This made me think of Steve Martin in "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels":

Passenger: "Miss, may I go to the bathroom now?"
Flight Attendant: "Of course, sir."
Passenger: [pause, then contented facial expression] "Thank you."

(yeah, yeah, I know that's not how catheters work...)

A lot of airlines are now charging extra for bulkhead and exit row seating. This started with Northwest back in 2005 AFAIK.

And then on top of that, if it's a codeshare flight, you're at the mercy of the actual carrier for any equipment changes, not the airline that sold you passage. In that situation, who knows what aircraft configuration you'll find yourself with.

Both sides of the aisle possess those attributes.

I doubt that the lawyers company will be looked upon favorably by the tech giants anymore either

I wouldn't be so sure. If they're like most employment lawyers that I'm familiar with, they work both sides of the table, so odds are they've helped other companies screw over their people in the past.

Businesses making more money don't lead to more hiring. It leads to higher profit for the business. Nothing else.

It does when they need those people to make more money. If I own a store, and am making good money, I might want to expand and open new stores so I can make even more money. Those stores won't run themselves.

And the blacks? "None more black."

"paystherentpic.com" is still available...

that's a completely made up statement. i have worked in lots of IT shops and the only place to find folks w/o a college degree is in the help desk/desktop support.

With the exception of my first job back in the late 80's, every IT shop I've worked had at least one senior dev without a degree - me. Fortunately, my resume and documented and verifiable accomplishments tend to make the degree issue moot in my case, and questions about my educational status are few and far between.

That's not to say that I don't think that a college education is a valuable thing, but there *are* a lot of us out there that took the time on our own to learn what we needed to be successful in the field. My copies of Knuth and Sedgewick are just as dog-eared as anyone else's.

I have two computers, two cell phones that default to 802.11 for data, two tablets. Between all of those, I'm at 303 GB for August thus far, according to my router. I'm guessing 2/3 of it was split between Netflix, Amazon Video, and YouTube.

So I'm assuming the IAU will be naming it "REI-128717"? ;-)

Why must people hang on so much to the old when there are so many clear advantages

Because the new is often outweighed by disadvantages, perceived or real.

MacOSX is a desktop system, who cares how complex Apple makes it to be easy for non-admin to use? not relevant to this discussion of a bloated complex thing for servers.

Apple offers a server variant of OS X as well.

Ten years later, XML has been largely superseded by REST and Web Services is basically gone

I think you might have meant SOAP, not XML. There are plenty of people writing REST services that speak XML.

Except nobody actually does that. The whole JVM thing was done to make browser "applets" work. Nobody uses those any more. Most Java is server-side, running on farms of x86 machines.

Those farms of x86 boxes aren't necessarily running the same OS on each, necessitating different JVMs. I've personally worked in server environments where the same code had to run on x86 machines under Windows, Linux, HP-UX, and Solaris simultaneously.