Not "systematic."

Tea Partiers don't seem to understand that the Social Security and Medicare programs they don't want changed in any way - both programs by the big, evil government they despise - are government programs. Oh, and that their friends in the Republican party - the people they're voting for all of the time - have spent the last 80 years (in the case of Social Security) and the last 50 years (in the case of Medicare) trying to destroy both programs. By any chance were the Yalies (that bastion of revolutionary thought) who conducted the study Tea Partiers themselves? ;-)

Meg Whitman - a totally hideous person - mean, small, vindictive - has no ideas of her own, so she's just stealing Marissa Mayer's bad idea. Both are insanely wealthy people who literally have no clue how the proles who work for them actually live their lives. Step by step, the US stumbles toward its own French Revolution, but ours will make the one of 1789 look like a walk in the park.

I really have to take issue with the "very literal" comment. In my experience (stretching over 20 years), it's the non-literal types who are the best software engineers. They not only have an imagination, but understand nuance as well. I'd say a literal-minded person might succeed at programming at a very low or entry level, but beyond that, it's imagination and creativity that win the day.

No one takes a nearly $1 billion write down and lives to make more humongous mistakes another day. There's got to be a line somewhere, and Steve finally crossed it.

Unload about what a piece of crap Git is. I bet he'll get very pleasant, very fast...once the ringing in his ears subsides.

What Bolden is simply acknowledging is that NASA's manned spaceflight program is over. Sure, they're still recruiting and training astronauts, but that's so they can keep the ISS manned until it is retired. The future of manned space flight, including space stations, Moon bases and interplanetary and interstellar travel will belong to private industry. NASA will focus on scientific missions. There's nothing wrong with that - it represents the evolution of the space industry. Billionaires like Elon Musk can build, launch, and return space capsules today. Fifty years ago, Musk's approach would have been highly unlikely, if not completely impossible. The US government will help fund and provide frameworks - think DARPA's development of the Internet and now the 100-year starship project and the humanoid robotics initiative. Along with its own research and development, private industry will take the frameworks and ideas DARPA is developing now and leverage and exploit them in unimagined ways, just as with the Internet.

Totally hilarious reference to North Korea - but c'mon - Microsoft is run like an open source software project compared with Apple. What's interesting is that consumers seem to greet Apple's secrecy and paranoia with an almost Willy Wonka like fascination.

I know a total psychotic who spent 2 or 3 years at EMC. Eventually, they fired him. Avoid that place like the plague - anyone who would fall for this guy has no idea what they're doing.

The tax "reform" acts of the 1980s - supported by both Republicans and Democrats - shifted the tax burden off the wealthy and corporations and onto the middle class. 30 years of gradual destruction of the middle class ensued. Today, instead of a progressive system of taxation, the US has a system where the wealthiest and the largest corporations pay little or no tax, while those least capable pay the most. Having a bunch of millionaires under the influence of corporate contributions - then and now - make tax policy is the definition of conflict of interest and reveals the total corruption at the heart of the US system - and its drift toward oligarchy, now almost complete.

Absolutely correct. The logic of mikejuk's argument is so flawed is hard to know where to begin. Google isn't just proposing standards because they're nice folks who want everyone to work happily together. Google, like Microsoft, is a huge for-profit behemoth whose goal is domination of the markets they are in and any others they can get into. Doubtless Google has some product(s) of its own that require, or may require such a standard and, not being fools, they realize that hiding behind the figleaf of Mozilla and pretending to be nice will buy them some cred in the open-source world. Microsoft pulls stuff like that only when it thinks it needs to. The W3C will most likely cull what is best from both proposals, have lots of meetings, and come up with something that everyone can live with. That's one way standards come into being.

I don't know who came up with the idea of Friday afternoon meetings but unless they're accompanied by quantities of alcohol, they usually end up becoming modern day equivalents of lynchings or Soviet-era show trials. They have the great potential to end up destroying morale and productivity. Meetings in general are a tremendous waste of time (IMHO) and a large company is better served by very brief, daily morning meetings among teams or daily updates via some other means of communication, rather than stopping the entire operation dead for an hour or two on a Friday afternoon.

When they stop releasing a new version of Firefox every two weeks - let me know. It's really tiresome. Maybe they should just schedule their updates with Windows Update. Yeah, I know - makes way too much sense. I can hear the howling now.

What's really nutty about ExxonMobil is that on the one hand, they are spending millions on TV, radio and print ads on how the US needs to improve math and science education, but at the same time roughly two-thirds of their political contributions (corporation and employees) are to Republican candidates. To a person, Republicans have conducted an all-out war on free public education, teachers, and teachers unions over the last 30 years. The leading US scientists over the last 100 years did not, in general, attend tony prep schools or come from wealthy families. If ExxonMobil is actually serious about improving math and science education in the US, they'll stop funding Republican candidates and start funding Democrats, as well as making targeted gifts to grammar and high school math and science programs around the country.

I studied English, Russian and French literature in college and for the first 10 years of my career worked as an editor. In the early 1990's I fell into programming quite by accident - through a project at my then employer's. I caught the software bug and never looked back. Today, I run my own software development company and work across Windows, UNIX, and Linux. I think that curiosity and intelligence are paramount, followed by a good dollop of old fashioned perseverance. To build a career in a technology-related field requires that you never stop learning. It's the old story: if you enjoy what you do, it won't seem like work.