I spent 20 years contracting in Silicon Valley after working for Apple in the late 80's. I could tell lots of stories relative to the OP's question, but I am going to boil this down for you young whippersnappers who are going to down-vote this post no matter what. I found a few reasons why OP would ask these questions: 1. Some managers, particularly under age 40, are assholes who, even in this connected age, if they can't see you typing away all day, right under their noses, believe you are "not productive", a term others seem to toss around in their answers. What is productive? 100 lines of code a day, or 20 lines that actually work? What proof? Well how about the silly ass religious adoption of "agile" methodologies. How can everybody look over each other's shoulders if they aren't all in the "hive"? Clearly, these managers have never worked with someone with serious experience. The mania for groupthink management has always originated in academia, where the rubber meets the sky when it comes to shipping anything more than research projects, not real commercial work. 2. Managers hiring "older workers" object to paying them nearly as much (or more) than they themselves make. The younger the manager, the worse this is an issue. They prefer to hire people younger (and cheaper) than themselves. 3. Younger managers don't possess the life experience to appreciate hiring people who are smarter or more experienced than themselves. They feel threatened by experience, not appreciative of it. And they are naively convinced that hiring two younger, cheaper guys is a better bet than hiring one, more expensive, more experienced one. They end up with crap code that maybe works and rarely scales or is resource efficient. I made lots of money mopping up after exactly these kinds of failures. 4. And lest I come off as a "young manager hater", most older managers suffer from some of the same issues, particularly the "I don't want to pay you as much as me" and "I don't believe you are working unless I can see you". But they are even less likely to hire offsite workers, frequently being utterly ignorant of the collaboration technologies that are in common use today. So I don't believe there is any misconception about there being age discrimination in the business of software development. I have seen it first hand. But being old or having 30 years' experience does not give anybody a right to a job. You have to have relevant experience. I figure everything in this business is obsolete in about 3 years, so anybody who has more than 3 years of experience has to have learned new technologies in order to remain relevant. This cycle never stops and it gets shorter every year. But even if you have the latest tech under your belt, there are still age and location to consider. I beat them by remaining current, networking constantly, and living where the work is. Anything less will make it harder. But that doesn't invalidate the points above. Of course, YMMV.

The hilarity of this is that other California cities didn't think of it first and make their own pitch to Amazon. Now you hear them crying "boo hoo". Other tax grabbing wankers are pouting, "Oooh, that's not how sales taxes are supposed to be used!". Winers! Taxation is corrupt in the first place, so you want to object to how that particular sales tax money will be used? Sounds like sour grapes! One local goobermint screwing another over money!: I'm LMFAO... Where's the popcorn?

Hogwash. I've lived in CA for 25 years and the only thing I expect is the roads to be maintained and for public schools to be operated. Everything else I get is fee for service (utilities, trash pickup, etc). The only Californians I know of demanding services are people who don't pay jack shit into the system in the first place, just like everywhere else in this bankrupt country.

The article title reads: "Steve Jobs Questioned In iTunes Monopoly Suit". QUESTIONED??? This hasn't happened yet, so Jobs has not been questionED. Bullshit troll article title.

“A generation which ignores history has no past -- and no future.” - Robert Heinlein

This is easily misleading. If Mr. Crupnick means "album buyers", he is more likely to be correct than if by "buyers" he meant total number of customers buying music. The fact that people can now easily purchase single songs when they previously were forced to buy entire albums in order to get only one or two songs they really wanted might have something to do with this. In fact, it might have everything to do with such a typically misleading music industry claim.

One thing is for sure: If they drop the URL bar, it will increase the use of search and, thus, increase the click through to ad-words sites. Nothing like a pretty fucking obvious money-making move on their part, eh?

This sounds like more zero tolerance police state crap. Have a look at this: http://www.lewrockwell.com/whitehead/whitehead26.1.html

No 30 years ago, damn it.

It should come as no surprise that the Wall Street Journal would publish an article asserting that publishing the Pentagon Papers is "different" than what Wikileaks is doing. Why? To help set the stage for justifying the government resurrecting the Espionage Act of 1917 to prosecute Assange, and killing all dissent since we are supposedly "at war" (Iraq, Afghanistan, War on Terrorism, War on Drugs, etc. ad nauseum). Of course, there has been no formal Declaration of War by Congress, as required by Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. But since the U.S. Government doesn't actually seem to protect and enforce the Constitution any longer, WTF matters?

And you need a whole new OS for this? What about using *nix machines, setting the login shell to /usr/bin/firefox and limiting the network accessibility to the corporate LAN? You could have done this many years ago and wouldn't need a new OS to do it. As for thin client, ChromeOS is nothing more than what I just described with a specialized browser with customized hooks for Google's proprietary app world/framework. Bletch.

This makes perfect sense once you understand that the majority of the people working on ChromeOS (in Google's Kirkland offices) are Microsoft refugees. Since most people psychologically try to solve problems in their new jobs they were unable to solve at their previous ones, what better way to keep from having the most virus infested OS on the planet than to prevent anybody from ever installing or changing anything! I bet the colleagues they left behind at Microsoft are envious beyond belief.

So Google is appointing a Director of Privacy, Alma Whitten, from the UK, the country with more surveilance cammeras per person than any other country on the planet. She assures us that, "We are now strengthening our internal privacy and security practices with more people, more training and better procedures and compliance." Oh just wonderful! With all the Chinese programmers at Google, it really makes me feel really much more secure. China is such a bastion of personal privacy, what could possibly go wrong?

This story is old fucking news. Things must be pretty slow at Slashdot to stoop to posting this story again...

I thought the same thing, but I have consistently read in the last several weeks that the well that blew up was an exploration well not a production well. So there was no plan to take that well, as it was, into production.