I almost forgot: if the miner's pver 30, and doesn't get a BS degree, what HR moron is even going to consider them? Who's actually going to *hire* them, when so many people with a lot of experience and degrees (and are over 30 or 40) are having trouble finding and keeping work?

Retraining does *NOTHING* if you don't have any reasonable expectation of finding a job.... (Oh, and you should expect to pick up yourself and maybe your family from where your family's lived for maybe generations, and move somewherre else....)

                  mark "come the Revolution, we'll lead HR depts into the parking lot, throw asphault on them, and PAVE THEM
                                            INTO THE ROADWAY, so that they'll provide *some* social utility...."

calls this absurd".

Dear Rupert F.* Murdoch,

      I realize that you're an 0.01% Australian who bought citizenship in the US, so perhaps you might have one of your lawyers explain the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution, that mentioned indentured servitude.

      And then you can tell us how all of *your* employees get 10% over base salary while they're on-call, and what your *official* comp time policy is. Oh, and about the annual bonuses *all* of *them* get.

      Alternatively, FOAD. I haven't answered any since I worked for a Baby Bell in the mid-nineties, and have no intention of ever doing so.

                    mark

* fscking

Someone who wants to set up one or more test boxes, and let the END USERS try it out and get used to it? Doesn't that violate what MBAs are taught, that only upper managers know enough to design stuff (even if they've just been hired from another industry)?

Seriously, I'd start out with several boxes, and *ask* if someone(s) would be willing to try it out, noting that XP *must* go away. I'd also recommend *NOT* using a bleeding-edge Linux like, Fedora, or any of them that have tons of updates almost daily. Go for an enterprise distro (ok, I'm biased: we use CentOS (== RHEL), becuase the enterprise distros' big emphasis is on STABILITY, and reliability, not the latestgreatestneetk3wlcrap. Note also that enterprise distros have five or 10 *years* of support, so you'll see the bugfixes and security patches for that length of time.

                    mark

As a personal side note, when did the GOP bring up a bill to force all insurance companies to offer medical coverage to *all*, and not refuse due to "pre-existing conditions"? Did I miss that?

Did they also have, in the same bill that I missed, where > 80% (or is it > 90%) of the insurance money was to be spent on healthcare, and 10% on "administrative costs" (including CEO's bonuses)?

                  mark, in the home of the cowards and suckers

You also can't teach some Kewl White Boys how to code, either - over the decades, I've had to deal with utter *crap*, with inconsistancies, lack or piss-poor error handling, and on and on.

Current pet peeve: a few months ago, I had to build BioPerl as an rpm at work. It took, on and off, about a month - some modules had hard-coded /usr/perl, /usr/bin/perl/ /usr/local/bin/perl into them; then there were the documented circular dependencies....

Oh, and if you want to teach everyone to code, and give them a job (yours?), then who are you going to get to fix your car, or your plumbing?

              mark

Flat files? What was the world's *largest* database, at least as of 6 or 8 years ago, is Daytona, with trillions of records. It's Bellcore, it's flat files, they write quesies in C... and it's the record of every phonecall ever made, back to "Come here, Mr. Watson, I need you".

                  mark

The ones that were fixed by the updates for all RHEL-derived distros, like CentOS, a month ago?

                  mark

What data and metadata do they have on the President, and his advisors, and the Cabinet? I mean, if they were listening to Prime Minister Merkel of Germany, and on, and on, why wouldn't they listen locally, if only to ensure their own funding?

                mark

Given the way so much stuff - including internal to companies I've worked for, no way. Links work... if you're on the internal network, not outside. Software runs SO FAST... until you're not on the intranet, and then it's a dog.

And developers always get and test on the hottest machines or servers... never mind the 95% of the folks going to that site, or using that software, are 1-2 generations of hardware back, and again, it runs like a dog, or requires you to buy new hardware.

So if you did it on superdooperpowerfast cloud hardware, you'd still not see how *users* see it.

                    mark

So, you want to pay, um, $400 every other year, or $800 for both, as the cameras break, or get broken, or the software goes buggy, or one of the vulnerabilities are found, and someone hacks your rear vision?

And for the moron who says get rid of all mirrors, I want your car taken away from you, and you banned from driving for the rest of your life.

              mark "for our next trick, we'll do the same for the fools doing their makeup while driving"

The US is *still* doing this crap, presumably to cater to the folks who were for the dictator Batista, or the Mafia, who's still pissed at loosing all the money from those casinos?

Why is the US so in bed with China, if those in the "intelligence community" (for values of each of those words approaching zero as a limit) are so desperate to bring down China?

I want my tax dolars wasted on this back.

                  mark

Having just done something very un-slashdot-like (well, it *used* to be what a lot of us did, but not the last few years), i noted that it was hitting in the midst of a famine... which is when a) many, many people would have weakened immune systems, and b) did you unbelievably rich folks, who can eat three meals a day (or more)(or supersized) without thinking about it think that the concept of stewed rat was only in, say, Monty Python?

And if the fleas hit the folks catching them, and then it mutated, or there were both strains.....

                    mark

94% of waiters will be replaced with automation? Ah, they didn't even do that in the old Horn and Hardart Automats. Do you *really* want all your meals out to be buffet style? Or is that all of them are prepacked and they nuke it for you? In that case, why go out?

Or, for that matter, would you trust a completely automated fast food joint? Wait until the first lawsuits over someone getting sick, or dying, becuase some sensor went off.

Reatil salespeople? You mean, like in the supermarkets with self-check? Those folks who come over to deal with when it goes off - they're not people?

And, for that matter, if you raise the minimum wage - and do NOT try to claim that most folks working minimum wage are teenagers living at home; that's an outright and provable lie - some of those folks might be able to go down to one or two jobs, instead of two or three. Or, if you raise it to a living wage, as some cities have done, or are doing, even more can go down to holding down one job.

But so many of you are stupid fools who think that working 80 hour weeks means you're Important, rather than that your manager sees you have no life whatever of your own, and that they own you.

                    mark

--
"There's a sucker born every minute" - PT Barnum

I have long said I preferred elegant to clever code. When I get a phone call on Friday, at 16:15, or 02:00 some night, I want to leave on time, or go back to sleep that night, *NOT* spend hours figuring out how this bit of cleverness is broken, or how someone's "the code's more compact!" is suitable for entry in the Obfuscated C contest.

But to write elegant code, you need to a) know what you're trying to accomplish; b) tell your manager, or whoever, that no, you can't make that kind of major change without their $$$ signoff on a change to the schedule, complete with specing out the change, and its affects on everything else; c) having the time to write, test, and debug the code, and this does *NOT* include drinking a six-pack of Mountain Dew a day, and doing 80+ hour weeks.

Yes, I *have* had jobs like that. And 70+ or 80+ hour weeks result in a *lot* less "productivity" than the old 40-hour week (and try looking up where that number came from... the name Ford may surprise you in that....).

                            mark "as opposed to managers w/ MBA, who think that you can point and click a good system"

The year before the US, under Bush and Cheney and Rummy, invaded and conquered Iraq (for no particulatly good reason), there was a naval exercise imitating the invasion.. Gen. Shinsecki, on the defending forces, blew up a number of ships, including, IIRC, an aircraft carrier, by sending small fishing vessels, much harder-to-hit targets than capital ships, in packed with HE.

My personal bet on this imitation Nimitz is that it's a target, to work out similarly effective attacks.

I know, no fun, nothing to laugh at....

                      mark