Based on my own experiences, my cable company now tries to discourage technician visits. It takes a week to get an appointment, even if you have no service.

Now, they are encouraging customers to go to the local cable office to pick up their own equipment and install it themselves.

In recent years, the equipment itself has changed. The cable box is now a simple box, without even an on/off button. I think the idea is supposed to be "hook it up, plug it in, it works", requiring no expensive visit. Unfortunately it does not always work that way.

In my case, after hooking everything up and having the cable company register the box over the phone, the box would simply die. I could not even be able to turn it on. Following their advice, I did three exchanges before I lucked out with a phone person who knew what was happening. After entering a series of secret codes using the remote, the box suddenly worked. I don't think the boxes were physically defective at all. It would have been so much easier to have someone come out.

Now if only all of my channels would work...

Wordperfect? Windows 95? What decade are we talking about here? Not only have the horses left the barn, they have established a healthy feral population.

For this subject, it's useful to see tax revenue and expenditures in a pie chart format. Even though this data is a little old, it still provides a good view of the landscape. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget

This reminds me of a short story called "The Carnival" by Michael Fedo. I read it in junior high school. It was a good creepy read. I've always thought it would make a good Twilight Zone episode.

"So, developers do the refactoring on the sly. If they are really honorable, they come in on their own time and implement architectural improvements on their own dime."

I used to have this attitude when I first started out, but I learned the hard way that the best thing a developer can do is leave well enough alone, "first, do no harm". This is especially true for hacked up, patched up code. Chances are, ugly as it is, that code is working as expected, especially if it's old, and you may not be able to figure out all of the subtle behavior. You will miss a few subtleties, and introduce bugs or unexpected behavior in a part of the system that was considered to be correct. In addition, you will have the client complaining "We only agreed to fix this one specific issue. What are you doing making all of these other changes?"

Clients and management what to know exactly where things stand. They don't like surprises.

Sounds like to me that Google's all grown up now.

Everyone is always chomping at the bit to work on something, so you need project managers to make sure that only the right work gets done. If you need a garden shed then don't let them build a skyscraper. Instead direct that extra energy to get some weeds pulled.

I think there may be something behind the idea of hearing voices in white noise. I leave my floor fan on all night in the hallway. Sometimes, I wake up thinking I am hearing garbled voices or screams. When I turn the fan off, it disappears. I wonder if this is an audio illusion. It may be the mind trying to make something sensible out of the fans white noise, in the same way your mind makes faces out of the clouds.

How much is 150 GB? How many hours of youtube or typical game playing will it take to use that up? How many windows updates will it take? If they want to limit traffic, they should provide some tools to help customers gain more control over their data usage. For example, lots of advertisers make heavy use of video on popular websites. I don't want stuff like that eating into my monthly cap, and I would like some tool or option to block that type of traffic.