Precrime Division has had it for years.

Your outdated "value-adding" "service provding" skills are so 20th century. 21st century careerism is about networking. Networking. Networking. Netowrking.

Look at item number one on TFAs list.

1. Take names. ...

In five to 10 years, that will all be different and the person who you ignored because they were boring and couldn't help you will be the person who could have won you an important opportunity.

Network! Impress people! Dress right! Booze people up! This is how successful companies are made. You will not attract the rright venture capital with your simple abilities. Most companies won't even use those anyway.

2. Problem solving. .....

Problem solving is essentially the same thing you learned in abstract in seventh or eighth grade or whenever you learned simple algebra.

See! Look at this! The people this guy is writing for don't even know how to solve problems. They just code stuff nobody really needs -- and they're still successful! You think your ability to analyse and abstract is something all the cool kids will pay for? Think again. Your geek/nerd/hipster/bro-grammer cred wil matter far more.

6. Work more than 40 hours per week.

Profession? You think programming is a profession. Get back on that hamster wheel and like it code monkey. And get some hair dye. First sign of a grey hair or stress line from yellow packs like you and we sack you and hire a fresh young grad to suck into a husk.

5. Think in terms of a career, not a series of jobs.

Translation: "You can either join the fed-money, app-cloud bullshit wagon, or you can learn to love foodstamp lines. Either way, it'll still be a superior outcome to any science-fiction fantasy you imagined programmers were capable of making in a rational universe. The Market wants fart-buttons, not robots, so drink the kool-aid or join the lowest caste of contract workers you, you, you..... Loser."

No wonder so many programmers go into management.

Or a kid's first attempt at a project... backed by his family... who knows.

And my thesis committee - "Ballistic properties of early 21-century office furniture and of Executive personalities: an exoteric analysis"

Well, that depends on the amount the jobs pay, doesn't it? Have average salaries for manufacturing jobs (with respect to inflation) increased, decreased, or remained the same over the past 20 or so years?

That's how you can have an increase in the number of jobs while simultaneously collapsing a middle class. You can also convert full-time positions with benefits to part-time positions without, decrease sick and vacation days, require people lucky enough to have health benefits pay increasing amounts for them, etc., not to mention taking actions that simply raise stress in people's lives like making people work more erratic shifts, threatening them with off-shoring or outsourcing, basically any psychological gambit that makes the employee feel powerless - which has the follow-on effect of making them too cowed to asked for a fair share of the company's profits, again leading to less money for what was equivalent or better work. Plus that latter thing makes it less likely that workers would organize as a labor block or politically in their communities - a fine multiple win for the factory owners vs. their employees.

So yes, I can see several ways that a middle class can be hollowed out, even while increasing numbers of even worse, lower-paid jobs are created (and taken). That you don't see how this doesn't make things better for most demonstrates that either you are unaware of how the real world has been working for quite a while or you have some sort of odd ideological ax to grind.

The self-destructing cookies plugin for Firefox has the cookie management policy that I want. Sites can leave whatever cookies they want, but they are silently removed when I navigate away from the page (there's also an undo feature, so if I realise after navigating away that I actually wanted the site to store something persistent, I can retrieve it). It also does the same for HTML5 local storage and will aggressively delete tracking cookies from ad networks. It needed basically no configuration other than to whitelist a few sites as I go.

I'd love to see Microsoft and Apple integrate this kind of functionality into IE and Safari. I doubt Google would do the same for Chrome, as they rely too heavily on aggressive tracking for making money. I don't really understand why Apple and Microsoft don't aggressively push privacy features in their browsers: they'd get good PR and hurt one of their competitors at the same time...

And your father's knowledge is broader and more accurate than this report's ..... because?

There was certainly a time when wage disparities were truly enormous, though not that big. But the entire premise of this story is that what we knew to be true just ten years ago is now out of date.

I suspect your father was giving you information that was once correct but no longer is.

They don't use tracking cookies (their preferences cookies are not identifying, they're just a string of your options, if you've set them), so the most data that they can have for identifying you is the IP address. They've been SSL by default (redirecting from http to https and defaulting to https in search results where available, for example on Wikipedia) for a long time, so you don't suddenly jump into an unencrypted connection as soon as you leave.

The complain, specifically, I was addressing was price. $800 is not $600 is not $349. The complaint I was addressing was the inadequate specifications of the low-end Microsoft device using 2 GB ram when newer cellphones are coming with more, standard.

Chromebooks are between 200-300 for units that have 2GB ram. While the screen size is bigger, they aren't as portable or connected as Cell Phones. Trade offs for price / quality / performance.

The over all point is that Microsoft is being squeezed at both ends, out of the Windows World in to the Cloud / whocareswhatdeviceyouhave world. They cannot compete in all areas all the time, without compromising something. And right now, Microsoft is eating itself trying to compete in places it wasn't built to compete with.

The long term prospects for MS at this point are grim. They have lost market dominance of computing devices to Android and iDevices .And while they still dominate Desktop / Enterprise world, they have lost the mobile arena.

I like their hair and I like their shoes, it's just that useless bit in between that sucks.

A lot of Africa would disagree with that last part. Though it's kinda unfair to blame them, after all we force them to it.