Or the VP in charge figured that if he didn't assign a job to send them out to anyone, that few enough customers would complain that it wouldn't be a big deal to handle those few that would.

Unfortunately many companies can stand to have a layer of incompentency between those that make decisions and those that actually do work. One can even argue that when the workers actually know what they're doing and are actually working toward a goal, most of Management's job should be to keep obstacles out of their way, to anticipate the needs of the project, and to handle the company-external communications and initial deal-making. While it's true that some companies do make their earnings using entry-level workers or are structured to be profitable even with incompetent workers making up sizable portions of their ranks (Walmart, Fry's Electronics, and just about all fast-food come to mind), that should not hold true for companies that employ primarily skilled workers.

It's really aggrevating when skilled workers are both treated as if they're unskilled workers, and when they're managed by a former unskilled worker that somehow managed to get promoted up to lower-level management. Those kinds of managers tend to push everyone down to the lowest level, and to treat the skills of the talented workers as if they are unimportant. Ironically though, even good workers can often make for terrible managers, as often they cannot accept someone working in a different way than they did/do.

I will say that I have been happiest when I've had bosses that were better at the job than I was, that I could learn from, that actually respected what I was able to do even when it was not necessarily what they would have done. I felt that they trusted me to do the damn job and to get a positive result, without worrying about my methods so long as they didn't make things worse in the process. Those bosses have been very, very few and far between though.

...one ping only...

As opposed to the Gnome Foundation's people pronouncing it, "guh-nome"?

I HATE that. They claim it's from pronouncing GNU as "guh-new". When I point out that the animal gnu is pronounced "new" and that since that animal is the mascot of the GNU project and that it too should be "new", they get all butt-hurt.

At least no one has called it "guh-rep" yet.

Honestly I don't think it would be as bad as one might think. Most people, including criminals, are not homicidal to begin with, so police officers and their families would be relatively bodily safe, and given the effort needed to case a home to verify no one is home in order to break in and vandalize or burglarize, it's unlikely that a police officer's home would be targeted for vandalism or theft either, over and above statistical average.

If anything, if criminals are paying attention to where police officers live, the neighbors of cops might find less problems, as there's a possibility for a quicker response by calling a neighbor (ie, the cop) and more effort into an investigation relative to the importance of the crime, to appease the neighbor. Or it could come to nothing.

Exactly. I don't think that humans will go to Mars to remain there until robotic missions have essentially built and distilled and mined and refined enough to make the human settlement functional to the point that it runs without the human presence stressing the systems. It's going to be like remotely building a combination aircraft carrier and submarine on another planet with a communications loop of 20 minutes.

I assume that it'll be LOADS more difficult. Even the most optimistic well-thought science fiction work on the subject, Robinson's Mars Trilogy, opens with a description of the advance equipment sent at considerable expense to provide colonists with as basic things as water and air. And Robinson, for literary license, makes things far easier than they really will be to make the story fit within one lifespan.

If that trial of that American girl for murder, its overturn, and its refiling is any indication, then yes, it may be possible.

I think that if they do refile though, it'll give incentive for scientists and other intellectuals to move, and with the EU rules allowing one from a member-state to live anywhere within the EU, it would probably be an easier choice to leave if one's work could be interpreted this way.

Yep. Lower speed, no common-carrier benefits anymore.. No reason to continue to use them.

I carried a palm pilot before the modern smartphone, and the network-synchronized smartphone is an improvement when one wants a central device that functions as a pocket calculator, an address book, a phone list, a tasks list, a pocket calendar, a walkman-replacement, etc. It's also convenient when one needs an address and doesn't have any other practical way to find it. We were on a road-trip and the car needed service, we were able to find a place while in the middle of nowhere that we were confident would be able to take care of it.

Palm's insistence on using palmdesktop and serial/usb hotsynch is what cost them the market. Had they come up with a network-based synch that would work over the cell network transparently and automatically then they probably could have remained on top.

Honestly these days the bulk of what I use telnet for is testing the mail servers. It's much faster to test SMTP that way than it is to open a client, especially when the bulk if what I need to know is if forwarding/relaying for a particular IP/range works or is blocked.

Cute. Did you go find an ASCII-to-binary chart to make it?

Once walked up to some kid wearing one of those shirts-in-binary that Thinkgeek sells and said to him, "Nice shirt, and no I'm not." Based on the look on his face, apparently I was the first person to understand what it said.

I take the skeptic approach, I'm not sold on new things just because they're new. I need to see a valid reason to use them; a benefit to whatever this new thing is over the status quo. With this mindset, I can tell you that the majority of new things are bullshit or are reimplemented old things trying to pass themselves off as new.

If we're lucky, no. Most of 'em aren't in nearly as good a shape as Tim Curry. Most look more like Meatloaf.

This is as much anticonfirmancy as most people that want to hold-down a good white-collar-ish job with full benefits and matching 401K can do.

Which is to say, that it's not really nonconformist at all. And besides, any counter-culture that establishes itself is a culture all its own, even if it is deviated enough from societal norms to where it doesn't mesh well.