Well, to be fair, in the broad view, we have more than enough people.

I'm not sure the current situation is great, but some incentive against reproducing isn't all bad.

I'd expect a systems admin to be able to diagnose a problem like that -- not that ours can. But most programmers I meet can't. They'll be trying to fix their code all day long when their system has bad ram.

Our customers have the same problem. They'll be asking why our software is slow on "just this one node". Telling us to "fix the bug".

I have to look through system call timings, application logs, kernel messages, kernel dev tools blah blah to give them evidence of what I already know. "it's a hardware problem. It seems this is a known failure pattern in the linux kernel for cache coherency errors betwen SMP cpus".. or whatever. We're an application vendor. I guess these companies spend enough money with us that it's worth it to my employer for me to play tinker-toy remote systems admin for them via proxy of systems debugging.

I get roped into these problems because no one else on my team can figure them out.

It pays.

Those things are true, but IMO the real issue is:

  Can they find the same talent offshore?

I'm sure there are developers in eastern europe, china, India, and other popular offshoring locations with all the talent of a 50 year old american or western european engineer who is looking to work remotely. Good luck finding them through typical offshoring channels.

The real issue, IMO, is that modern management has NO idea how to measure competence and turn it into a number, and therefore doesn't believe it's important.

Some open plans are awful.
Some are fine.

If you hate open plans, then skip them.
But don't write them off if you don't know that you hate it already.

I do a lot of evaluation of special purpose tools.

Performance analyzers
Flowchart editors
Outline editors
Callgraph generators

I don't do this until I actually need a thing. Then I want it within a week or less. I often try out several multi-hundred dollar packages. Inevitably almost all of them fail.

The last thing I needed to do was generate a callgraph to document a subsystem I'd spent around 30 hours understanding. I didn't want to ever do that again. I went through a few ~1000 dollar packages that sucked. I ended up writing the callgraph myself in DOT.

Most commercial programs are too full of features, dialog boxes and other crap to really work for anyone except someone who uses them all day long. And there is a very short list of sotftware categories that deserve this type of complexity and learning curve.

Most apps are just NOT the center of attention, and the important thing is to remove everything obscuring the core utility.

Too bad the usability is worse than both combined.

Really Box is just a way for lazy corporate IT departments to spend money instead of do their jobs providing secure, functional file access services. The only people who like it are CIO type morons who don't know what their users need but are sure everything has to be outsourced.

No, you're not alone. It's disgusting and enshrines our cultural perception of criminals as sub-human.

Convicted of Resisting Arrest, so they couldn't make the real charge stick, and went for some BS.

This is quite typical for kickstarter. "Maybe we'll do Linux, you know, if the Windows users give us a lot of money." It's awkward.

Or more simply:

Oakland is pretty crime-encoouraging territory.

The best (most effective, and most efficient) ways to reduce crime are:

  * Improve neighborhoods to the point where they feel well kept, and try to ensure there's a feeling that most public spaces have people watching them by having housing facing those spaces.
  * Walk beats, be present in neighborhoods in a slow, ongoing way. Crime-in-progress tends to require police to be present for around 30-50 minutes for the actors to give up and wander off. Crime tends to be strongly discouraged though by regularly present officers who know the territory.

The problem here is that Oakland like most post-1930s cities is largely built in a semi-suburban pattern, with bones that work against neighborhood centers (which leads to blight) and don't have a strong sense of observation, which means crime feels free to happen.

In addition, it's not high density, so there's far too much territory to realistically fund a police force who actually walk beats. In addition, in a lot of neighborhoods the police would be afraid to do so.

So the obvious place to invest is in neighborhood center revitalization, encouragement of high quality urban development, and slowly getting rid of the semi-tenements that exist here and there. But that's long slow hard work. Gadgets are more fun.

The only way to make currency impossible to counterfeit is to not have fiat currency in the first place, which means the people would choose something real to be money, I am talking about gold, and you can't really counterfeit that.

Crazy gold bug,

Gold-backed currency does not mean that everyone carries around gold in their pocket. It's actually quite a bit harder to accurately value and validate than paper currency with various anti-counterfeiting properties. Let me repeat that, physical gold is easier to counterfeit for typical casual excahanges than modern cash.

So in the realm of reality where cash has not been physical gold in living memory, nor will it be, gold-backed currency could only exist in a similar form as our current currency. And it would be subject to exactly the same forms of counterfeiting.

Just because the value of the valid currency would be, in your mind, ideologically pure, doesn't mean people can't fake it.

So now we see that your reasoning is entirely nonsense, which is always the case when gold bugs speak.

The problem is that Oakland doesn't have much of a tax base, but Rockridge is one of the few relatively monied regions.

Oakland has other problems that lead to fairly high crime rates (most violent crimes are actually down, but robberies are way up). So overall the costs of policing vs the funding are quite high.

Rockridge would rather split from Oakland and have their own police department and not have to finance policing the city at large. Since attempts to head that way haven't really gone anywhere, this is the next closest thing.

I think there's some space for a neighborhood watch plus to do some serious good. I'm not sure what this will turn out to be.

Original poster claimed a trend, you think you countered with an anecdote.

That's not a contradiction.

Original poster might be wrong, but you've really provided nothing either way.

Correction, he supports *some* gay rights.

Your position is ridiculous. You think everyone needs to be the same "for the children". That will never happen.

In practice the adopted kids in my school were never singled out. Typically the fact they were adopted was simply not known to most people, and even when it was known it was just another fact.

In practice the children of gay couples I know from 3-12 do not have problems in school because they have two moms or dads.

You can't justify preventing people from having kids because of some vague peer pressure idea.