A friend of my was involved in a road rage incident while in standstill traffic at night. The guy up ahead pulled out a crowbar and started walking back. My friend took his camera out of the glovebox, took a picture of the guy and the license plate on his truck. The flash on the camera going off may have stunned the guy, as he backed away and got back into his truck without further incident.

Three years after being a video game tester, I became a lead tester for another three years. Recognizing that it was dead end job, I went back to college to get an associate degree in commputer programming. After I got my I.T. certifications, I was branded as "not being a team player" since I had an exit strategy. Not long after I left to pursue a career in help desk support, the company got delisted from the stock market, traded on pink sheets, and became a private company. All my former coworkers got fired.

GCC Introduces DRM-Free Movie Store

Something else for Linus Torvalds to complain about after GCC 4.9.0. :/

If you're a tech contractor, you may very well get fired tomorrow. Prior to the Great Recession, I used to change jobs every three years. My last three jobs each ended after nine months. My current job is a one-year contract, but my employment is in jepoardy because someone complained that my pants were wrinkled were last week. My newest resume is already on the job search websites. Plan for the worst, hope for the best.

Mod up. Cynical, no doubt. But very true. Good advice if you plan to become a grumpy programmer.

Or downloading one CD over a 56K modem took a better part of a week?

The trouble is they know exactly why they are better, but cannot be forced to see why they are also worse. New technologies always have flaws, and it takes time for the kinks to be worked out in practice, leaving a mature technology. There is a delicate balance between early adopters that keep the new technologies alive enough to have a chance to mature, and the slower moving segments of the market that need maturity and reliability.

In the tech market, in this century, the latter segment is riotously underserved. Supporting mature products is considered a waste of resources that should be instead used to push the boundaries of in-your-face ad delivery. The entire situation is ridiculous and could only occur in a market where the buyer typically has no better way of choosing between competitors than flipping a coin - because he has no idea what he his buying!

I didn't feel the earthquake in San Jose, which is further south than Sunnyvale. The real fun begins when the East Coast media starts running stories about how California is sliding into the ocean. CNN once did a story about a minor 3.0 quake in Los Angeles by showing a grocery store surveillance tape with nothing falling off the shelves as the camera shook from being mounted on the wall. Most Californians don't even notice quake unless its 5.0 or higher.

That's why corporations have subsidiaries and sister corporations. MS Ireland is not the same company as MS USA.

Most of it is not actually earned abroad, due to accounting practices. MS USA sold all of their IP to MS Ireland, and pays MS Ireland a fee for every copy of MS software sold in the USA. That fee is almost certainly for an amount nearly (or actually) equal to the sales price. As a result, they claim a write-off on every title sold that's just about equal to that title's sales price. As a result, MS USA says they earned nothing on those titles. It's all based on technicalities that are unavailable to real people. Only corporations are allowed to account for profits and losses in such a way as to reduce their tax bills to nothing.

I was misdiagnosed as mentally retarded when I was kindergarten due to hearing lost in one ear that wasn't diagnosed until years later. I traveled around the county in little yellow school buses, and puking my guts out every morning from motion sickness, to attend special ed classes. For six years in a row, I blew out the evaluation exams on the genius side of the scale and told each time that it was statistical fluke.The school system made three times more money from mentally retarded students. From the first through eight grades, I was told I was an idiot.

I didn't bother to go to high school. Spent four years at home teaching myself from a personal library of 400 books, reading newspapers and news magazines, and watching documentaries on public television. Learning what I wanted to learn with a wide-ranging curiosity.

After working with my father in construction for a few years, I enrolled in the adult re-entry program at the local community college. With a fifth-grade math and writing skills, and a college-level reading comprehension, it took me four years to get my associate degree in general education. I had trouble getting level-entry jobs because I didn't have a high school diploma.

A decade later I went back to the community college to earn an associate degree in computer programming. Uncle Sam picked up the tab with a $3,000 USD tax credit to change careers. That took five years going part-time while working 80 hours per week as a lead video game tester. I made the president's list for maintaining a 4.0 GPA in my major when I graduated.

Some people still think I'm an idiot to this day.

-- Victim of serial sex pest Stuart Arthur Clarke shocked by his prison sentence

Yeah, and we should also ban municipalities from building roads because they discourage private investment in toll roads. All the roads, including the street in front of your house, ought to be sold to UPS. You'd have to get their permission to drive your car on their roads. Since they'd be private property, they'd be within their rights to make any arbitrary rules they wanted. They could ban certain makes or kinds or colors of cars. They could allow you to drive only to certain pre-approved destinations. And don't even think about trying to create a package delivery service to compete with them.

"As a tech worker myself, I don't see why foreign workers would be inherently worse."

They are not, *inherently* worse. Not by a long shot. Some of them are very, very good.

The problem is that they are being selected, not on the basis of technical skills, but on the basis of lower costs and more subservience. Companies prefer, not just foreign workers, but H1B workers specifically - because they are powerless and easier to abuse.

Just a look at the 'products' these so-called tech companies are churning out should be enough to give lie to the idea that they have any interest at all in technical excellence. They do not. They want cheap code-monkeys that will crank out utter crap as directed with no back talk, no wage pressures, and no looking for a better job to worry about.

"I mean I've seen some people, very much home grown, who seem to have such a poor grasp of how things work that I wonder how on earth they even have a job."

Sure. But we dont have any kind of monopoly on those people. Outsource to save money and you are likely to get the south asian equivalent - all the same problems, plus communication and cultural difficulties on top of it.

Are you surprised? Humans are humans.