted to *narrow it down*.

Maybe I'm a curmudgeon, but I would rather tweak the search to narrow down crap results than try to outsmart the 'smartness' any day of the week. I understand that this isn't necessarily what John Q. Internetuser is looking for in search, but at least having the option there would be a big help. Google used to have a very straightforward syntax to help you modify your search results in specific, predictable ways... while much of that syntax is still valid in google searches, now it seems like everything can be arbitrarily overridden by what google thinks you 'should' have meant, rather than what you told it you meant. Very frustrating.

Yep:
http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/dec2010/sb20101210_839038.htm

“Hey Folks, we’re the Nuclear Trashmen, we’re here on tour from Brooklyn, promoting our album release. This is our thirteenth show, first with this lineup. This is a song called half life.”

Absolutely. Tipping in cash is ridiculous when they're charging me for a tip on my card. That simply means that instead of the drivers being stolen from, I'm being stolen from, because they're charging me twice.

Why in the world are the credit card fees something that should be transferred to the individual employee when the company itself is a) purchasing the credit card processing service, and b) the primary benefactor from the transaction?

It's quite illegal for restaurants to deduct *anything* except taxes from a server's tips, and it should be. In most states, servers are getting paid approximately $2.50/hr based on the assumption that they'll make at least a certain percentage in tips (where I am, they automatically get taxed on an assumed 12% of sales, unless they claim higher, which that $2.50/hr generally barely covers. If someone stiffs them, they still pay taxes based on an assumed 12% tip, if they don't claim the other 8% of a 20% cash tip, they still pay based on that 12%) You're paying less for the food as a result (and you really are, restaurant profit margins, after all of the incurred expenses, are generally fairly small,) so the customer adjusts their pay directly, adjusting the amount for service... but the restaurant is still making the profit on the food, drinks, etc. and the server is a regular employee, not a contractor. CC processing fees aren't taken out of servers' pay for the same reason they aren't taken out of a Neiman Marcus employees' pay when they sell you a pair of shoes, even if they are making commission. That's a business expense, not a personal expense of the employee.

Uber takes a standard, per-booking fee from the drivers for the costs incurred as acting as a dispatch service, and a payment clearinghouse. The drivers can utilize that service as much as they want, when they want. Some drivers work for limo companies that collect the fee for the ride, and pay them their regular rates for paying limo drivers, still giving them the tip, as a tip. Some drivers use their own cars and for themselves, operating as one-person limo companies contracted by uber. It's completely appropriate for uber to charge the *company* they are contracting for the costs incurred in the CC processing, because it's the company that the service is being purchased from is the primary actor in, and benefactor of the transaction, not the employee. There are accepted ways for companies to allocate less money to an employee and more money to themselves, if they see fit: charge more and don't give more to employees, or reduce the employees pay. Charging the employees fees is absurd.

I'd say being able to flash someone's headlights if they're driving on a winding, unlit road, at night, could most certainly be catastrophic.