Can anyone find out if he received any recent campaign contributions and from whom? All I could find was for 2008.

Thank you, again, for pointing out why RIM is out of touch. At work, the big push from the user base is to use their consumer iPhone/Android to connect to the corporate network. You might not have it, but there is a very big, very lucrative customer base that wants exactly that -- to use their device for fun & work. The CIO's office gave a presentation about the challenges they face as the user base wants to dump the Blackberries and use their iPhones instead.

The mobile market is not like you; you are a niche (and can be catered to quite profitably). But you can't be a giant and a niche player. RIM has to chose.

Everybody knows it, head hunters know it, employers know it, so why do they carry on asking those "skills"?

Because as Marti Olsen points out, the majority of people are extroverts, and assume anyone who is not like them is defective. So extroverts love brainstorming, group think and other social work environments, so they think everyone should enjoy it and demand it in others.

The right answer is, as other people have said on this thread, balance. Sometimes we should work together, but also sometimes we should leave each other the f--- alone.

But because extroverts tend to be disconnected from facts and experience, they instead remember when they were happiest which was brainstorming sessions or other team activities. Thus they demand it.

To be fair, that's only about 30% of the hiring managers out there. The other 70% actually want people with political skills. The ability to negotiate with people they disagree with, to get people to go along with an idea, to contribute to the group when required instead of being a lone wolf causing problems or sniping. Introverts make excellent politicians in this regard--usually the Karl Rove backroom operator or chief-of-staff. But it's somehow off-putting to state: "Don't be an obstinate asshole who has to get his way and bullies others to achieve his goals -- yes, that means not you, John Bolton." on the job posting.

So just look at "work well with others" and "enjoy team work" to mean you're not a douchebag or a dickhead. It doesn't necessarily mean you are a people person.

[Channeling Jeff Goldblum]

"No, I'm, I'm simply saying that life, uh... finds a way. "

He wasn't. >_<;

Pfft! They'll just wire up some servos, an arduino and some hobby rocket motors, and it's all good. :-)

The salts used in these reactors are (according to the Wikipedia article):

MSRs can be safer than ordinary light water reactors. Molten salts trap fission products chemically, and react slowly or not at all in air. Also, the fuel salt does not burn in air or water.

As I understand it, they are using more stable fluoride salts like uranium tetraflouride, which is still potentially reactive with water, but much more slowly and is quite manageable, so I hear.

Although, I do admit to having drunk the Kool-Aid on MSR's, so I hope someone more knowledgeable in the chemistry comes along to correct me if my faith is misplaced. :-)

There are newer, better designs like pebble bed, or molten-salt reactors which, when it fails, fails by shutting itself down and locking the radioactive materials in the core. I see some people talking about the thorium cycle reactors above too.

PWR can be safe, but frankly, there are far more effecient, potentially more cost effective and definitely safer designs out there. We have to stop using 1960 light-water reactor designs meant for nuclear submarines.

That's a BINGO!

For the last two years, we've been dutifully reporting the work we do in--at first--one then two separate systems showing that we were, in fact, operating the LoB's business. Still no effect on the higher ups--they didn't even look at the reports. They just saw a big number and thought, "Geez! We should cut costs! I'm sure we can get cheaper labour and that will solve the problem."

Yes, I am trying to escape this asylum. Thank you for asking. :-)

Where I work, us, the IT teams that program and support the applications, often have to tell the employees how the business works. So many people retired in the 2000-2010 that a huge chunk of institutional memory walked out the door. The new folks doing the jobs often don't know how to handle the Once Every Five year situation, etc. I know the company keeps buying these Knowledge Sharing portals, but it seems more like oral history is the primary knowledge transfer.

They also terrorized Loyalists, which is why most of them fled to Canada.

Indentation as syntax.

I thought you needed to license the protocols in order to use it. Has the EU changed it's mind and made it a proper public infrastructure?

I've been in corporate IT for over 10 years now.

The corporate standard version for Crystal Reports was so old, the version wasn't even listed on their website.

They were creating classic ASP (not .Net) applications as recently as 2005.

The most recently approved version of Visual Studio is... 2005.

There are still active VB6 programmers in the company.

Most of my department uses VSS 5 (yes 5, not 6).

The main corporate Java web app servers were Java 1.4 until last year.

On the other hand, if you come work for my sub-group, we've recently decided to screw corporate standards. We use mercurial, continuous integration with Hudson, Glassfish, latest version of Eclipse IDE, Java 6 and jQuery. None of this is corporate "approved", but we get high marks from our users! ;-)

At my work, the IT department has crippled Outlook e-mail searching because their poor, massively underpowered Exchange server kept crashing under the load. Then, because the XP version of Windows desktop search was slowing boot up times, they crippled that too. Oh yeah, we're not allowed to run any other searching system.

When I search for stuff in GMail, I find it. I rarely use labels as anything other than marking stuff I can safely delete. In Outlook, because of the crippled search, I put things into folders to help Outlook focus its search.