Half of the people have below average I.Q.'s while 90% of people believe they are in the top ten percentile... mathematically they just can't all fit no matter how much their parents told them they are above average.

agreed. In the example of the radiator, they might say radiator but it could be a thermostat, hose or water pump.

If everyone knew what was going on the need for technicians would vanish. It's time to get over it and be professional and do your job which is helping people do their jobs by supporting their technology.

Used to work in the far North as a network programmer for remote, fly-in tribes. When a chief calls the monitor in his broken English a t.v., is he really wrong?

In cree the word for monitor I have found is teevee. The word for computer is hard drive. Who am I to say they are wrong? I just have to make it's still working for them when I am 500 miles away back home.

Martin Fowler's UML Distilled is a great read. Roughly 200 pages it offers a concise introduction to UML which is a handy way to visualize software design and share ideas in a common and easy to use visual language.

I think that software bug was unpatched windows machines in Ohio. But I was too close to it all and may just be making an erroneous jump for correlation to causation. The network storm caused by that virus was pretty horrendous.

As the story unfolded the early reports said the machines were unpatched. Then that story seemed to be brushed for reasons I can only guess with tinfoil hat securely fastened.

I imagine there were many factors that met on that day contributing to the blackout. And I doubt the virus was designed to take down the grid. But the lesson I took from it is that there are many critical machines that are hooked up to the internet or networks that hook up to the internet that aren't properly maintained and these sort of events will be more common. Also that if a non-specific virus can do that much harm I shudder to think what a well designed attack would unleash.

Remember the blackout in 2003? There was talk that the computers that failed were hit by a particularly nasty worm going around that week. I think it was the Sasser. Can't remember. But I do remember working as a tech and the worm was really crescendoing at the point the grid went down. The talk of a virus being the cause was put out there and quickly replaced with some excuse less scary. But from my vantage point it seemed to really coincide with the worm.

You are on to something as it being the destruction of the family, but more so the expectation that one must forge one's own identity. By prerequisite this means narcissism. It used to be that doing something in a way because this was how one's father and grandfather did it was a reasonable justification. Now we are expected to not drive our father's Oldsmobile.

This line of thinking was popularized among the babyboomers, and if there will be one good thing that comes out of the greatest depression will be a rethinking of this logic. It's really hard to develop an identity for oneself. This difficulty can lead to an easy narcissism. This easy narcissism is about defining oneself by what one has rather than what one does. It's easier to buy the super laptop rather than learn how to operate it well, etc. It's good though that kids have an expectation of success. Hopefully they can use this expectation to figure out a way to forge this identity through hard work.

Yep and so is Microsoft. And since they aren't medical companies they are not required to follow HIPPA. Nice end run.