Evil as a touch-screen app, of course.

I find it hard to believe that there was racism intended in any way, shape, or form. It is unfortunate that this took place but Google certainly took care of the problem in short order, as is right.

There are too many of the LBTO (looking to be offended) crowd these days. Come on, there are plenty of real problems with racism, there's no need to label inadvertent and unintentional things.

Learning to delegate is one of many necessary skills, but the biggest thing a new manager has to learn that being a manager is not about YOU, it's about your staff. Your job is to do what it takes to enable them to get their jobs done, to empower them, to remove roadblocks, and to make sure things work for them.

The minute you forget this, you're done, because as a manager you are NOTHING without your staff. They're the ones who are going to make you look good or look bad.

Yes, managers set direction, make policy, make decisions, all the stuff you hear about, but if they ignore the needs of the staff while doing so, they fail as managers.

I was a manager for a good part of my career (after having been a technical person). I am glad I had good mentorship and learned what managing was really all about, which is empowering people to do their jobs.

Side note: I was once myself mentoring a new manager, who said, "Well, what if I'm having a bad day?" My response: "You're the manager. You don't get to have bad days. Your staff needs you doing things for them every moment of every day, and YOU are not the one who's important."

So if you're a programmer (or other technical person) aspiring to be a manager, fine, but keep in mind that the minute you become the manager, your role changes drastically, and if you're into satisfying your own needs, think twice about taking on a management job.

You have an interesting viewpoint. I (too?) live in Hawai`i and I can agree with some of it.

But one thing often said here by those in favor of continuing with the TMT is that the ancient Hawaiians themselves, as master celestial navigators, would have readily embraced something that advanced scientific knowledge. Is the idea of the TMT out of line with Hawaiian spiritual practice? As I understand it, not at all.

There are already about a dozen telescopes atop the mountain. Will one more desecrate the `aina (land) so much more? I'm not qualified to answer that, but it's hard to believe that it's such a make-or-break issue.

Fundamentally, it isn't the telescope or the `aina or spiritual practices that make up the issue. Instead, it seem that it's about an indigenous people resenting the very real slights and persecutions of the past and projecting them into the present; it's also about the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. But in today's Hawai`i, it is most certainly not the haole (general meaning today of Caucasian, though that's not really what the word means) who rules and runs the show.

Really, that's the answer to all of this, isn't it? Competence? Aren't many of these fads intended to be a substitute for basic coding competence, which, sadly, I've found to be rarer than we might wish?

And ultimately, the fads fail, because in order to produce a good product, competence can't be eliminated no matter what. But the big downside is that when truly competent staff are forced to get bogged down in all the management dictated faddish-ness, they can't produce and look nearly as bad as everyone else.

This seems like another "fad of the day" approach.

All these new "methods" strike me as coming either from 1) managers or "experts" with little to no actual experience at the keyboard writing actual code, or 2) university professors and theorists whose code is all written by slave labor in the form of grad students.

Do you have any backup for this statement?

The only possible thing I can think of is that COTS can potentially have greater control over a closed ecosystem. But even COTS today often relies on various third-party libraries.

HR guy: "We need people who are 22 years old with an M.Sc. and 20 years of specific experience, and we can't find any."

C-level exec: "See, I told you we can't find qualified domestic hires and we need to ramp up the H-1B visas."

Had something like this happen more than once. I'm at home, I use my credit card. Wife is 3,500 miles away, uses hers (same account). Discover blocks the card because they have trouble figuring out that two different people can be in two different places at the same time. The cards (on the same account) have different numbers in the final digits to distinguish them, even.

Thank you for your well-thought-out and courteous reply.

If you think it's politically correct to question climate change models (the converse of my assertion), try it and see what happens.

.... and being downmodded to 'troll' proves my assertion.

Excuse me, it is politically incorrect to doubt the climate change models.

How is this going to work, though? Won't Windows 10 require a footprint of something like a million gigabytes of RAM, a couple petabytes of disk space, and a 32-core processor just in order to boot up and open Notepad?[1]

[1] All stated figures are approximate.

Wall Street investment bankers have moved well beyond simple burglary.

A pity. AOL had a lot of entertainment value, even if it wasn't quite the kind AOL intended.