But then I always wiped my Lenovo to install Ubuntu anyway.

Who knew?

Spoken like a true engineer. Including a full stack trace.

If only governance worked like software, or machines. Unfortunately there is this thing called "money" that's gumming up the gears. Money now owns everything including the tools use to clean up the machine. The battle was lost a long time ago and we must await the day when all this falls apart from it's own excessive greed and compulsive malice.

I give it another 15 years. Of course, things will have gotten very ugly by then and it's unlikely we'll be talking about software much for another 15 years past that.

The web app I am working now sells for $5000 per CPU, and runs in Fortune 100 network environments providing cloud network security services.

I have worked on it for 3 years and once it's running with the full feature set my job as lead UI coder could be outsourced to a team in Hungary who would then do the bug fixes. And I absolutely expect that is what will happen.

You are not in my industry, or else you are not in my league.

Oracle, Google, Apple, Yahoo, HP and all the rest have an army of lobbyists in Washington DC specifically to prevent anything of the kind ever happening until the heat death of the universe.

Nope. My kids will do something else. Farmer or teacher or architect or chef or just about anything else, with my blessing. Of course that means Oracle, Google, Apple, Yahoo, HP and all the rest will become dependent on an external labor pool, with all the political and socioeconomic issues so implied, and when the cheese really gets binding and they are hemorrhaging trade secrets to off-shore competitors they'll fall on their swords claiming "it wasn't our fault!" and the US technology industry can start over from basic principles.

So yeah, maybe my grandchildren will be coders. That's cool, I could totally help them with their apps.

Been writing web applications for 15 years. Through 5 startups. Been outsourced twice, one time with the entire US team the week after closing an important B-round that we all worked really hard to land.

I have two kids. I've never suggested work in a technology field as a career choice for my own children. I'm glad they don't teach coding in schools, it's not good work. Coders are paid sh*t and used like toilet paper. All of our daily creativity and occasional brilliance ends up making the MBA pukes rich and rolling in blow.

So I guess it's no big mystery why he's gone now, is it.

come to mind for some reason.

"NASA wanted the shot before it retires the shuttle fleet after one final mission in July."

Then this is just a consolation prize. 12 years to finally get at the iconic moment.

So much fail.

I know a few geeks, not many of which could hold up their end of an intellectual conversation. I tire of them fairly quickly.

I also know a lot of engineers. There are a few nerds among them, but not many geeks. The engineers I know can talk all four legs off an Arcturian Megadonkey and then convince it to go for a walk afterwards.

Yes, I've wrapped a lot of subtle distinctions in all that. But that's really the point of the exercise. We all could stand to examine our definitions of a lot of things. I would start by examining one's definition of success.

Hell I have a /. account that probably goes back to year two. I see that the email account I have associated with it is the one I had 17 years ago. I still get mail there, but it's mostly spam, and I never bother opening it.

More likely George discovered too late that there was already a really successful "Star____" television series out there and realized he didn't want to play second fiddle to that other guy.

That was a really elaborate ruse. With that much free time to cook up something like that, you'd think they could ... oh I don't know ... maybe just study for the test?

Or maybe the cheaters were just working up a movie script idea. Do a few months in the slammer, sell the rights, then buy a really good test tutor for next time.