"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But," says man, "[that article in the Wall Street Urinal says that science] proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

– excerpted from Douglas Adams (for the cretins in the audience)

Is it time to revive the Civilian Conservation Corps, which put jobless youth to work planting trees (among other things) during the Great Depression? It famously "brought together two wasted resources, the young men and the land, in an attempt to save both."

It's a simple matter of terciles and life expectancies. Average life expectancy in the post-industrial world is about 80 years. Dividing that into three equal categories, you get (roughly) 0-26 = young age, 27-53 = middle age, 54-80 = old age. Of course with increases in life expectancy (and to make the math easier), you could use 30-59 as the middle group, and save a bunch of late-20s people the anxiety of already being "middle-aged", but it's still a bit silly how that term has become (in some people's minds) a euphemism for "old".

(And for the record, I'm 49: very accustomed to being "middle-aged".)

"A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once." – W. Shakespeare

I'm pretty sure that every printer I've ever owned was three-dimensional.

I used to have an HP LaserJet IIID; that thing was built like a tank!

The problem isn't that people don't understand the difference between linear and area measurement scales (so 8K is four times the number of pixels as 4K), but the fact that anyone lets these marketing drones get away with calling 7680 pixels "8K". 8K is either 8192 in binary terms, or 8000 in decimal terms.

One of the new legislators-who've-written-code is Will HURD.

No, it just means that MS isn't issuing a patch for XP. At least not exactly. They have released a patch today "for WEPOS and POSReady 2009", which is the branding given to the point-of-sale variant of Windows XP, which Microsoft still offers support for. There's a registry hack that makes Windows XP identifiy itself as Windows POS [insert joke here] when contacting the MS Update servers, and machines running that variant will get the patch.

Or so I'm told. ;)

"it does make you wonder how long organizations can afford to continue promoting incompetent bosses in today's very dynamic and competitive business world."

Indefinitely? As long as all organizations are doing it, there's no competitive disadvantage to it. And as long as the job market remains one in which the overall supply of workers exceeds the demand (no change of that in sight), employees will continue to put up with unhappiness, incompetent bosses, etc (at least up to the point where the incompetent boss fires them for threatening their own employment ... no, I'm not bitter, why do you ask?)

And some people wonder why I don't have cable-TV service.