The main branch of the NYPL uses the same system, albeit more floors that aren't as tall, and human workers handle pick and place.

An original illustration here, sorry for the ugly url: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_PotguXM3PJk/TKh0YeRyQMI/AAAAAAAAF_c/WiOrMXEWdQc/s1600/nyplstacks.jpeg

"I am, or have as a significant other, a graduate student." ;)

... buys you a middle class -- and I don't mean upper middle class -- lifestyle; esp. if you've got dependents to support as well. You can pull that nyc income and live in places where it goes a lot further, but you'll be commuting an hour or more (sometimes much more) to do so. After taxes, 100k there is roughly 65-70k take home (estimating broadly). In a place where a completely boring, typical one bedroom apartment goes for 1500/mo (outer boroughs) to 3000/mo (manhattan), monthly transit and commuter rail passes can set you back another 300/mo combined, and electricity is 3x as expensive as it is in the interior states, and groceries average 2x as expensive, that doesn't go very far.

I worked there briefly years ago back when they were EVSX. EVSX was in turn founded by folks from the Austin branch of Exponential Technologies, which ironically was a company based around making fast processors for the Apple clone market of the 90s (for extra irony given Apple's years-later switch to intel cpus, exponential tech apparently worked both in PowerPC and x86, with Austin focusing on the x86 branch of development). In a sense, this acquisition is kind of like full circle for the company. I wish them all the best; they are an extremely bright and friendly group who were great to work with. I ended up leaving for a job paying slightly more with less commute, but ultimately I wish I'd stayed on as the people were better to work with at EVSX.

Two years seems to be the developer half-life in most shops. By that point if you're worse than average they've canned you, and if you're better than average your responsibilities have grown to the point that you're spending as much or more time dealing with cross-team organizational bullshit as you are doing what you actually love (writing code) and hence wanting to quit. :) The thing is, I think every gig has problems, and often they're the same tedious set of problems, but people jump in the hopes that maybe, maybe the grass will actually be greener THIS time. (After a decade or two of corporate culture, further, it's all too likely that the truly idiosyncratic individuals will have accumulated enough capital and enough disgust with the system that they give it all the finger and go run a bar just to pick one prominent example.)

The other direct motivator that comes to mind is money. All too many shops hire you at a rate that approximates more-or-less-if-you're-lucky Market Rate for your skills and so forth, then want to give you sub-10% raises for ever and ever thereafter. Ergo it's easier to ramp your salary in tune with your experience by jumping periodically. This is perhaps most prevalent in the first ten years of a programming career as there are big deltas at roughly two and five and seven-ten years of experience as you start to [potentially] hop up the org chart some from junior to regular to senior dev.

So in short I think that getting fed up with a given situation and taking steps to change it for (hopefully, maybe not, probably not... but hopefully) the better is both normal and healthy. Or are you of the opinion that backing the same crappy horse for years is the best way to go through life?

If only that headline used "Nuking" instead of "Using" Outlook from Orbit.

My company recently switched from a really screwball lotus notes install to msexchange and thereby screwed every unix and mac user -- which is to say, 95% of the technical staff. Some of that I can't blame MSFT for, we do have some real chimpanzees on our email team, but the experience does have me shaking my fist in Redmond's direction even more than usual of late.

A decent quality scientific calculator and enough training with it that they can start using to discover the joys of solving problems. I think I had my first solar powered scientific calc when I was about ten. A handful of years later in high school I moved up to a more complicated graphing model. I'm sad to say I don't have the original calculator but I still have the latter. It served me well through high school, college admissions exams, and then a bachelors degree in the sciences. Of course these days I write boring but comparatively lucrative line of business web apps, so the most complicated math I ever have reason to do can be done with gcalctool in simple mode. ;) I still feel a bit of a rush when I look at my old calc though; we had such times together. :D

I won't get into the emacs-vs-vi wars of TI/HP/whatever, but get them a solid useful tool that can be used for most any science endeavor and you'll have done them a favor, imho.

(And yeah this might not be appropriate for the 7 year old, but I'd wager the 9 year old is mature enough or on the cusp of it...)

I saw this earlier on another site which included a screen-cap, wherein there was a $20 Negative Balance Fee shown after the huge erroneous charge, so it would seem that it did trigger issues on the business logic level.

Not all uses of sex selection are for social reasons. For example, I am male and have an X-chromosomal genetic disorder that I'd very much like to avoid giving to any of my (as yet purely hypothetical) children. Ergo, for my putative offspring to be healthy [or at least avoid the disorder I've been afflicted with], they would have to be male as well. So it might be appropriate to look at things with a bit more of a nuanced view than "it's absolutely evil and should be totally banned."

starting to think "D" in DRM stands for "Doomed" and "Dickheaded" more than "Digital". Customers may on average be pretty fucking dumb, but even the truly dense will feel themselves getting screwed if you do it hard enough, and the content cartel just can't ever quite seem to figure out how far they can push things. If by some outlandish chance this moves from "patent application" to "products on shelves", I expect that it'll die on the vine just as badly as the movie industry's attempt at obnoxious tetherware (DivX) did ten years ago.

The idea that giving loans to THOSE PEOPLE (implicitly poor, black, and whatever other qualities our society is calling moral failings this week) is behind the collapse of the financial industry and had nothing whatsoever to do with the saintly finance industry's business practices itself is a meme that really needs to bite the dust. Was CRA part of the problem? Maybe, but there's no such thing as a single cause to a collective fuckup/fiscal meltdown of this magnitude. I'd argue that the repeal of Glass-Steagall is an even larger singular driver.

I'm sorry if it seems like I'm singling you out or jumping down your throat in particular, I'm just real tired of simplistic finger-pointing at the CRA. (I even vaguely recall seeing numbers that said CRA-driven loans were actually less likely than average to be in foreclosure, but it's been a good while and I can't remember where to dig up the particular citation.)

The last administration was interested in unilateral projection of policy and access to resources moreso than flag planting, an ideological and commercial empire more than one of borders. As regards oil, I'd argue that it was never about cheap oil (another common red herring in this discussion) as it was access to oil in light of ongoing demographic shifts in the southern Arabian peninsula. As for control over oil supplies, consider this: which was the first ministry occupied by Coalition forces in Baghdad during the 2003 invasion? Which company was given total operating rights on Iraqi oil fields in May of 2003 lasting until 2007?