1. Where possible NEVER reveal experimental failures to anyone. Ever.
          Experimental failures are normal learning processes for developers that management nor marketing never understand.

It means we're now beholden to shareholders, a board of directors, the whims of Wall Street, and can be made or ruined with overreactions to any statements coming from any known associate.

Do these people really think when a trial goes to jury or even just judgement, that the jurors or judge is going to catch the "too cute by half" nature of their name and let them off?

Tech is now i phones, i pads, BlackBerry, touchscreens, etc. and it's getting easier to offload IT tasks to managers and individuals instead of having in house helpdesk employees in high numbers.

At least where I work, individuals are better at keeping their systems clean, avoiding the virii, worms, etc. than in the past. They can map their drives and printers themselves, and all in all are less of a pain than say five years ago.

Most of our corporate IT is actually cross functional, doing CAD and CNC programming as well as IT work in our engineering department, or data entry and database administration along with network administration and system installs.

IT has and always will be seen as overhead. Because it is.

I've had a few customers with trojans, from like 2009 and MS Sec. Essentials doesn't detect them with a quick scan. Only after a full scan did it see them.
These machines always had MSE running and up to date.

It's unfortunate that so many software companies write software such that it requires admin access or we could avoid so much of these infections.

That SOOO explains all my liberal democrat friends.

I'll have to tell them all to stop hiding their intelligence, the bullies are all gone.

Without the electoral system our current state of voting would require days or maybe weeks of tallying up all this garbage.

I can't for the life of me figure out why voting equipment and ballots etc. aren't a sanctioned standard equipment set.

If the labor statistics on unemployment are to be believed, and I'm rather sure we have worse unemployment than the labor statistics show, Cringley is correct in his assertions. I know so many slashdotters get all emotional about national borders being irrelevant in a perfect world, and fairness in employment across the world being a great thing in their logical minds, and I agree for the most part, logically at least, but as of now we are working in a system where we still have national borders. Central governments still DO take care of their populations currently, (some better than others) and there is no current world fixture in place to assure society functions properly across these borders. So within these known constraints we still must do right by our own nation's citizens currently first. Unfortunately we are not, and I would like to see foreign programs like this cut back and eliminated based upon employment statistics.

Get your generals out of the way at a community college or similar but be SURE the credits transfer to THE four year college you want to attend.

This will save you thousands of dollars and you end up getting your BA or BS from the school you wanted.

Think about marketing. Huge opportunities for growth positions and most marketing departments have a tight relationship with their corporate purse holders.

I've lived here all my life. The first thing you need to know about Minnesota is that it is the "State where nothing is allowed." as local radio jockey would say.

The second thing is at all levels a favorite thing to do here is crawl as far up your business as possible.

As an example; Governor Dayton actually came out after the state house and senate both passed bills to liberalize the use of small scale consumer fireworks and admitted that he was lobbied by the firemen lobby and he used their opinions and "feelings" and emotions to decide against the state voter constituency's legislation and vetoe'd the bill.
Now I'm not a huge fanboy for fireworks, couldn't care less, but this is a key example of the mentality of "mother knows best" and it runs sooo deep here.

This is also the state where the governor alone tried to unionize all private home daycare centers whether they wanted to be union or not, in a clear example of trying to force union membership rolls to grow as repayment for him winning the election. This would force these new members to pay dues, and to offset the cost, raise their rates.

Socialism has a history of "shedding" it's people to cut costs due to economic failures and "backwardness" of socialist/communist style governments.

Collectivizing agriculture creating a distribution nightmare, developing fake sciences for medicine and agriculture production, intentionally failing to adopt known ways to feed your people, industrialization of large regions of self sufficient rural communities etc. were just a few of the ways socialist countries ground their own populations into dust and bones when they needed to have fewer mouths to feed. It's unfortunate this history is not taught routinely for the scary reality it must have been for these people.

Getting stuff done was never in the design of the house or senate or the Presidency. Laws were supposed to be fought for with logic and majority viewpoints. While it is true that Presidents have acted as you say for ages, The The House was designed to be the people's voice and the Senate was designed to stop majority rule running over a portion of the electorate that needs a voice of it's own. The President's main functions after you remove the Madison Avenue style marketing tactics are still to appoint the judges of the Supreme Court and also to perform veto powers, as well as other obvious functions like national security, Commander In Chief, etc. But in the end, a veto pen does not lend itself well to "getting stuff done".

Get him something larger in scope than programming. Look into astrophysics or biology or botany sciences, or aeronautics, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, materials sciences, anything engineering related or high math or high tech, but not programming.

Think about promoting something where they seek interests and career lines that might work for themselves or create their own corporation.

If you want to shoot for an interest leading to most likely employment, get him something for marketing and business. Entrepreneurship as well.
I don't recommend these as careers for everyone, but there will be lots of need.

Alternatively, get him a book on how things are actually made, not how they say they are on How It's Made or Mythbusters.
Something with a lot of good photos of Injection molding, machining, forging, casting, metal injection molding, powdered metallurgy, 3D printing and Selective Laser Sintering, Fused Deposition Modeling, etc.

Anyone here ever run a milling machine? That's a subtractive prototyper.

Apparently they can jack straight into my mind and tell what I'm going to either program on my CNC, or turn handles to make on my manual lathe and mills?

The patent office needs a huge overhaul.

We'd be better off without it and take the position that speed to market of new innovations can keep development income going.

I predict an obvious but subtle castigation of lower courts for it getting there at all.

But when did we lose common sense? Can't a corporation think it's way out of a wet paper sack?
Clearly the solution for them would be to raise prices abroad.

This parallels drug importing I suppose as well. Same solution imho.

Oh wait...nobody abroad would pay that much for a book? Then maybe you're gouging the US market and as a judge I'd say you've made your profit here via gouging and abroad by what you were willing to sell for under no choice but your own and what the market will bear.

Tough Shiite.