Yes, society is a contract of cooperation and when you fight against general social norms, expect to be punished for it. What now, not fair? Who the hell said life was fair for everyone. I could cry for unborn babies aborted because their potential mothers didn't want them or for the thousands of cattle slaughtered every day, but I don't, and neither do I care about your disestablishmental libertarian views. Society as a whole could care less as well it seems.

Putting all the finances, benefits aside for a moment (since they've been covered to death earlier), you have to realize that modernizing an existing established piece of software is a huge mine field. Trust this from soneone who's had to deal with several large projects varying from small refactoring of existing architectures to complete software rewrites. There aren't many happy problems, as you'll often face problems with integration, performance, ops support, stakeholder buy-in's, resistence from users (for every even trivially minor change to the existing platform), etc..

So much of this problem is out of your hands that you'll always need to keep a lengthy detachment from the process or go insane frustrated that nothing works the way you like, and in the end its a system that you'd wish was never born. It could take years of maintenance and bug fixes before the software gets to the point where you'd consider it 'good enough'.

Be very sure you want to load yourself up with this responsibility, because I assure you, that there's no easy solution for this problem domain, which is why large software consultencies charge obcene amounts of money at companies wishing to update/rewrite their legacy systems.

Define the difference between visionary and forward thinker exactly? Ah, thats a minor quibble. Architects are supposed to be developers with more wisdom, and hopefully though not always more bredth of knowledge. I'm still technically a developer but I worked in IT between development jobs years ago, and I have significantly more broad knowledge than most of the Arch's that typcially come from strictly Dev/Ops/DBA backgrounds. That doesn't mean they're bad at their jobs, but everyone on the team has something to bring to the table, and if you assume the hierarical development roles as the pinacle of perfection, then you certainly will end up being doomed from one mistake or another down the road.

Even the most junior straight out of university kid can have great ideas, and its up to development leads and managers to decide the merits of such thrrough their years of development experience. Maybe they're wrong, maybe they're not. Its not the junior guy's fault if a major screw up in design jeopardizes the project / company (assuming it wasn't done without permission).

Rule Engines are one very tenuous issue. Here are some thoughts on them as I see them:
1. It requires businesses significant overhead to bring in expertise to allow developers / architects / solutions providers for new products, but
2. most products are legacy, so when moving into a business rules eninge model, you need to essentially re-implement everything you've ever done, because
3. Integration with a system of this sort becomes very difficult, and somewhat unmanagable, especially when these outside systems share much of the same behaviour

I have a customer who's debating 'replacing the crown jewels' with a rules engine, and every time I hear them talk about it, it makes me cringe. This mind you is replacing the implementation of 10's of millions of lines of code and hundreds or even thousands of inter-dependent data elements with multiple workflow stages increasing the complexity factor. The higher ups just don't realize how complicated their system really is and someone was like 'fuck it, its the new buzz word!'.

Nah, but some people can be royal jack asses, just like everyone else.

I generally go for the self-deprecating developer style. If I earn people's respect without being a braggert, then I know they're not tools and we get along just fine. if my current compensation is any indication, it seems to be working.

Who the fuck cares? Even if you were bravado enough to punch the number in front of everyone in the restaurant in broad dayight, they can't do anything about it unless they steal the card along with it. Chip-in=pin requires both the physical card (or at least a chip clone which to my knowledge doesn't exist -- maybe with destroying the original card to get it) and the PIN number. If my waiter wanted to steal from me, they'd also require the card itself, which is why the 'new norm' for credit cards is to never let the credit card leave your sight/possession. Most sales associates won't even take the card offered. They just direct you to put it int the POS device.

They have cordless terminals which are wireless (and encrypted) which send the challenge all the way to the credit card merchant providers for verification.

If someone could eavesdrop your PIN, why couldn't they do the same with your signature? Your comparison sounds a little weak to me.

I can't say about 'the rest of the world', but here in Canada, Debit and credit cards are still quite separate for major banks, though I imagine you could find one-off's galore.

As for the rest, I don't know wtf you're talking about. When a credit card is stolen, you reverse your card charges like any other transaction. If someone steals your 'combo' card, they have to guess your pin in a live transaction before being authorized to remove funds (at least for your debit card, and 'officially blessed' chip-in-pin transactions). These are live-authorized transactions, and if you fail the PIN too often, the card will be frozen and the POS operator is required the cut up the cards.

If you have a credit card and don't have chip-in-pin, you're almost guaranteed to reverse the charges without the bank putting up a fuss. The ONLY way you can run into trouble is if you wrote down your pin number and had your card and PIN stolen. In that case, the bank may give you a hard time because one should NEVER write down a pin. If you can't remember 4 a DIGIT numeric password, then you have other issues. There have been cases where fraudulant POS terminals steal PIN pad info, but then again, that doesn't work for PIN-in-Chip cards, unless they then steal the card AFTER you entered your PIN into the number stealing terminal.

None of what you say matters. Basically all providers besides very few number of high density area ISP's are huge and effectively Oligopolies, which means 'some small company coming in and selling bwelow cost' doesn't happen. Additionally, the idea of Net Neutrality means that in this limited marketplace, we as conbsumers have no information of what kind of extortion that their companies are putting on the internet services that we use. Would you support an ISP that charged excessively high rates on a site you frequent regularly (like slashdot)? Would you ever know? How much do you want to bet that fees will be doubled+ if its publically disclosed?

I say screw it. Have the gov take pack the lines they laid and introduce a non-profit entity who's only job is to maintain the architecture and push costs on the content / service backbone carriers.

I've been using Eclipse on for pretty much 10years now and by and large, the tool has been pretty darn soliod. its a memory pig so get over it. I throw 1.5G at the heap and though it rarely if ever gets close to it, the amout of speed it performs mosdt operations is amazing.

There are warts which I find personally lousy (like Mylyn of the built-in profiler, and much of the built-in text validators), but thankfully most of those can be trivially turned off and tweaked to speed up usage even more. With a few choice plug-ins, you can do a lot of the hard lifting without effort.

I've only had cursory usage of Netbeans/Idea, but Kepler is really a dream to use. Note, almost every first few months of a new release are generally ass, and Juno was entirely ass so be warned. Just because one version of Eclipse may be a flake, don't discount the platform.

"which can be quite common even on high-end machine"

Sure, when the games are coded to use 100% of 1 thread while ignoring (most likely) 3-7 threads just screaming to be utilized, then CPU's are surely a contentious bottleneck.

Yes, and every internet enabled user in the US is legally required to take down illegal material if its been detected (I assume through the confiscation of another users' account information).

If you don't follow the laws of the land, don't expect to be protected from its freedoms.

But if you're the sender, you're fucked.

Google: buy back to black

Seems that search engines somehow work without out already... who woulda thunk it.