I've never had this response. Most employers like the concept of an employee who can do the work of several.

So do it in Perl - it'll be good enough to make your life easy, and inscrutable enough that anyone trying to 'automate you' will recoil in horror.

I've espoused the doctrine of proactive laziness since I started sysadminnning. I figure I'm doing my very best work when there's nothing that I need to be doing, and I can be spending my time fiddling with the next thing.
That means applying appropriate automation and scripting. (Don't overdo it - not all scripts need to be gold plated).
Decent documentation. (Which is easier: explaining or fixing a problem, or saying 'RTFM' and waving a hand dismissively - if TFM is up to scratch, they won't come back and bother you)
Tackle tasks that'll become a pain, before they're a pain.
The combination of these means I've had a fairly easy and productive live in 'systems admin', because I've never had a need to diddle with spreadsheets to look like I'm working.

Lots of people 'play spreadsheets' all day, which is working really inefficiently. Some companies prefer this, because they operate on billable hours in the first place. You being efficient costs them money. Some companies know better, and will value your skills. You should go and work for those. Getting laid off sucks a bit, but it's far from the worst thing that'll ever happen to you.

If you pull out the all the stops occasionally, you're a hero. If you do it routinely, you're taken for granted. It's hard enough to measure 'productivity' in IT anyway. Far better to automate your job, and 'pay yourself' to support it on an ongoing basis.

Scripts are generally more accessible, but that's about it when it comes to comparison with other languages. That means you get some pretty bad scripts, but ... well, there's no real reason to not use decent coding practice. The core one being 'get everyone involved a working knowledge of the language'.

Not that you'll care, if you're the person who's already moved on :).

There are plenty of things that persist despite not being scientifically valid. Like homeopathy, for example.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

Solar panel by day, wind trap by night!

One boeing aircraft may look much like another at 10km distance. And boeing make military aircraft as well as civilian. *shrug*. It _could_ all just be a horrific accident.

B52s are made by Boeing and still in service I believe? OK, so the B777 might not look _too_ similar, but if you're not expecting a civilian flight, you might make that mistake.

Depends how much they knew about the thing they were shooting at. I mean, Boeing make military aircraft too. Are B52s still in service? What does one of those look like from 10km away or on a radar?

"There is no such thing as a former KGB man" - Vladimir Putin.
He was Lieutenant Colonel when he left in '91. I don't think you spend 15 years in the KGB and get to that rank without learning a thing or to about 'playing games'.

Unless the aircraft is destroyed out right by the explosion, it'll be damaged and start to crash. I would hope that the onboard monitoring would notice that damage and start warning the pilots, which is a really good cue to start uploading your black box data. Anything where the black box actually survives, there's something to notice 'things going wrong'.