My current manager couldn't hack it as an engineer, but he understands the problems good enough. He protects us programmers from the harsh realities of inter-departmental politics, he's a good people person. He tries to maintain a good balance of not bothering us and coming to us for our opinions for stuff like estimated time to get work completed or what kind of issues we need to worry about.

Several of us programmers are the "quirky" smart type and don't do well with idiots and have been known to get verbally snippy. But we keep getting raises because we deliver. I couldn't imagine working with an incompetent manager, I would feel sorry for them.

The statement of work should have everything as required. If the statement of work is satisfied, then the work is done, if it is not, then it needs to be finished, otherwise it's a breach of contract.

I don't see the issue.

Our division breaks even, but we use internal billing to track interdepartmental charges. Because we don't really make money, we have a hard time getting more funding to hire more people. Until sales found out that nearly every multi-million dollar contract that comes in requires a service that only our department supplies and no other department can supply. Suddenly we're getting money thrown at us. Could have used this funding a few years back. Now we've got a backlog of work on top of the new contract deliverables.

You forgot quotes around "skills" to indicate the sarcasm of what many people call "skills". Skills don't get outdated, knowledge does. Problem solving is a skill, programming in C is knowledge. A skillful person can easily apply their skills to new problems.

Great, now I got tea all over my monitor. Great joke! I wonder how many of those women getting college degrees are for psychology.

High School Teacher: Ohh, I see you do well with test taking. You should go to college where you can further increase your ability to take tests.

Soon we will have an army of women who are highly educated in test taking and a psychology major. Since you can't find a good psychology job that doesn't require a PHD, they can be great secretaries. /sarc

But really, our educational system is messed up. Women are smart as men on average, but it's not as simple as getting a degree, you need a marketable degree and preferably in a non-saturated market. We're treating college like extended high school. Moar Test Taking!!!!!

I also read that even if the LHC did create a "stable" black hole that didn't immediately evaporate, that if it fell to the center of the Earth, it would take about 10,000 years before it came in contact with other matter to consume. The Earth would die of other reasons far before the pico-blackhole was able to do any real damage.

"During the past year, EPB Fiber Optics surpassed the 50,000-customer mark."

"Our customer service representatives and business sales team added thousands of customers to the fiber optic network, earning $80.7 million in revenue over the past fiscal year.[2013]"

They make $80mil/year in revenue, but they save $50mil/year because of the fiber. Even if they offered the 1Gb for $0/month, they'd still be nearly breaking even.

Ahh yes, the "you have it better than others, so you should take it in the ass and like it, because it's better than being dead" argument.

I can sue them once I'm paying for the service and not receiving it. I can't sue my grocery store for being out of stock.

My brother has an app on his smart phone that not only reports host fast you are moving, but if you're moving faster than some set speed, it puts the phone on silent. He longer gets bothered by his phone ringing or flashing him while driving.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...

Learning to program has little to do with learning a programming language. Programming is a thought process.

I highly enjoy C#, it allows me to write flexible yet concise code that is easy to read. Many languages give you one or the other.

There was /. on how much you exercise is less important than how often you exercise, when you have a desk job. People who got up and did mild exercise once every 1-2 hours saw no difference in circulation than not sitting, but sitting 4+ hours saw nearly no benefit from any amount of exercise. Or something like that.

Rule of thumb, lots of mini breaks.

VB.Net still uses enough English to make some things hard to remember. Concepts are easy to remember, specific words are not. Some concepts have multiple words.