This matches my experience each of the three times I've done phone interviews with Google. The first two were with the same cocky / condescending twat. All three quickly derailed into obsession over technical minutia unrelated to the job. Now that I've removed the first 15 years of experience and the year of my degree I should try again and see how differently it goes.

... Until two releases from now when Fedora's video drivers change and the display goes black instead of booting.

It's been a bunch of years, but my understanding is that this was/is true on the value-oriented lines much more than the "enterprise" ones. ISTR Precision vs Optiplex. I do recall having a pair of Optiplex units with goofy onboard NICs not supported by BSDi (or was it Solaris by then?) so I had to add in the DEC cards that were popular.

My OpenElec box runs off a 4GB USB flash drive and only uses a fraction of it. Since these things aren't useful for anything else, they provide more than enough.

"Limited Restructuring"

I think you mean meat and dairy, which waste far more water.

Has your sister recovered from the mÃÃse bite?

While asbestos removal may not be hard, there's an awful lot of it on a large ship. And it's far from the only concern -- PCB's are also very common, and no doubt lead and mercury are also present. Large numbers of the world's ships are chopped up on a stretch of beaches in India and Bangladesh ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... ) basically by near-slaves with hand torches. You can imagine how well that works out for the environment and the people; my understanding is that the steel often gets rolled into rebar. There are cleaner but smaller operations within the US; they are far more hassle and less lucrative. There's an informative show out there, maybe one of the Megafactories series, about this outfit: http://www.escomarine.us/ which I think very recently shut down.

Here they're often out in the rain as well. I was once told that it's most effective to support organizations that provide services, vs giving cash directly, so that's what I usually do, but there's one guy who sits with his dog in a parking lot island at a mall. I give him whatever change I have, figure it's for the dog. As for scamming, I dunno how prevalent that is. Many of the panhandlers I see here look to be a physical wreck and not living the good life. What *does* bug me though is when I see someone with a sign begging for food or work or shelter, yet they're smoking, which ain't cheap.

I mostly see them in front of grocery stores, and at the drive-through exit of at least one Charbux. I've never perceived one to be under any influence, or to be pushy or rude. I suspect the RC folks police them strictly.

Or here's an idea: pay your IT people a reasonable wage so you aren't stuck with the bottom of the barrel, so that they don't have to outsource anything more complex than wiping their butts.

Important context there, probably many of them were already making $70k or more. MSFT pays code monkeys right out of college $100k, which is one reason why housing around greater Seattle is so obscene.

Wow, where can you get childcare for only $1515/mo? I see more like $2000 usually.

Does that mean they don't recognize Wicca?

super-rich is very context-dependent. I hardly live an extravagant life, yet >$100k is breakeven at best, and I'm not even in Cali.