I've read a hundred posts, and have not yet seen this angle yet. But I think that the term "IT Guy" can be used in a derogatory sense only when the employees refer to people in other departments with more formal titles or using their names. So if referring to Jack as an Accountant or Jane as a Account Executive is the norm, and yet they refer to you as "IT guy" they are degrading you relative to others in the organization, who may have far less impressive credentials. If everyone is "Accounting" or "Sales" or "IT" then it is probably nothing to get worked up about. One other thing to consider as well. Some companies consider IT as a business driver or differentiator, and others see it as a cost of doing business. Companies that have a strategic use for IT are going to have a natural respect for IT professionals, but companies that need IT just to re-image laptops will treat you as replaceable and if you are nerdy, they will try to pick on you like they did in high school -- just more discreetly.

I agree, science is not about instant gratification but science has to start at some point. LHC project started before:2004 (this was a date i found where parts were shipped, had a hard time finding an actual start date). LHC project was finished the build, and went live: Sept 2008 (first live fire). The LHC project has not started a scientific study as of November 2009. So how much patience do we need to start experimentation, let alone completing it, publishing the raw findings, analyzing the raw findings, and the coming out with some results?

To AC about my first post and reading it - the regime is 3 raw eggs daily, 2 hours of gym daily, 1 hour of sex daily, and reading the article hours before it was posted to /. and coincidentally going to /. just as the article posted :)

Homer didn't have to invest thousands or even millions of dollars in special effects or recording studios in order to "write" the Odyssey and Shakespeare wasn't worried about people showing up to his plays with video cameras. Honestly, I don't understand how pirates say artists and the entertainment industry just "doesn't get" how technology has changed the world and then use defenses like that.

It's simple, there's stealing a good or service, and there's paying for it. Pirating is stealing. People need to just be honest: They're stealing because technology makes it easy and safe.

Actually if you read TFA, the long-pondered question of why humans only use 1-15% of their brain is largely a matter of power consumption, and the reason for the abundance of dormant neurons is for greater potential diversity of thought.

"While accounting for just 2 percent of our body weight, the human brain devours 20 percent of the calories that we eat."

"The brain achieves optimal energy efficiency by firing no more than 1 to 15 percent—and often just 1 percent—of its neurons at a time."

That seems to indicate that a human brain would burn more calories than the rest of the body if it were "always on".

Being a hypoglycemia sufferer, I can attest to the severe limitations of brain activity when deprived of sugar. Before being diagnosed I underwent tunnel vision and black-outs, not to mention the typical mood swings, shakiness, cold sensations, etc.

Never has my nickname been more appropriate...

that these stereotypes of behavior are aspects of everyone's personality, including yours

i would have hoped that people would have realized thinking about the world in this cliquish way went out of fashion in high school. simply because you realized in high school (or should have realized) that people aren't cartoonish cardboard cut-outs of one dimensional behavior

show me someone who is supposedly dead center for being, say, the "sociopath", and i'll show you their empathetic qualities. now also show me someone who is supposedly far removed from being the "sociopath" and i'll show you the sociopathic side to their personality

it makes for good television, but real people are a lot more complex than this derivative reductionist thinking that sells people short. its entertaining, but in real life, its brutalizing to your social interaction

thinking about people this way only hurts you, in the end, by hobbling you with a poor model of human thinking and interaction. such that you reduce the richness of your own social experience up front before you even have a chance, because your mentality has overly simplified the people around you. you sell them short, and in turn, you only wind up selling yourself short

in other words, you've become the source of the problem: i would call a person who uses these stereotypes as a way of thinking about people around them the only truly one-dimensional stereotype that has a ring of truth: "the feckless tool"

Also - data centers do move. I know, been through a couple myself. Make sure the movers are bonded, check references for the movers, and insure both the equipment and costs to recover lost data.

One move was government systems. One of the horror stories I heard back when checking with other state agencies was that in one case movers dropped an entire rack of servers, destroying all.

Our moving company un-racked every server, then wrapped in padding and blanket and placed in a stable rolling cart. Only 3 servers per cart.

Move went off without a hitch. However the facility we moved into was still under construction and we had a brand new fully populated HP4108 switch that got fried because the electricians shorted the power supply while running CATV lines. Apparently a piece of copper fell in and the electrician heard a snap and we noticed our network going dark.

Luckily I could get some spare switches from another state agency. And the building owner was good, he paid the $1,500 plus $150 in shipping charges to get us a new power supply for the HP switch the next day. We also chipped in $1,500 to get the redundant power supply.

Disaster recovery is clutch. We had a web server crash hard that didn't have solid backups or documentation. So we put policies in place to document and backup everything. Ended up using an rsnapshot server for the purpose and that made life so easy.

i hear what you're saying. don't take people's money off them and let them spend it or invest it as they see fit.

What do you think everyone would have bought with that money? I think it is $6.8*10^11/350*10^6 americans is $1,900 per american.

not an insignificant amount of money! a months rent, your books for a year at school, a shitty car...or I suppose investment in a company which may or may not be involved in providing infrastructure, health care, whatever.

I like the idea of small government where ever possible, but there must be some things that only governments have the resources for and can assume the risk.

I think the main problem is not just that top talent is no longer going into science and engineering, but that poorer talent is entering. Every university you can think of now has a program where you can graduate with a bachelors in science. It used to be that top schools were the only ones producing anyone who can reasonably call themselves scientists, but now everyone is doing it. It's even worse for engineering. Here in Canada we have very strict regulations on the certification of our engineers to make sure that they all have the same basic knowledge, but I know people who went into engineering programs that had required entrance averages a full 20% lower than mine! I wouldn't trust them to engineer a toaster, but they're in fields with a lot more responsibility, like aerospace for example. And that's /with/ our strict regulations, I know places in the U.S. have lower standards and the people who graduate from those programs will one day call themselves engineers.

Like the fact that an acceptance of an offer need only be sent, not necessarily recieved, to make the contract binding. I.e. as soon as the acceptor mails off the acceptance the contract has been accepted and the offerer is bound by it.

In theory, yes, but in real life the "mailbox rule" is usually contracted around--the offering party will expressly state the method in which the offer can be accepted.

Except that 10% of nurses are now male, rising every year. On top of that 20% of current nursing students are male, again, rising every year.

Is it really so hard to believe that more men find electrical engineering interesting and more women find psychology interesting? Do we really have to be the same to be equal? I hope not, that would be pretty boring.

...Up the water spout,
Down came the rain and washed the spider out.
Out came the sun, and dried up all the rain,
Wave did the spider to the surprised proctologist,
And the itsy bitsy spider went up the spout again.

Headhunters will change and brand your resume! It's happened to me many times. The also will demand a Word formatted resume -- which is ironic for a web developer position!

If Android phones don't step up to the plate app-wise, AND touch-wise, accelerometer-wise, GPS-wise, compass-wise, iTunes-wise... then you're just going to have a lot of companies betting on the wrong horse.

But other handset manufacturers can't make iphones. They have to make phones with an OS that somebody is willing to licence to them. In itself, this guarantees that plenty of non-Apple phones will be manufactured and sold. Manufacturers have no choice but to compete.

It's just like how Mac can't kill the PC platform. Thousands of companies make PCs. One company makes Macs. If you want to build computers, they have to be PCs.

Glossy v. Matte is not a definitive advantage either way, IMO.

Glossy has some very interesting advantages offsetting the reflection problem. Reduced glare for one, which lets glossy screens have darker blacks. They also are easier to clean, although they are quicker to show the need.

I have a Macbook and an old Toshiba with a matte screen, and the screen on the macbook is much more useful when, say, outdoors as long as I don't have the sun directly at my back and I don't wear a bright shirt.

If I were looking at a new notebook, I wouldn't rule one out off the bat just because of the screen. They simply require different habits and have different advantages. For me, the change was not onerous, so I would definitely recommend actually trying out the two screen types for a little while first. That goes for Macs or PCs with glossy screens.

The ultimate gateway "drug" is prohibition. The more you ban something, the more some people are interested in try it. That is when the real danger occurs. Then when they find out something, such as pot, isn't as bad as it was made to be (again reference the movie Refer Madness), the more they are willing to try other things. That is why simple drugs, such as pot, can lead to bad things such as meth or coke, but it is because of the outrageous claims and prohibition. If society is going to speak of the psychology of gateway drugs, they need to look at the whole picture, instead of villainizing something that is probably safer to use than alcohol.