Your comment is pointless. Letters and punctuation have almost no value. They are reproducible, infinitely, for free. But, you want me to derive argumentative points from your particular arrangement of them?

No I didn't, it's the last line.

First you get a beowulf cluster of turkeys.

Then you place a naked and petrified Natalie Portman above the turkeys, and you pour hot grits all over her, letting the grits fall on the turkeys, slow cooking them with their transferred heat.

If you find the turkey's aren't cooking fast enough, you add the sonic energy from screaming, "OMG ponies!" to the process, hopefully speeding it up an uncountable number of femtoseconds.

When Netcraft confirms that all other forms of turkey cooking are dying, you dispense the entire Beowulf cluster of turkeys into a series of (feeding) tubes.

Before eating, you praise technology by reading the latest F*cking Article on Slashdot, and ban any insensitive clods to the neighbors.

Then you eat the turkeys before they can move to Soviet Russia and eat you.

I use two writing devices these days.

Pilot Precise V5 http://www.pilotpen.us/ProductGroup/711-Precise-V5-V7.aspx

I discovered these in college, and have never looked back. I buy them in bulk, they last forever. Satisfies all your requirements except maybe #1, and that depends on finely you draw. Also inexpensive.

and the Pentel Twist Erase III http://www.pentel.com/store/twist-erase-iii-mechanical-pencil

I started using this in my High School drafting class, to the chagrin of my teacher at the time. He told me if my drawings went down in quality, he wouldn't let me use it any more.

It's been 20 years. I don't know what I'm going to do if either company quits making them.

If neither of these works, find a drafting supply store (or, I guess, an art store these days, or a Ben Franklin if you live on the East Coast), and go through the pen aisle. Unlike Staples/Office Depot, those stores will frequently have pens in bins instead of blister-packed. Take a pad of paper with you, and test some candidates. Find a representative group that might work, buy one of each, then use them at work. Find one you like, buy them by the dozen.

I've been a space nerd since I was a little kid. I remember watching the space shuttle going up when I was in elementary school. I remember being glad that I stopped growing at 5'8" because it meant I could fit in the shuttle cockpit without issue. But, alas, space was not meant to be in my youth. This idea intrigues me, and I have some questions.

Will there be an age limit? Say I get to 65, and decide to give my remaining living years (which could be as many as 30), to helping this project succeed, would I be able to do so? What would be the physical requirements?

Will there be projects for the Mars inhabitants to do to grow the colony (methods of creating some sort of atmosphere in a controlled space, growing crops, etc.)?

How often do you plan on refreshing the project with supplies, and more importantly will you be sending the supplies first? Will you send a housing unit beforehand? How long can one survive off of the supplies?

Will the transport module be something that can be scavenged and repurposed? Will the launch vehicle be designed to be reused as housing on Mars easily?

Will any medium equipment be sent so the creation of Martian cement/bricks can commence immediately upon landing? Mainly, a cement mixer and a laser to melt water from the poles? Will you be sending a shipment of tools, piping and other construction materials beforehand?

If I were to go at the age of 65, will there be any sort of designated funeral area that will memorialize me as a starter colonist to future generations of Mars inhabitants?

Or is this trip really just a ruse to send a bunch of DNA and organic material to a new planet in the hopes that as we die, our bodies will decompose and start terraforming the planet the slow way?

-RT

Look. You're 40. It's time to sit down and think for a while. No, really. Just sit and think.

Think about where you've been, and where your career has been. Think about where you want your career to go.

Factor in the fact that you probably have 20 more years of work ahead of you, if you're lucky.

Think about all the things you hate about the current scope of your work, and think about whether you still want to be doing them when you're 50.

Think about the things you can do if you hire two young buck programmers, teach them right, and have them do your programming for you.

Think about what people have said about what you excel at, and if it's different from what you've been doing, think about going that way.

Think about going into management.

IT (I'm using IT as the whole sphere of computer related degrees) + MBA = CIO position.

Think about that. Even if you don't make it to the CIO, and you may not, what you're buying it looking at problems from the 50,000 foot view and choosing the direction of a company.

If you get a master's degree in BioInformatics, you'd better focus on doing something no one else is doing, preferably something forward-looking. By the time you get done with school and what not, it's probably not going to be as forward looking as you thought.

Computer Science could be easy, it could be tough. You've got programming experience, that's great. You're probably reluctant to pull all-nighters though, and there's some 18 year old kid who will. And what is it really going to get you?

Here's what you do.

Look around the world. (Yes, the world.)

Find the people who are a few years older than you doing work that you think you'd want to do.

Shoot them an email. No, seriously, shoot them an email. Get over that fear of "Oh, they're too busy and don't have time for my little measly email." Politely lay out your case, and wait for their advice. It might take them up to 3 weeks to reply. You might have to email them a few times (no more than once every two weeks).

Find out how they got there. Master's degrees? Fellowships? Luck?

Follow in their footsteps as much as you can.

Just remember, you're 40. If you were to quit work and go to school full-time, you'll be 42+ by the time you graduate. In two year's time, some jobs you want will no longer exist. They will have been discovered to be dead ends (see: Ruby on Rails in large applications) The industry will have moved on. You'll have to be above that on some level. Figure out whether going to school is going to pay off. You can finish undergrad in 2.666 years if you set your mind to it. A master's will take two years no matter how you slice it.

Here's a hint: A Master's degree is not as much about the education as the opportunities you will be provided as a side effect of the school you go to and the people you meet there.

Therefore: Go to a good, real, school. Discard the University of Phoenixes of the world right off the bat. Apply somewhere there are people that might be smarter than you. Many companies use specific Master's programs as feeder schools. (Stanford -> Apple + Google, Cornell -> IBM).

Remember, you're already 40. Going back to school is going to be weird.

But it will probably be rewarding.

I'm pretty sure this is a dupe.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/98/04/17/91338/seti-at-home

Don't the editors double check for anything around here?

I think it's interesting that no one has bothered to mention why they think Steve Jobs thought it was important to have huge cash reserves.

Aside from the fact that having that money allows you to make big investments without resorting to a bank loan (yes, big corporations get bank loans), Steve was acutely aware of how fragile Apple's existence was. The simple chain of a few bad decisions could send the company on a downward spiral much like the last one in the 1992-1997 era. If anyone recalls, Apple had about 7 billion in the bank at the beginning of that downturn and proceeded to bleed all that money out over the next 5 years while still selling products that were so popular they were backordered for months. Yes, their supply chain was a wreck back then, but they managed to bleed off all that money.

Steve knew that Apple shipping one or two failure products could put the company into a tailspin that would take a while, and cash, to recover from. He also knew that the computer industry goes through boom and bust cycles and you need money to weather those. And you can't predict them. Contrary to what proponents of the "Long Now" and "End of scarcity" economics say, we're not (nor will we probably ever be) in a world of plenty, and Apple needs to be prepared for that.

So, if it took 7 billion for Apple to slide through 5 years of mismanagement and lack of vision, how much will it take for it to for them get through the next one? Apple's much bigger now, and everything in the world is more expensive now. If Tim Cook does this, it'll be the beginning of the end of the Apple we all know and love (and hate). Whether or not that's a good thing or not is completely different discussion.

And that's my .02, which is nowhere near the $58 billion Apple has.

I had 15 years in IT (Systems Admin, network design, etc). And walked away from it. I found another industry where my skills would be applicable, advertising in my case, and jumped into it.

I've found that my skill set helps when trying to make things live online that aren't stupid or annoying.

I recommend you take a look around and see what's out there. Maybe you just need to change the context/business sector you're in to one where your skills are needed and can have an impact.

One thing?

Hook a debugger/stack trace software up to iTunes to see what's going on.

There's this new technology that's been around since the 1800's. It's called running a ground wire. You're supposed to connect it to ANY conductive cable that spans the distance between buildings.

When it was first implemented in the 1800's, it was considered demonic, since the wrath of God was no longer taking out church steeples.

If you're doing this sort of stuff without following code, you shouldn't be doing it.

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A .22 LR frequently doesn't do enough damage to actually kill. The bullet's too small and moving at too high of a velocity to get stopped by anything inside your skull.

Usually, it just ricochets around inside your skull, moving the grey matter around, but not causing actual death. The condition of the victims after this varies, from being relatively unaffected, to severe brain damage.

If you want to do it that way, you need a much bigger gauge weapon. Or a shotgun. Just make sure you point it in the right direction. It's quite common to miss. Especially with people that have never fired guns before.

-RT

They want royalties on your browser wars/standards argument.

You can deposit it in the account of one honorable Nelson Malambe, somewhere in Nigeria. Check your spam for the address and account number.

-R

(sorry for the double post, I accidentally posted as an AC.)