Probably so, a lot of the 90's are kind of a blur now for reasons. Also, the company I was working for at the time was notoriously cheap with IT costs. They were also the only company I ever worked for that allowed smoking in the office. Around computers. That's smart. The two old guys who ran the joint both died of lung cancer a couple years after I stopped working there. So... yeah.

I had to punch an AWFUL lot of deer to progress, back in the day. That was before Trammel or any of EA's WoW-Style gear grind nonsense. I did manage to get a mage to GM mage/GM Scribe and was at different times exalted and notorious. I probably still have a couple of shots around somewhere of the ol' guy. Made bank selling filled spellbooks, recall scrolls and rune bags to people. I had runes to damn near everywhere. That was another thing that was pretty unique to UO -- you could make a rune to damn near anywhere. And despite this, the world still felt HUGE!

NASA was a great, even fantastic thing back when there was no commercial motivation to do research on space and powerful rockets. Back when there was little to no commercial launch market.

Now NASA is full of pork.. You cannot kill it because . . . pork. In every congressional district.

NASA is not and never has been efficient. At one time that was irrelevant because of the nature of what they did. Now is is more about letting bureaucrats CYA when something blows up. And to make sure money flows freely to as many congressional districts as possible. The traditional contractors are not designed to be efficient either, except at maximizing how much they can suck from the government teat.

One way NASA might end is that with lower and lower budgets NASA simply cannot do anything. Alternately, they might end because they get budgets big enough to actually do something, making the real inefficiency clear for all to see.

NASA must be held to the same safety standards that commercial providers are held to. Otherwise, a culture of evading or ignoring those safety standards will creep in.

The only role that NASA might have left is projects that require large investment to overcome a lack of commercial motives. For example, going to Mars. Maybe for operating a space station. Probably not for mining asteroids.

If they'd been a little less bitches, they could be like Dubai right now and dipping their balls in gold, regularly. Them and Iraq both. And yes, everyone in the world pretty much has been fucking with them for... well... ever, really. But there's a way to win against everyone in the world, and being stinky little bitches isn't it. But, you know, whatever makes them happy, I suppose.

The first computer I bought for myself was a Vector II graphics machine. It was an odd beast -- integrated computer/video, MFM 10 MB hard drive, some number of kilobytes of RAM, I forget exactly, and most oddly a dual processor machine. It had both an 8086 and a Z80 chip in it and could use either one or the other to run DOS (I want to say 2.0) or CP/M. Mine came installed with CP/M. This was in the early 90's, just before the 286 really started to catch on.

For my hardware class, I brought it in, took it apart and handed the chips around the class. At the end, I reassembled the whole thing and booted it back up. Fun little presentation. That old hardware could really stand up to a lot of abuse.

What the fuck are you popping up at the driver? Put current speed, RPMs, fuel level and maybe oil/water temperature along the bottom of the windshield so they can just see it without taking their eyes off the road and call it good. Maybe the entire problem is just really bad user interface design.

They were only able to do it because they already had an affordable, high quality krampfor on hand. The whole thing would have fallen apart if not for that.

You probably overlooked my nym before you clicked Reply. :-)

It seems unlikely that there are any gay nerds. Nerds are a fraction of the general population. Gay people are an even smaller fraction of the general population. This would make the existence gay nerds seem highly unlikely.

Similarly, the odds that in the vastness of space, an asteroid could just happen to strike our moon seems so incredibly remote that one could safely conclude that there are no craters on the moon.

is stupid enough to leave the health of its citizens up to the vagaries of the profit motive? How many assets does a a nation have that are more valuable than a healthy population?

when we're too cheapskate to maintain our existing infrastructure.

Cost of living and demand are high in my area right now. It's not uncommon to see manual test positions around here advertising for $45+ an hour. Contract software engineering positions start around $60 an hour and go up from there. And my salaried co-workers aren't much worse off, at least not before you factor in the overtime they're working. They get benefits, paid vacation and the company would likely throw them a couple months' salary if they get caught up in a layoff cycle. My rate factors in all the stuff I'm paying that they get and down time between contracts. 'Course, if I end up working a couple years on a decent contract, so much the better.

About 10 minutes after my porn collection is finally complete.

Leaning toward contract work, if I work an hour I get paid an hour. And it shows, with the production teams constantly being asked to come in and work weekends while I'm off skydiving. Of course, if I don't work an hour I don't get paid an hour, either. Which means if it's a particularly nice Friday I might just forgo the $600 and go skydiving anyway. It IS easy to get into a cycle of not taking real vacations as a contractor. Every so often you really DO need to get out of town, even if it's just for a long weekend.

Every once in a while some manager will try to discreetly broach the subject of fudging the books so I work longer one week, take some time off the next week and smooth it all out. To which I usually respond, loudly, with a beautifully crafted note of surprise in my voice, "You want me to FALSIFY MY TIMECARD?" They usually quickly deny it and scurry off to harass the salaried employees some more.

I'm quite wary of offers to come onboard as a FTE, as that usually means the company has a lot of overtime in the cards in the next two or three months, and a layoff cycle coming right after that. Fortunately their offers are usually so laughably bad that they're pretty easy to resist.

The HR process will grill you on C++ at a master level and yet somehow their entire production system is some Ruby abomination that has never seen the touch of a person with more than 5 years of experience in programming. They may need performance, but they're unwilling to commit to the changes required to get it. They may need a master C++ programmer, but they'll never use you to the full extent of your capabilities. And that doesn't really matter as long as they're willing to pay you like they are.