This. Maybe a decade ago I answered a few actual polls, and felt taken advantage of. The questions went on and on. Then I got some sales "polls" and quickly decided to never answer that crap again. I've also gotten so many calls where all I get is a few seconds of silence and then *click*. I've gotten to the point where I have to call back some folks I too reflexively hung up on who were legit.

On the whole I wish I had killed the land-line a while ago.

Easier said than done.

I've got a 2 year old, and it is frustrating to buy things like backpacks and clothing. It is pretty common that ALL the girl versions of things are covered in flowers and ladybugs while being made out of various pinks and pastel colored fabrics. Boys stuff is ALL dinosaurs, monster trucks, and pirate ships on red, blue, or black backgrounds. It is pretty common to be unable to find anything I would call gender neutral at all.

I am sure a lot of this is a reinforcing cycle, as gender neutral items won't sell as well, thus reinforcing the stereotypical choices for yet another generation.

Yep. Capture the zero, and with some proper insight you set it to some appropriate non-zero approximation of zero like 1e-6 or 1e-15. The choice usually reflects knowledge of the situation at hand. But often I'd rather a program stop and tell me something bad has happened rather than just patching around it and carrying on.

Usually it just lets the magic smoke out. A divide by zero is usually called a short circuit and makes a lot of heat for a short period of time, after that you get the smell of the magic smoke.

Yes, they do. It is called L'hopital's rule. It is one of my favorite rules out there from Calculus.

In short it states the for 0/0 or ininfity/infinity the result is equal to the derivitive of the number over the derivitive of the denominator. Still get 0/0? L'hopital it again.

So something that acts like x/x near zero comes out as 1/1=1 (oversimplification), or if it acts like x/x at infinity is is 1/1=1.

Look it up, it is a wonderful little tool in your mathematical quiver.

If you get a human, they are just trying to get paid to do a job. They know it is a crap job, and there is no need to be abusive or profane.

Just say "No thank you" and hang up.

If you want to take the time to throw sand in the gears, tell them you are REALLY interested in their product, but you left something on the stove, and to stay on the line. Come back and hangup in 10 minutes. It will slow down their system enough to lower profitability without being demeaning to another human who is just doing their crappy job.

No exceptions.

The really important stuff should be kept among confidants, and discussed as little as is necessary.

Important records can still be kept in hard copy if you really need to write stuff down.

Assume everything you say may be taken out of context and without including your sarcastic tone.

It is about as awful of a job as I can imagine. There have been some awful stories of having a nice night vision view of resulting body parts, and not quite dead targets. Similarly there have been tails of "dogs" that look like a small humans coming into view just after firing, only to have you commander insist it was just a "dog". Try going home feeling proud and patriotic after being that guy.

The aviation industry is kind of a Ponzi scheme. New pilots become instructors as soon as they can for barely minimum wage just so they can rack up flight hours on someone else's dime. Similarly they will have to pay to get multi-engine trained, then will turn around and work for nothing just to rack up enough multi-engine hours at some backwater commuter service as soon as they are able. Soon you see the "opportunity" to fly for a regional and get to rack up hours on a real plane. Making it big at a real airline is the light at the end of the tunnel, but countless others drop out due to overwhelming debt and impoverishment.

It takes thousands and thousands of flight hours to even be considered as a pilot for any airline you have actually heard of, and those hours would cost hundreds or even thousand per hour if you bought them yourself. So you offer up your labor for almost free just to get the flight hours on each successive rung of the ladder.

A lot of this hit the fan about 10 years ago when a crash was partially blamed on the pilot working two jobs, being overtired and overstressed, and then crashing with a load of passengers. People were shocked at an airline pilot would have trouble feeding himself on just one job. I don't think much has changed since then.

It depends, not all of it is down in a manhole. Much of it is retrofitted into neighborhoods using a Ditch Witch that augers under roadways and sidewalks. My neighborhood has a bunch of circular patches from when Verizon put in FIOS.

At work there are a bunch of warning signs in the grass next to the sidewalks telling you in bold letters where the fiber is buried going to the Comcast building.

It won't easily tell you where all the fiber is, or necessarily where the really important stuff is, but all the "Call before you dig" signs are a pretty decent trail of bread crumbs to find plenty of targets if that is your schtick.

My guess is that some cranky local that got booted out of their rent controlled apartment when a rich techie bought the whole building read the Monkey Wrench Gang and decided that it made some decent sense.

They are there to fund themselves, usually by writing grants and getting their indentured grad students to do the work.

A lot of the issue boils down to a gap between college and "career" for the first 2-3 years after college. Employers know that hiring a guy with a physics degree to do an engineering or programming job job will be a money loser for at least a couple years, even if they are pretty darn sure he'll come up to speed and be a major contributor. It is safer to either hire someone who is already trained (and grill them about their possible lack of loyalty), or to get someone with just the right set of skills to minimize the training. After a new guy/gal has some experience there is no assurance that they will stick around. Often you can't get a decent raise, no matter how well you are performing, without jumping ship to another company (a dose of bureaucratic stupidity worth ranting about all by itself).

At-will employment has made this entry level dance crappy for both sides. Everyone knows that they can be let go at any time with nothing guaranteed beyond a cashout of their meager vacation accrual. Employers know that if they sink a large amount into an employee to bring them up on a new or in-demand skill it increases the likelihood that the person can get headhunted away. Stock options and other incentives try to patch this broken relationship by putting some carrots out there, but the young guys usually get very few of those until after they have proven themselves (and a lot of companies has dispensed with them for peons entirely). Other companies know they most incentive plans are crappy and they matching the loss with a hiring bonus and/or sign-on options and still be cheaper and easier than training one of their own (and outsiders are smarter, obviously, than the whiners already sucking at the payroll teat).

It is all pretty perverse. I work in the states for a foreign company, and having a counterpart doing the same job with a very different employment setup regularly makes me question the US system. My counterpart is part of a union, has many more holidays, more vacation, has his hours strictly limited, is not allowed to work at all from home, and cannot be easily laid off (and his college was tuition free).

Somehow EULA's need to get reigned in.

Perhaps we need to fight fire with fire. Maybe start slipping a CEO's first born clauses into open source software, or other ridiculous things so that a few major corporations can find themselves signed up to make major donations to charity after their employees clicked through the latest update.

We are supposedly a country of rights and laws, but we have run out of times and places where those rights have not be superseded by some arbitration clause, or some automatic opt-in BS.

The FMEA's I was party to were basically to give cover. "We had an FMEA, and it still managed to fail." When usually it was actually managed into failure despite engineers asking for more time and less feature creep, and specification uncertainty.

Sounds more like a socialist paradise you are describing.

A Libertarian one would be a bunch of toll roads where the operators can make bids based one money, speed, and number of potholes for the automated system to heuristically choose between to optimize your travel experience.