And what if I have an HDMI projector hooked to my phone?

ITIL certified? Seriously?

Understanding process control is one thing, but ITIL is stupid governmental nonsense and requires markedly more than 20 people in a shop to properly implement.

Meaningful process determination can be determined through effective interviewing and early monitoring/guidance alone.

Trust is earned.

You've basically got three kinds of sysadmins, in my experience (though obviously there's a spectrum).

1) The jerkoffs who don't do their job and squander company time. They don't fix things, they don't improve things - insofar as it's not visible to management. These are the kinds who put in backdoors and may put in needless obfuscation to maintain their relevance.
2) The fuckups. These are the ones who needlessly make a mess of things by not following basic best practices. They're better suited for desktop support roles or development. They may be good, damn good, but they're not systematic enough to be good admins, and overlook crucial things (like, "oh, I'll just leave this point-to-point tunnel up without encryption and get back to it later").
3) Everyone else. Doesn't matter how good they are and how fast they are at doing it, but they follow a couple basic rules: be thorough, be diligent, and always try to improve.

You'd know pretty soon which kind of administrator you've got. Start with a short term contract. Give them a limited scope of responsibility - a zone, like a set of specific systems or a project, such as something like upgrades and/or documentation. Maybe give them a problem to solve. Give them something that's intentionally expansive but of limited impact for them to work on and see how well they do.

If they do well and don't surprise you with something atrocious (oh, I don't know: can't convert MB to GB would be a hard stop for me - I've seen it), let them stay on.

But they really do need to see how the shop runs and be your PFY for a bit, first. There are very few people who can jump into someone else's baby and drive it like a pro, it's going to take a long time for even good sysadmins to catch on (my replacement is still catching up after I left 3 years ago, and I was only there for a year, thrown into more or less the same environment he was: his approach has been to slash and burn whereas mine was more granular due to less levity in outages).

I believe you'd find that slashdotters have more telecommuting than most any other demographic in the country, if not world.

I work from home exclusively - and home can be any number of places, including the beach (though I'd find that a bit distracting) or in a tent up in the woods (assuming decent data connection).

There's something to being able to fairly spontaneously travel and not save up for months to do so (above and beyond normal expenses).

... or from police weapon lockers.

They also make them. See the case recently in Australia of motorcycle gangs making some (very) effective subguns (automatic pistols and the like).

It's pretty trivial to make a firearm capable of being used to perpetuate crimes against people: they just have to be better than not having a firearm, so looks, and impression of effectiveness, are more important than actually being well made firearms. Someone with crude hand tools can make an AK in a day or two, and that's a fairly capable firearm. The net result of regulation and elimination of privately owned firearms is that only criminals and cops will have guns, and military (and militarized police) will be the main ones with firearms suitable for any sort of tyrannical resistance and/or hunting.

There are already efforts well underway to prohibit any firearm with a rifled bore - you know, something that was invented to the point of being effective in the 15th century, and have been in common military as well as domestic use for 200 years. Still, you can't regulate ingenuity.

This is why they're also trying to control/eliminate consumer ammunition production (by making it prohibitively expensive through the banning of things like smelting lead, making it illegal to import lead, and things like that) - at least in the US.

Most of my favorite tools do one thing and do it well.

My list:

* Swiss Army Knife (now called the 'Spartan' - no frill bullshit). I've redone entire racks of equipment with only this at my disposal and it's not fallen over where multiple others (such as leatherman and gerber) and have had no problems. I've also done god knows what else with them - I've had a total of 2 in the past 25 years as "always in my pocket", and both still work.
* IBM Model M - goes without saying. They don't break or die.
* Compaq iPaq desktop - hey, mine is still kicking and working like a champ on my network. Not a fancy billed item, but I've had mine working continuously as a small home network services system for over a decade now, and it's reasonably power efficient even by modern standards.
* Brother ML1345 printer - black and white laser. Still kicking.
* Nintendo Gameboy - the original. Built like a fucking tank. Mine got run over by a Ford F150 and still works: my kids use it.
* Hitachi hard drives: they're the best out there. I've never had one die and have owned dozens personally.

Deveops types aren't the kind of people to be crawling around under desks or helping directly to push for a release milestone.

They're the go-betweeners, sort of a cross between senior sysadmin and development project management assistant. They are the internal toolsmiths, depending on the blacksmiths to produce effective metal so they can hone the tools for the carpenters' needs. They are broadly skilled and know how to at least muddle along in both a developer and a sysadmin job, but prefer the big picture of orchestration. They're the ones who figure out where the shortcomings are, and are broadly skilled enough to jump in and provide possible avenues and solutions, seeing where one side can't fix a problem, and the other may have a solution.

Exactly.

This "there is no role for devops in a mature company" attitude cries back to the age of isolated business units with isolated departmental goals, often where sales sells products that don't exist and engineering produces products nobody wants. The money to run the company will come from somewhere!

In short, developers don't want to dogfood, because that's hard. It's much easier to not challenge yourself with divergent ideas from what you and your brainfund coworkers cook up: after all, developers made it, so it must be good.

And yes, devops is an integral part of dogfooding. It makes sure the left hand is talking to the right, Support is able to effectively move issues laterally, operations can effectively provision IT infrastructure budgets, and Engineering can focus on the real issues that impact the product. It's called teamwork. If you can't get this part done right - at the very least, making sure your product works in an operational capacity internally - how can you expect it to be a commercially viable option out of house?

It would make sense, if it wasn't for the fact that Comcast operates as a government-sponsored monopoly.

They get away with this crap because their potential customers are prohibited from operating: there is no free market. In a free market, you'd probably have full gigabit fibre to the home as an option in most metropolitan areas at this point. As it is, ISPs rarely can even gain the rights to offer service in areas due to exclusive deals Comcast has brokered by greasing the palms of local officials.

Capitalist incentives, if they were in play, would lead to a mass exodus from Comcast. There's really nothing 'capitalist' about how Comcast operates, except that they use money.

I think its completely laughable that you mentioned healthcare as something beneficially monopolized by unions.

In the US, that monopoly has resulted in the government intervening to stabilize costs repeatedly for the past twenty years. The only reason it continues is because its necessary - people die without healthcare. With STEM, you'd just see employers close up shop domestically.

In the UK where such things have fallen out of style and costs have tried to be cut, healthcare has gone to shit. Similar things are starting to occur in Canada, and places in the US like CA where similar state level practices are common. (Scheduling a doctors appointment, weeks ahead for a simple checkup, is unheard of in some parts of the US still, and you don't have to go to ER for cold meds.)

Absolutely. I've been saying it too. The only thing shortage numbers demonstrate is which, and by how much, employers want to pay talent less.

When I say talent, I mean just that. For instance, in information systems as they mention, its usually incredibly difficult to break into the field after college - even with experience and a good cv. I've experienced it and I know many others who have too.

And then, once a person is in, its usually quickly apparent where someone is going: nowhere, earning entry level wages for some time, or straight to to the top.

  I will grant that there is a shortage of desirable candidates (worldwide, not just in the US), but its because STEM is hard, and to thrive as a STEM company you do need a competitive edge. Without that edge - gotten by hiring as much top talent as possible - you will stagnate. And that's why there remains a shortage: when the top people you need are 200k a year or more, and then you need a dozen people at 100-150k to back them up, you would love to reduce labor costs and reduce the supply. Unfortunately it doesn't work that way; decreasing the job supply and desirability pushes employee demand to other fields.

Glad this news just came about; I just backed out of ordering a Keurig on this news (ie canceled the Amazon order).

I'll save up a bit and get a real (oood) espresso maker now.

Sure, the Keurig does something for speed and efficiency (when you need a cup, you NEED A CUP). But not at the cost of being locked into their packets: I want my locally roasted beans, thanks.

According to the Wormers, yes; yes, it is. Since an ice age is attributed to the mammoth extinction, global warming will have a net positive environmental impact for the mammoth.

I'd be curious to see how many generations will exhibit this characteristic, of course using the initial pre-stressed generation as the baseline for what normal behavior would be considered.

I always find it interesting when science proves something from ancient verbally-passed records, particularly when it's something which couldn't possibly* be scientifically concluded as truth in ancient days. Specific to this case, I believe the Bible says something like "your sins will be visited upon your children and your children's children for seven generations" or some such thing. Ignoring the biblical propensity to refer to everything in 'sevens', it'd be interesting to see if there's correlation.

* per our current understanding of ancients and their scientific capabilities

My guess is that this is probably for some variation of a stripper/party bus: There's a bus, with strippers and booze in the back, where people party at a higher cost than the establishment, with a degree of exclusivity.

You can kick someone out of a club for taking pictures of the strippers. It's not so easy to kick someone off a bus (without stranding them and causing PR issues with them and their group).

The easiest way to do this is with policy: take pictures, and you get banned (for life). Conveniently make it difficult for them to take pictures by giving them an optional 'cell phone deposit' area; however, this makes use of phones impossible.

As for IR emitters... how about a high-intensity IR laser disco ball, of some sort, along with using displaced spectrum for internal cameras? You may be able to do something with black lights or figure out a way to inhibit automatic focusing of the cameras, making the shots more or less pointless.

If the owner is just trying to monetize the "pictures with strippers" market, he's kinda SOL. You might be able to get something workable with IR filters for a high end camera (leaving cell phones to deal wit horrid pictures) but it's unlikely, since cell phone CCDs already filter IR (often at different frequencies than each other, so it can be hit or miss).