I attempted to make just a technology change, at the midpoint in my career, and I was damn lucky to be given the chance to do so. As 50 approacheth, I don't dare risk even that again.

And good luck being offered a move into management. We already have plenty of managers. I have to keep programming until no one wants me anymore. Because it's all I can do. Really. YMMV, OTOH.

Well, to be fair, we aren't children. Being far from His level does not make us mentally incapable.

And we haven't been kicked to the curb. We're standing in the corner in a time-out; we haven't been kicked out of the house. Total abandonment, OTOH, would be Hell.

Some say ignorance is bliss. To know too much leads to madness, I think. And that's what I think is going on with human beings nowadays.

BTW, no animosity inferred, and note that on some things I'm only disagreeing with you in emphasis, because they are of course tough questions for Christians to come to grips with.

Every person without a job is a good candidate for becoming a Democrat voter. Keeping the most people unemployed and feeling financially vulnerable and hopeless as long as possible yields the greatest numbers of life-long vote-slaves.

And what better way to show a low-information and short-sighted populace that capitalism doesn't work, than by preventing it from working. The forced failure of capitalism here is overdue to offset the famous failures of socialism in the history of the world.

So-called liberals were only liberal about things in the era when they were on the outside, trying to break thru to get in. Now that they're on the inside and running things, they're the exact opposite, of course. Because they never really were about a liberal approach to things, of course, they were only about wresting power.

"Liberal" was just a misnomer for Progressives before they got control. People who've noticed the misuse of power on both sides and are opposed to it (on both sides) are actual liberals. But such creatures are a miniscule minority in the modern world.

That's news to me. I assumed what was being accredited was the curriculum, not how PC the administrative policies are.

But in this age of flagrant misuse of power, there's no limit to what "standards" can include.

Next, the Left might as well threaten Christian doctors who volunteer in disease-stricken areas, of "medical malpractice" and revoking of their license to practice medicine, not because of anything medical, but for also talking about their faith. I mean, that's close enough, right?

Is it more rewarding when you make a careful argument and people who think like you agree with you, or when people who don't already think like you find the brilliance in it? Why does smitty like his Leftie tormentors more than his fellow Conservatives? Because convincing one of them of something once in a blue moon is way better than predictable agreement.

Whoa, who's been having who suffer? God set us up the frickin' Garden of Eden. We could've lived in paradisiacal world, but we decided that somehow we knew better than God, so God said fine, try it your way for a while. How's that been working out for us.

I run the server version of Windows 8.1 at work, and have all my apps pinned to the task bar or whatever. Same for when I was running Windows 7 prior; never went to the Start menu (because I've always hated it). I shudder to think if there are very many people that sift thru that hierarchical behemoth of a usability nightmare each time they want to launch an application. Then they'd see live tiles jiggling in their face, but hopefully practically no one is that silly. As you say, I think most people like to customize/optimize their workspace.

Speaking of which, every time we move to a new version of Visual Studio at work (on our 5th now), I waste time fiddling with it getting my child windows arranged and toolbar buttons that I like and the keyboard shortcuts that I like. Some employee productivity will be lost when moving to something new, but only initially.

And as far as social media feeds, people already spasmodically check their phones for that. And they probably don't want their employer knowing how much/often they're farting around with social media while at work. Since nowadays everyone knows your employer monitors your computer activity, I would think people wouldn't even set that up or use it on their work computer. Better on their phones where only the government can see it.

p.s. On a personal note, while your wanting to return to Slashdot is quite mind-boggling, I'm very glad to hear that you're doing okay.

Animals have rights.

p.s. Re: "generate revenue", why do we go along with such a harmless-sounding euphemism for what is impropriety on the part of our overlords? Why don't we call robbing a bank merely "making a large-scale withdrawal" then?

It looks like anyone running for any office of significance who's not on board with America's comeuppance will simply be legally badgered out of trying to be a part of any leadership.

p.s. I hereby dub such people "candidacy trolls", after one of the Left's fun, go-to phrases that I have to see all the time in the tech news, "patent trolls". And I ascribe to it what I envision are the same kinds of connotations; stifling innovation, abuse of the system, bottom-dwelling.

> Obama is a symptom, not the disease ...that Obama (and ilk, of course) are indeed the disease, and America's ailments are the symptoms.

And no doubt America was unhinged, war-weary and esp. after the supposed almost financial collapse, when we elected BHO in 2008, but TFAuthor conveniently omits BHO's flabbergasting (even to BHO) 2012 re-election. The problem is, like people my age and younger no longer expecting Social Security to be there when we're old, even though there's been no official pronouncement of such, I'll bet it's a widespread belief. Similarly I think is the belief that America today is the new normal. So the problem is, we probably won't ever go back to being hinged. How can we, when we as a nation hold BHO and Democrats and the Left blameless for America's woes.

> out of every job change for the past three years.

I guess you're saying you do contract work. It takes me longer than the average person to learn a new business domain and system and code base and libraries and frameworks used, so I don't think 6-12 month jobs is for me. I don't start to pass others until after a couple of years.

> once you've had 16+ years in the industry

I'm under assumption that hurts me instead of helps (so I hide it by following conventional wisdom and only showing the last 10 years on my resume/limiting it to two pages). But maybe that's only true for full-time positions.

Not strictly on topic but I think it was your link to a video by an anesthesiologist that had me questioning what I assumed "center of mass" to be.

My sister hired some ex-military guy for personalized gun training and was taught ("get a 9mm" and) a "one in the head, two in the chest" thing. But from what that doc said, and that slide that showed the major artery systems of the human body, it looked like you want to shoot below the rib cage.

(And of course the other takeaway was that handguns suck as far as lethality.)