Heck, the UAW might not even exist if the companies weren't such big pricks earlier in the last century.

Therein lies one problem with unions. At one time, long, long ago, they provided a valued and needed service. However, they're still here, only now they mainly work to perpetuate themselves.

Somebody think up something that includes the term "beleaguered".

Hypothermia can kill you even if you're not at 14K feet. There's a stage where you actually feel *warm*, like you're burning up. I've felt it. And while not as pronounced as the high/low you get from hypoxia, it can also leave you impaired to make wonderfully stupid decisions that can get you killed.

Sunday night + Something vaguely criticizing Microsoft == Slashdot Front Page

http://demo.opengoo.org/en_us/index.php

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Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/2.2.10 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.10 OpenSSL/0.9.8i DAV/2 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 Server at demo.opengoo.org Port 80

Scope-creep is a separate issue. I'm assuming that you've already established scope, which is a matter of specificity in the quote.

You did explicitly lay out what you will do, right? And that nothing further beyond what you did lay out is implied or can be inferred?

Maybe contracts should be on the comp. sci. curriculum.

Should I bill by the hour or provide a fixed quote on a per-project basis? What kind of assurances should I get from the client before I begin work? What is the best way to create accurate time estimates?

1. Maximize what you get from the client. Do hourly or fixed-quote, whichever is most appropriate. If you have the luxury of choosing only high-paying clients, well, nice to meetcha, Santa. How's the skiing in Hell?

2. Half up front. No exceptions.

3. Years of experience.

Had the federal government responded initially by cutting taxes and spending, lowering trade barriers and streamlining regulation, it probably would have been just a very bad recession.

Or they could have done nothing at all. One of the most helpful things for the business environment is stability. Knowing exactly what the government is going to do, because that's what it has always done, relieves a business from expending capital on adjusting to changing conditions.

Of course, no government would ever have done nothing, as the citizens wouldn't have stood for it. But, so long as we're spinning moonbeams...

I'm surprised anybody looks at the tags.

They're not good for anything, even if they were utterly correct.

I take that back--I'm sure they're good for something, but they're not at all useful. Meaningless featureitis for Slashcode.

... must go on... for great justice...

Which this particular patch qualifies as.

I think Yahoo has been slowly reinventing themselves in the past two years. To call them "the old web" is rather shortsighted.

Maybe they're not moving as quickly as many people would like, but that's a different institutional issue. Also, consider that Yahoo has a crapload of "old web" customers and users who in many cases are simply averse to change. You can't just one day drop them in a super slick Ajax interface that ties into nine different social sites and expect them to be thankful - because they just don't care about that sort of thing. Microsoft tried that and it didn't work.

No, and that's obviously Microsoft's fault.

Remember Blaster, which had a full 40 days or something like that before the exploit was seen in the wild. 10 days is obviously not enough lead time. I personally think we should all be given at least 6 months warning for each vulnerability. Then the attack success rate would plummet to 20% from the 70% it seems to be at these days.

One year would be even better. 365 glorious days to decide whether or not to patch! That would be great.

Having access to the technology is a pretty important thing, IMO. This isn't 1980 when personal computers were a rarity. Being computer illiterate is almost as bad as being actually illiterate.

There are also several things that computers can do that even good teachers cannot do. Computer-guided instruction allows the student to go at their own pace, rather than be held behind or left behind. You don't want to lose either of these groups. Students who fall behind tend to drop out, and bored students are, if anything even worse. Computer-guided instruction may also allow for a student to wander off the beaten track to follow a particular interest. Instead of just studying when Einstein developed his theory of relativity, the student can follow the theory itself.

We broke up school into discreet subjects because that's a good method for one-to-many instruction. But learning is rarely so segmented. A few hours of clicking through Wikipedia is often better than a couple of weeks of ordinary classroom instruction.

With a well-designed computer-aided library of knowledge you could cram 50 kids into a room with one well-rounded and competent teacher without too much trouble. Going this route would radically change the way people think about education. It would, I believe, even be cheaper than our current warehouse-style, time-clocked factory schooling methods. But it would anger the teachers' unions, the textbook publishers, the thousands of people employed to service the status quo, and most of all politicians who like being in control of piles of money.