The guy is completely correct.

The situation: You've got a thousand applicants. You've got one or two job openings.

If you don't have the slightest idea what makes the internet and the information age run, you probably don't deserve the job. But the converse is also true: programmers should learn something of art, literature, and history. Too many software people don't even know anything about science. A person that can't think broadly in a well-rounded way is useless.

A lot of programmers fall into this track because they have not been given the opporunity to develop or learn new skills. If the company only expects this person to keep grinding out the same old Fortran/Cobol/VisualBasic code and never gives them chances at learning, then the company gets what it deserves: a problem employee.
My suggestion: give the person opportunities and work time to develop. An employee is a long-term investment - if this works, you'll get a better employee. Remember that this person has lots of business knowledge that they bring to the table and some sort of track record better than a new hire.
What if it doesn't work? The dude isn't interested in learning anything new. Well, what you describe is potentially a problem employee. The type of employee that insists on using stinky old technology without justifying it with any sort of valid analysis. The sort of employee that says "If it isn't written in VisualBasic, you'll have to find someone else to run the project." The answer to this is REMOVAL FROM ROLE. If you can't fire them send them off to some dead-end part of the company where they can do less harm: you know, Human Resources, Facilities, Projects...

We have this old fashioned technology in Canada called a paper and pen that works just fine. It doesn't need calibration. It leaves an un-arguable record: no hanging chads. Any uneducated person can use the technology. And at most polls you can count the ballots in about 35 minutes: I've done it.

Why do you have machines??

I'm getting tired of all the anti-nuclear stuff on Slashdot as well. Enough of this. If you are some sort of anti-science luddite go comment on Mother Jones or somewhere like that. A nuclear station is built to withstand a hurricane with ease, including, loss of off-site power. There are multiple backups. End of story.

So I think you are absolutely correct, combined with heat effects this explains it. The rising noise floor would equally effect a new router. I've observed that cable modems, in particular, seem to fail over time. Radio performance can have nothing to do with their failure. Sadly, we live in a disposable society where both companies and consumers will accept flaky products.

It is a great learning tool, but the Arduino always seemed a little overpriced: especially the Mega 2560 version. On the Uno you inevitably run out of I/O pins when you are building anything remotely useful. I've switched over to the Teensy for my projects. A much better value: http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/

Being Canadian, I am surprised prostitution is actually a crime in the United States. Strictly speaking, it isn't here.
Seems kind of parochial, just sayin'.

The Road is sci-fi, certainly. And it definitely is an order of magnitude more depressing than most things mentioned here.

Yes! And it earns bonus points for having Bruce Dern spouting environmentalist drivel.

While I don't agree that the Foundation books are depressing, your comments are very insightful. I never noticed the way Asimov writes before.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Should win this contest by a mile.

I need it to stop hanging for 10-20 seconds 2-3 minutes after I log into my workstation in the morning. For years I've put up with this.
I need to stop deleting lock files and parentlock files when it crashes. What year is this again?
I'd like it to run a little snappier.
I need it to understand the system "no proxy for" setting and actually use it properly.

When I lose features I use, it makes me mad. Gnome 3 has this problem. It is hard to customize my colors the way I like. My computer temperature no longer sits there on my title bar. My CPU monitor is no longer there on my title bar. Gnome keeps popping up title bars over my movie playing.

Sadly, Unity is even more frustrating and XFCE is still very rudimentary.

CAN I PLEASE HAVE KDE2 or GNOME2 back??

Markus Persson once again demonstrates why he's the coolest guy in the software industry.