It's not hard to bypass the idiots in HR. Recruiters often deal directly with the hiring manager because that manager is sick of dealing with the idiots in HR. But then you have to deal with idiot recruiters. (And no, not all recruiters are idiots but it's the 95% of them that ruin it for the rest). To connect with recruiters you need to get your resume on job websites. They'll contact you, mostly for jobs you don't have any interest in or capability to do. But you may get a lead there.

A better tactic to get back in is networking. Old contacts may know of places that are hiring. Former students may be able to help as well. Even friends that aren't in the industry may know someone who is.

But the biggest hurdle will be lack of experience. Doing some relatively recent things like Java and Android development will certainly help but don't expect a senior position or higher right out of the gate. There's a lot of young and hungry engineers out there competing for jobs and they probably have more recent/relevant experience over someone who's been out of the game for a while and they'll take a junior position for less pay. Competition may require starting over at nearly the beginning.

Eh, I have plenty of karma already. I'm not worried about getting voted up.

I use Firefox, which probably isn't the best. But NoScript and Ad Block Plus make a huge difference. It's amazing how many websites use scripts from Twitter, Facebook, and google-analytics.

That's all I need. A browser that gives away all of my personal information so that advertising creeps can push sell a lot of crap on top of the web pages I'm trying to view. And on top of that it's going to make me use a very clunky "touchscreen" style user interface full of downloadable craplets rather than taking advantage of the keyboard and mouse that my desktop has always had.

Call my cynical but I really see all of this as the web going downhill. Sure, there are great new technologies that can make things better. But as with any tool, it depends on how you use it. In this case, it's not being used to make anything better.

Oh yea, I almost forgot the obligatory "get off my lawn" statement...

I don't think it was even bad publicity. It was the mass exodus of paying customers. My transfer request took almost 12 hours to get through their system when it was suggested it would happen in less than an hour. That tells me they're getting completely slammed with customers walking away from them.

Yep. Took about half an hour. The transfer is in progress now.

I think a lot of people are pulling their domains. It's taking forever to get my exportable list.

That's exactly the dilemma. Do we focus more on the details of the book or the point of the story? Which is, or in this case, would have been more important to the author? I think that the author who told the same story about defeating the evil orks in Isengard with their wheels and gears, wouldn't care so much about the specific sword as he would about the people who wielded it.

I get why you don't like the movie. Changes that many don't feel are important still bother you because you feel that they're important. To me, the town of Bree was just a spot where they hooked up with Strider and escaped from the Nazgul. Does it really matter that he doesn't have his sword or Gandalf's letter? To me and many others, no. To you and many others, yes.

For those who are really passionate about a story and have intimate knowledge of it, any translation to film is going to be a let down. In order to make it commercially viable, they're going to have to cut out a lot, especially given the magnitude of the story they started with. I read that when making decisions about what to cut, they decided that the story of the ring itself was the overriding factor. Everything else was secondary. By doing that they could consolidate other parts that were cool in the book but just used up a lot of valuable screen time. Strider's role in the story didn't change but the time they devoted to it was reduced when they changed around a few things. And in the grand scheme of things, I don't think it was a bad change because it didn't materially affect the story of the ring. That's the kind of compromise you have to live with when you embark on a project like this. Unfortunately for the small minority of "true fans", they will be let down. But there's no other way to get a project of this scale funded and put out there.

Hell, Tolkien spent decades changing things in his creation of Middle Earth. I wonder how many arbitrary choices were made without any real thought just to satisfy a publishing deadline. I wonder how many purists consider those to be cannon inviolable. And on the other side of that coin, I wonder how many people completely gloss over changes to parts that Tolkien spent decades getting "just right".

I just don't get why people get so hung up in the detail that they can't see the whole picture. But they do and they're happy to tell anyone who will listen.

In the end, the books were amazing. The movies were good too. They flowed reasonably well given the medium in which they were presented. Getting hung up on the details just seems petty to me. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Either you're going to like it or you're not.

Self proclaimed "purists" always fascinate me. I find it amazing that truly passionate followers of a particular story can discuss so much of someone else's work in such detail. And so many times, they can have legendary arguments over how some stretches of the work should be interpreted. It's almost always guaranteed that when a story is converted from book to film, all of the self proclaimed purists universally dismiss it as tripe. They all have their own individual reasons, but it's rare to see any of them approve of the work, no matter how good it may be.

Here's my suggestion. If you really want to see a movie that stays within the bounds you have arbitrarily set on a story written by someone else, why don't you make it yourself.

So, I've gone to great lengths to craft mail filters to sort my incoming deluge of company email. I know the offenders who send me volumes of useless junk. I've got filters for all of the distribution mail that comes out of every level of the company. I know that once caught by the filters and diverted to one of many folders, I can spend little to no time actually reading the contents of the folder because there's little to nothing that's actually useful in those emails so going through the list once a day (or less) is a short task. The few internal emails that end up actually landing in my inbox tend to be useful and contain information that I actually need to process. But since there are so few of them I can devote time to processing them.

This is a great system. I end up getting very few interruptions during my day. I can concentrate on my work and get into the zone while I'm digging through my software and I can get something done.

But this guy wants to take away email and replace it with instant messaging and other intrusive communications services that demand my attention whenever some boffin decides to tell the world that he's updated some tool that I never use? Great. Now I have to deal with that crap that I've carefully figured out how to ignore. Instead of having a system that lets me address communication when I have time to do so, I have to now use a system that interrupts me whenever anything is being sent to me, whether the message is important or not. Instead of being able to focus on getting work done, I have to deal with a constant stream of interruptions. Good luck trying to focus on anything when your messenger is constantly pecking at you for attention on an irregular basis.

I suppose it's possible to configure messengers to filter and limit interruptions. But then if you filter the incoming messages so you can go back and read them when you have the time, you may as well just use email since that's better at that style of communication.

The switch to alternate forms of communication doesn't solve the underlying problem that far too many people spam out far too much useless information. My solution to the information overload problem in email is to first get rid of distribution lists and limit the number of recipients for a single email to a very small number. Say 20 people or less. If you need to send information to more people than that, come up with an internal web site where you can post distribution information that people can go read when they feel like reading it. Despite assertions to the contrary, there is almost no need to spam large groups with distribution email.

If you do that, you'll find that information overload will be significantly reduced overnight. Those organizational announcements and IT bulletins that nobody reads won't be filling up everyone's inboxes. The release announcements from the tools group that no one really cares about won't clutter up your inbox. The self important idiot who wants to tell the world about his 3rd quarter financials won't be able to bother people who don't care. The idiot who feels the need to post that he published something on the website won't be able to bother you. End distribution lists and you kill a large contributor to information overload.

Exactly. Reinstate the regulations that kept a wall between the types of banks. And while you're at it, reinstate the regulations that limit how far out on a limb you can go.

The problem isn't that banks take risk. That's what they do. The key is to keep them from taking stupid risk that exposes so much of the economy. Taking away bonuses from the bankers won't keep them from doing that. Reinstating the regulation (that was ripped down for the last 20 years with full bipartisan support) is what we need to do.

I know that the answer to the UFO question is that we, as a country, have never had any real contact with aliens in America.

There is no possible way that a government as inefficient, inept and corrupt as ours could have kept alien encounters secret for nigh on 60 years. Records get hacked. People talk. Politicians use secrets to leverage each other. Opportunists leak information and sell out what they know. People make death bed confessions. There is absolutely no way that something as significant as contact with aliens could remain secret for so long if it were actually true. There would just be no way the government could keep a lid on it for so long. A few years, probably. A decade or two? Sure. 60 years? No freaking way.

Let me translate it to American for you...

78.32% of Americans believe any made up numbers

You see, some other countries use a comma for a decimal point...