I agree. Noone likes a smart-ass. You have to use guerilla- and partisan techniques.

You could use version control yourself, get it working and ally yourself with another coworker. Configure the SCM for him and make sure it is working properly.Make him see the light and be a proponent, too.

If this is impossible, suck it up or change employer.

When did slashdot turn into the "please let me run proprietary binaries from a third party in my browser perfectly supporting HTML and Javascript so I can make ads and the 9913th Flash movie player" support forum?

Look, VB had it uses and time of glory in the nineties.

I have not seen a new VB(.NET) project started in the last 5 years, and for me, that is a sign VB will be dead and buried by C#. Most have converted to VB.NET and transitioned to C# at some point, and either replaced or retrained the programmers. But by all means, if you want to be the last person standing at the Visual Basic Alamo, be my guest.

You don't know Linq. And you don't use Clojure for your day job. Get real.

You are mistaking Linq for Linq to SQL.

Yeah, look at the flop that is asp.net, or how hard doing protocol agnostic services with WCF is. *sigh* .NET is a huge success in the corporate world, and hopefully c# will be one of the last nails in VB's coffin.

If you measured Java's success based on the non-proliferation of applets, it too is a flop.

(And if you are a Java programmer, I hope you get something similar to Linq soon :-)

Thank you, I haven't read that one. Somewhat similar to Douglas Adams' spaceships filled with hairdressers and telephone cleaners, I guess. :)

Euthanasia and mass-extermination has been tried before and the nazis still get bad press, so I don't think that is a road worth travelling.

Well, Greece, Ireland and Spain could be prime examples of that in Europe, but their problems are more related to economical speculation or incompetence.

The other side of the robotics coin is better working conditions, as robots take over the more dangerous work, freeing manpower to do other work.

Don't get me wrong, I love Norwegian high tech. I just don't feel certain our government apprehends it :-)

I had not heard about Nordic RF before, guess it is http://www.nordicsemi.com/ ? I should play less golf, and read more Weekly Techninal Review :-)

On the other hand, they (politicians) just passed DLD, which makes it mandatory for all ISPs and telecoms to log ip addresses and phone numbers for 6 months. It will of course be only availably to <agency-of-the-week/> , so we are all safe from any abuse.

But, he was granted a patent! It must be our innovation ;-)

Well, as your reply really posed a few good questions, I would like to refer to the poster below mentioning the difference between US and most European countries.

We do have safety measures for all people, so in principle you are never in the risk of having no shelter (or a home, as we call it in Norway) and not having food on the table. Really. Most right wingers in the US would call it socialism, but here we just pay our taxes and enjoy a nice safety net. Heck, we will even pay for your reeducation to a different trade.

Well, in the eighties some politicians here in Norway suggested a ban on robotics. It probably seemed like a nice way to save jobs (and votes.) Now, all politicians like to have a piece of the high tech cake, and claim their policies made it possible. (Our biggest claims to fame is OO, the paper clip, a cheese grater and a supposedly very efficient sea missile.)

But yes, all people should fear redundancy. I am a software engineer above the mid thirties and I fear redundancy big time. But, I do read a lot of books, follow forums and do a lot to not get left behind.

Again, I realize that is different from having your job replaced with a machine, like in the shoe industry, canning etc. For those, we invented reality TV.

On a serious note, once again: Yes, of course it can be a big problem, but only if a large enough mass of people at the same time suffer from it. OIf it is a chip at a time, it will get about as much as attention as when your last blacksmith went out of business.

The scapegoat is hiding behind that MBA wall over there.

(Serious note: What a troll story. Of course, everyone should care about unemployment rate, but should software engineers (and you Flash idiots) care more than others about it? Probably not.)

let's award a patent for adding text to an image. Sometimes I wish Mr Franklin had been given a perpetual patent on electricity, which he chose to not license out.

I found this guy on youtube, rather amazing! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNjWecipbTA He plays COD WAW, and is pretty good at the zombie levels. He cannot move and aim at the same time, but he manages to get pretty far.