This is exactly right! Why do I never have mod points when I need them . . .

I have long felt this way too. As others have pointed out, the US is all about capitalism, so take away some of the shareholder dividends by making the power company rebate money paid for service when the service fails and the problem will solve itself in an efficient manner. Gradually increase the penalties on a fixed schedule so the companies can plan for long term upgrades where the infrastructure is at the highest risk (rather than where the the PUC officials live - which is, I suspect, a large part of the equation now). Mandating improvements on a monopoly only results in government fines that the company officials use in the cost benefit analysis about infrastructure improvements. Give the money back to the customer and that will reduce the "sting" of a power failure.

Imagine if you got 1 day of free electric service for every hour of downtime? I'd be very happy with that and easily convinced that the power company was doing their very best to restore service quickly because it was hitting them squarely in the pocketbook.

Or it would be a good name for a band . . .

I gave up trying to do this on Comcast and now host my email at Zoho. It's free for the few accounts I need. I now it may not work for everyone, but I got weary fighting those battles.

There are 2 types of recruiters, those with "skin in the game" (like in house recruiters) and those only trying to make their quota so they can keep eating.

There are 2 types of candidates, those who need a job bad enough to work with any recruiter, and those that can get a job easily because they have "in demand" skills, they don't need (or want to deal with) the second type of recruiter.

Luckily, I'm the second type of candidate and I will never again deal with the second type of recruiter. I love captive recruiters, even if I don't particularly care to work for their company, and I will happily give them referrals if I can. But the independent recruiters are all scum, and I choose that characterization carefully, I've never met one that was not, though interestingly they all swear they are different than the others. I'm working on a form letter to send to the scum recruiters, but I'm too nice to actually send it, so I'll just continue to ignore them. Like telemarketers and spammers, I realize they need to make a living, they just aren't going to get any help from me.

Do the credit card companies hate that you pay your balance in full each month?

You (and I, since I do the same) are the ultimate easy money. The Visa/MC brands make money off the margin they get from each purchase and the banks make interest (and some margin), but the banks also collect interest. They charge a high interest rate because of the risk that you might default. You are very low risk and churn a lot of money through their fee-extracting process that they would not get if you paid cash.

Therefore, they still like you, a lot. Now, the people who always pay cash or use a debit card, those they hate (or more likely just ignore).

Every parent will have a "Sheldon Cooper" as a child . . .

Maybe the selection will go the other way . . . sometimes a smart child is more of a challenge than the parents are looking for.

It cuts both ways -- good tech people can use the demand for certs to tell the difference between good and bad managers. Well, not all bad managers will ask for a cert, but no good one will, so it helps.

So they really did get the tech back in time. Not sure why they gave it to Lockheed, but whatever . . . .

I hope they left the car too. That would be even bigger than Mr. Fusion !!

. . . with 17 years of experience with Oracle, and I refuse to ever get certified. It's how I weed out the stupid companies. If a job description even mentions that they prefer an OCP, I skip it. Very few senior roles mention it at all and it has never come up in an interview.

I suppose that for someone starting out with almost no Oracle experience it might be worth doing, but it's like your high school GPA, mentioning it a few years out makes you seem desperate and needy.

The only OCP's I know work for Oracle, I think they make you get it if you work for them. I know they don't require it to get a job at Oracle. It really is a worthless cert if you know what you are doing. Experience and good references/referrals will trump a piece of paper every single time, except for companies a true hacker would not want to work for anyway.

Now that Verizon is getting revenue from the upstream side because they have so many customers wanting to use Netflix, I'm just sure they will reduce the monthly fees they charge their customers, seeing as their customers are now their product. ( -- for anyone getting ready to "correct" me)

This is simple to determine -- The FCC jsut gets all the CEO's of the companies in question into a room and put them under oath. Then ask them what the bandwidth is to their personal residence and that becomes the definition of "Broadband" for that company. If it's good enough for the CEO's family then it should be good enough for their customers. And if investigative work proves they are getting all "weasel-like" using mifi or something to supplement, then they must do 5x what they claimed before.

teddybear

Like we didn't know this would happen.

They should just ask Commander Data to scan the building for life signs.

Wow, I learned a new word today. I would have guessed that a "pescapalian" was the child of a Presbyterian and an Episcopalian.

Thanks for the education. Now I have to figure out how to slip that into casual conversation at work. That'll be a hoot.

We should promote a policy that any Windows systems that are not fully patched be automatically upgraded to run Linux. That nicely solves the problem of them joining botnets and means that MS doesn't ever have to worry about those systems again. MS shouldn't care because they've already made all the money they are getting from these systems anyway (since the owners have demonstrated that they are not going to ever pay for an upgrade). This way, older systems would eventually all convert to Linux, a much safer thing for the internet,