That's why connections are so important. Completely skip HR and go straight to management, you know, the people that actually put in the hiring requisition.

At my current job I knew several people that worked in the company. They talked to their manager, passed along my resume (no HR required) and the manager arranged for an interview with me. The interview went well and the manager told HR to hire me. If I went through HR I never would have got the job. I could tell HR wasn't even too thrilled with me when they did my orientation. F*ck 'em.

Speaking of HR... Today if we want to hire someone we pretty much have to go out and do it ourselves. HR barely even attends to the needs of the currently employed (question about your 401k? vacation policies? medical insurance coverage? -- we'll get back to you on that), I'm not sure if they even have the ability to interview potential new-hires.

I'm in an urban area of Iowa and I pay the following:

Summer tiers 1-3: ~0.10/kWh (the exact same rate for all 3 tiers)
Winter tier 1: ~0.087/kWh
Winter tier 2: ~0.067/kWh (yes, tier 2 is cheaper than tier 1)
Winter tier 3: ? (I never use that much electricity in the winter - gas heat)

However, when you factor in all of the other charges, on my last bill (all in the winter tiers) my cost worked out to be around 0.14/kWh.

I use over twice as much electricity in the summer as I do in the winter (I like my air-conditioning). Plus I live in a very energy inefficient home. That is something I need to work on over the next year. I still have single-pane windows in several rooms and no insulation in the walls and not enough insulation in the attic. I need to rewire my entire house first though before I fill the walls up with cellulose. This is the year I do it! (tm)

I worked at a small (~120 employees) engineering company in the Midwest. Our building was in a new industrial park on the outskirts of a small metropolitan area. I can't remember the exact date this happened but it would have been near 2000.

Apparently someone from California (well, that is where the call came from) was hacking PBXs and he got into ours (which had no security in place -- no, I wasn't IT). Instead of milking it for free calls he (I'm assuming a male) decided to call in a prank office shooting. He called 911 from our system and told the dispatcher that someone or some group were in the building shooting people. He even played clips of screaming and gunshots in the background.

Needless to say, the entire police force showed up to our industrial park. One officer was in such a hurry that his "brakes went out" when he tried to corner and instead ended up in the glass-enclosed display area of a nearby home remodeling outfit.

The police observed the building for a while (we had a large, open 2 story glassed-in reception area) and noticed that everything seemed normal. The sent an officer up in full swat gear to the door and the receptionist was quite surprised to see him. Eventually, they figured out that there were no shooters and that someone outside of the building had made the call.

Of course, I was told all of this after the fact as I was in my cubicle with headphones on and didn't know any of this had happened.

Not sure if they ever caught the people responsible but it is a good story.

..are living in some sort of F'ing fantasy land!

What I wouldn't have given to have my parents let an Atari 2600, an NES, or an Apple II babysit me. No, instead I had go outside and do chores, do dishes, clean my room, clean everyone else's room, do my homework, finish eating my food, monitor the reactor core, etc. Seriously, In the summer I had to go to bed when it was still light outside (and no, I didn't live in Alaska). Do kids even have bedtimes anymore?

Oh to be left alone by my legal guardians to sit and veg in front of an electronic device... We are chastising these parents?! These parents are heroes!

Well, not much. This is primarily going to hurt German retailers which is why you probably will not see an outright ban on the sale of iPhones and iPods. If you don't think people will be driving to, riding to, flying to, or ordering from other countries to get their Apple gadgets, think again. Apple products draw a lot of water and it's something people are buying regardless of the relatively poor state of the western economy.

I am sure he meant that he tried to build a computer and it came out looking like something that does not resemble a computer. Instead of saying, "something that does not resemble a computer," he said, "skateboard." In other words, he was intimating that he sucked at it.

I really liked, but never owned, the RX-7. I thought I'd get an RX-8 when they were announced. Call me shallow but I just didn't like the look of the car. I really don't like the protruding front fenders. Actually, I really don't like the whole front end. From an aesthetic point of view I prefer the RX-7 (3rd gen) over the RX-8 but to each his own.

I can't wait until Rev. Phelps dies. Hopefully his funeral will be the party all others will eventually be judged by. I hope it's like Mardi Gras, the NYC gay pride march and burning man rolled into one. I've already got vacation and airfare set aside for it.

And before you say that Jobs contributed more than any individual one of them, let me ask: do you really even know how many of his contributions were truly his, and not his underlings'?

Doesn't matter. Being a great leader or CEO isn't about coming up with great ideas, it's about recognizing them.

I can't trust the code that I did totally create myself, either.

When was the last time any of us totally created code? I've been coding to various operating system APIs for a long, long time. Even back in the DOS days I made quite a few DOS and BIOS calls. We use(d) lots of 3rd party libraries for various things. Not to mention the libraries that come with your compiler/IDE.

I'm pretty sure I've never totally created any runtime code. Maybe some useless crap I did back in an assembler class would count?

I did have a radio-shack 8-bit processor kit when I was a kid though. That was all machine language (there was no ROM or non-volatile storage). However, I still had to trust that the opcodes did what they were supposed to do. Intel (and others) have shown us you can't even count on that all of the time.

No, licensed engineers just cover their asses better.

Or do you think the engineer should be held liable when someone parks a 30 ton vehicle on a bridge rated for 10 tons and the bridge fails? Well, then why should a software developer be held liable when the software asks you to enter your name and, instead, you feed it data which causes a buffer overrun which allows you to root the database server and steal everyone's credit card numbers? If you would have just entered your name correctly that never would have happened. A clear case of misuse if I ever saw one.

I think software developers should be liable but the liabilities need to be defined first. And if someone hacks the software outside of the scope of the security standards and practices that have been set by the government, put in place correctly by the developer and verified by the assigned regulatory bodies then there is no liability if something goes wrong.

Meanwhile the cost and time required to develop software will skyrocket. If you need any evidence of that, just look at how much time and money it takes to build a bridge these days.

Yes, and if your VPN has to terminate your account (because of DMCA violations, for instance) you still have your ISP's broadband account. In places where you have no other options for broadband, this is an important consideration.

Obviously if you are committing serious crimes or you torrent something and your name/IP gets turned over to the MPAA (by the VPN or your ISP) you can still (easily) be found and prosecuted, but for a majority of cases it just means you have to hunt for a new VPN instead of a new ISP.

If you are 45+, been coding all of your professional life and you don't have a personal network of individuals that you have worked with before who would be willing and able to help you get a job at their company, then maybe the universe is trying to tell you something.

Don't get me wrong. Being older and looking for a CS job is something I don't look forward to (I've never been unemployed -- yet). I'm 37 and the kicker is that I also have no degree. How many companies are going to consider me when I'm 45+? How many would consider me today if I were 25? Very, very few, except for the ones that employ (or have employed) individuals who I have worked with in the past that would be willing to vouch for me, push my resume under their manager's doors and stake their reputations on my abilities.

A new pizza delivery paradigm?

1) Customer places order.
2) Dominos HQ checks current moon position relative to the customers address and local weather conditions. A launch window is calculated.
3) Pizza is assembled, uncooked, and prepared for launch.
4) Pizza is launched on a trajectory to arrive at your home within 8 to 12 hours, only slightly longer than that of terrestrial delivery.
5) Pizza is baked during re-entry (only extra-crispy orders, please).
6) Pizza arrives at customer's location (+/- 1 km) and, for once, it's still warm when delivered.

The target market is the average dumb schmuck.

Funny, that's what your auto mechanic thinks about you.