The downside of of the high-quality video work that has been done on the Star Trek tapes is that you can see the black stains on his teeth from smoking in the closeups.

83 is a respectable age, but I recently lost someone who lived to about that age and had a similar smoking history. Whether not smoking at all would have made a significant difference in lifespan is uncertain. But it might have made those last few years a bit less difficult.

I have the same album. Singer usually implies a vocal range more than 3 notes wide. It was, alas, one of the things he did not do well.

Depends on the product and vendor (using the term to mean any software source, not just commercial ones). Some vendors will ignore you, some will abuse/riducule you, some will put it on the list for next quarter's release and some rare precious few will personally deliver an overnight repair.

At least in open-source, if they don't you can try and fix it yourself.

Umbrellas with light-up handles will be out of fashion.

The replicants were sent out to work in hazardous environments out in deep space. Presumably they had all sorts of customizations provided to assist in doing the job.

But that's the great thing about it. Since Deckard is a replicant and replicants have early expiration dates, you could use a 70-year old Harrison Ford and set it a year in the future from the original and it would be perfectly realistic!

The predictable script would in fact, have Ford on the run in a role reversal with a younger person as replicant hunter. Hopefully, though we'd be allowed something more original.

While they're at it, though, I wouldn't object if someone made a movie of the REAL "Blade Runner". The one by Alan E. Nourse.

We can afford to pay CEOs 400 times what most of those employees make and reward them with millions when they tank the company.

I suspect if we really wanted to, we could find the money somewhere.

We already pay employees not to work in companies that have "no moonlighting" restrictions. If they cannot work during nights and weekends, then their compensation needs to be sufficient to earn a living at their primary job. At least if there's any sort of free market for labor where they can hold out for a living wage.

Sorry. Ebola is no excuse. You must present an actual death certificate.

The best union is the threat of unionization.

You won't be an employee of MY company. I expect anyone who works to me to be invested in the company so that they will have motivation to help the company, not merely be a salaried drone. I'll bet that one of your standard auto-quacks about Why Unions Are Bad is that union workers are drones who have no motivation do do anything much because they cannot easily be fired.

You, on the other hand, don't belong to a union, and you're not invested in your employer. Drones like that are the first out the door. And since this is the Century of the Disposable Employee you will be. You may think you're a Special Snowflake now, but your attitude WILL negate that.

Then do so. You may discover it's not as easy as your think.

Well, no, I meant without resorting to trickery.

But if you can do it at all, that helps for development at least, so thanks for the info.

I'll believe that Microsoft has separated IE and Windows when I can have more than one version/instance of IE installed and running at the same time like I can with external products such as Firefox.

Very often the original system was hacked out in a couple of days/nights by one or 2 heavily-medicated (caffeine, alcohol, whatever) people.

It more or less did the job even though it has one or 2 really awful (but infrequent) bugs and is difficult to maintain or expand.

Then one day someone decides it's time for the Second System (see Fred Brooks).

They put together a team and a schedule and - like as not - spend a lot of money on fashionable faddish tools and consultants and a lot of time coming up with bells and whistles (a/k/a the Second System Effect - see above).

65 days into the 90-day schedule, they realize that they don't have any actual working code, just an immense collection of stick-figure UML diagrams, panic and put all the programmers to work coding on 100-hour weeks.

Guess what the end result is? Hint: read the papers. Somewhere between 66 and 75 percent of all major software projects fail.

The difference between software and mazes is that with mazes you are doing the same task every time.

I know, for example, that I can take cold iron and have it running most of what makes it a useful production server machine in about 4 hours. I'll sign my name in blood on it. Because I've done that same task over and over.

On the other hand, software is a creative work and creativity implies that you are NOT doing the same task every time and that at best you are guessing.

The problem is, everyone else is second-guessing, and they're guessing wrong. And they often will not accept a realistic estimate. They'll push for a "realistic" estimate, then blame you when you cannot meet it.

Actually developers guess wrong too - they usually think it's going to take half the time and work it really does (based on stats I've seen). But developers could simply allow for that by doubling what they think.

Except that in many cases, as I said, they cannot resist the pressure from outside.

More often in my experience the managers and the users refuse to believe the estimates and force new "more realistic" estimates to be submitted.

Because "It's Simple! All You Have To Do Is..."