1. I smell the influence of a marketing person in all this, and not an engineer's decision. Although it's not out of the question that there was a government hand in it too.

2. Am waiting for the new Drone Bus, an nnovation in public transportation where the bus gets driven by a remote drone pilot over a non-encrypted link. Because nothing could go wrong with that idea.

I would swear all 140K of those H1-Bs come from India, and they all live in Sunnyvale with their pregnant wives, and they all shop at Costco on Saturdays, and they all work at Intel, AMD, Cisco, Juniper, or HP. Only 7% from one country my ass.

Would not these parallel universes be somewhat coupled, then, because moving particle positions one place could affect the other place? And obviously position could transfer energy. Would a neutron within a black hole in one universe then be able to transfer energy into or out of the black hole by means of its parallel connection? But doesn't that violate some premises of black hole physics? And finally, would evil Kirk ever be able to overcome good Kirk and absorb his acting skills?

Of course there's a hell. It's a place where everyone owns Macs except for me, and I'm stuck going to coffee shops with a 386 laptop running Windows 95 and a 300 baud acoustic modem. And everyone points at me and laughs and I realize suddenly that I'm not wearing any pants but I have to give the commencement address. And then I wake up and realize I'm standing in the TSA line at the airport and I still am not wearing any pants and nobody is left on Slashdot with any kind of sense of humor. Yes, there's a hell.

Currently I am the only white guy in a startup composed of Chinese and Indians. Some dev staff is overseas. I hear the green cards discussing their status all too often.

Not one person is doing something that could not be done by Americans, and indeed, I know of many, many Americans with the required specialized skills who cannot get work.

Earlier this year I interviewed at a a large company with a department having the majority of staff in India, and of the US staff in this department, half were employees and the other half contractors. All of the work could have been done by US citizens, and by employees and not by temp labor. That company makes plenty of profit, but doesn't share it.

Sometimes I wonder who exactly set this whole H1B thing going, who are the bastards who started the race to the bottom and destruction of American labor? Finance guys and think tanks lobbying the scum in Washington? Because this is not just some CEO getting smart. It's a movement, it's been pushed.

At the Academy they taught us it was the destruction of a planet in our solar system, creating the asteroid belt, as a side effect of war between galactic powers. But that stupid nerd Wesley claimed that couldn't have been because alpha0 nuclear disintegration technology hadn't been invented that far back, Someday a lot of people on a starship are going to hate that nerd.

You do know that's public air you're consuming? You;re lucky I'm not writing this ticket for breathing heavily, that's a moving violation. I'm going to let you off easy this time but don't do it again. Sign here. What? Oh the fine. It's $148.

And the best part of this is, when your disk with 6000 movies goes bad suddenly with no warning, the data recovery fee will be less than $4 billion.

Well yeah, with these disks eventually becoming cheap, backup onto another will be easy and fast. Er, semi fast. Well, kinda fast. Okay okay. Damn that's taking a long time, and why is the disk glowing red and what's that grinding sound on the backup disk?

The easy solution is to outsource and offhshore the boss. First of all, you get cheaper management labor. Second, it solves the meeting timezone problem. Third, many outsourced bosses will work for merely a bowl of curry in the morning. Fourth, you don't have to spend money on indoor toilets anymore. Fifth, like my cheapass clients, you don't have to spend money on telecom anymore, by forcing everyone to use Skype and Gmail for your communication infrastructure.

Soon you can be as excellent as HP and Adobe and Symantec and Cisco and other great American companies, and use the excess profits to move to Dubai and avoid taxes.

Indeed, this spammer is posting in multiple places using mulitple accounts.

UIs have indeed gone downhill a bit. The Public Storage website provides a typical example. They use orange or else light gray text on a white background, rendering contrast down to terrible levels. The default font size for data fields is tiny too. The readability is terrible and nobody there cares.

I attribute this to companies hiring the youngest and cheapest labor they can (and the least experienced), or offshoring dev.

In general UIs are in poor times. The Microsoft Ribbon's issues with consistency of access to functions is a large demonstration of this. (One of many examples: numbering functions in Word can be approached multiple ways in the UI, and some ways/paths omit critical settings the other paths have, leaving the user clueless how to do what he needs to do.) Marketers or hotshot visual designers run the show, and the result slaps the user in the face repeatedly.

As far as icons go, those trying to free them from their history are not considering the human perception issue. It's like some 17 year old who doesn't like red and green traffic lights and has the power to replace them with the words "CAN HAZ WALK?" and "RUN DOOD RUN".

Punched paper tape. Punched cards. Core memory. Teletypes. Vacuum tubes. TV dinners in aluminum trays covered with aluminum foil. Mechanical calculators. 78 RPM records.

I'm 63. You kids get the hell off my lawn and take your damned revisionist icons with you. The $ sign has been good for 150 years and I'll be damned if you want to screw with it. Take my floppy from my cold, dead hands I say. Whimper. Leave Gramps to die in peace, you whippersnappers with your iPads and clouds.

Actually, modern interfaces are confusing as hell because user interface design has become so screwed up. When you use Gmail, some functions cannot be found, do not appear, until you're in the right region with the cursor and in the right mode of operation. It is confusing as hell when every new app uses it's own damned UI scheme created by a slacker who likes videogames and puzzles. So those who complain about the obsolescence of icons, how about creating usable software instead of complaining. And now again: lawn, off. Now.

The following two sets of data were collected:

Set 1. Notes. Helmet fitted to dog. System started.

Dog: "OMG this poop is delicious! I'm going eat ALL of it! And then go lick the lab human."

Set 2. Notes. Helmet fitted to dog. System started. Note: I seem to have forgotten what I did here, and the dog is missing.

Dog: "These damned humans interrupted me while I was contemplating superluminal particle theory. You! Human! Remove the helmet. Forget. Forget. Now sleep."

San Francisco is full of useless VC-funded startups most of which will die of smugness or marketing department stupidity or just plain failure to create something really worth a damn. Driven by fantasies of exit-plan cashout. Bubble, hell yes. Oh look, a mobile application that lets you check the cat litter box from the office. Gotta have it. I'm sure millions of pet owners need it. Let's fund it to the tune of $5 million in the first round. I'm sure Facebook will buy it for $1 billion once its value is seen. Because it's totally unique and no one could duplicate it easily and we can always get a patent and troll everyone in the future.