The key difference is anyone actually POINTING a cell phone camera at you is very likely taking a picture/video. Extending that to anyone LOOKING at you and it's going to be a very paranoid world...

Wait, I thought it was 0118 999 881 999 119 7253?

es a Touch Tone fee. Bell Canada has not moved the extra fee for touch tone service into their service packages. I cannot get a new pulse line, nor can I have touch tone removed from my line. There are customers who still had only pulse and so they did not get charged this fee, but you had to actively refuse touch tone service when it was being rolled out. This was ~25 years ago.

Almost as bad as the AT&T white page listing fees. It's $0.35/mo to be listed in the phone book, and $0.45/mo NOT to be listed. Last time I signed up for AT&T landline service (which was years ago - only the stupid or Internet deprived subscribe to AT&T landlines these days) they asked me which extra service I wanted and I said "neither". I knew the eventual outcome but it was fun acting confused for a few minutes while the service rep struggled to "explain" it to me :)

The first time someone at the next urinal wearing Google Glass winks at you, you will understand (unless you routinely have people pointing smartphone cameras at your junk in the restroom...)

Not sure about the singularity part, but to me it's definitely all of the above (well, maybe except for "short-sighted", unless that was meant literally after all of the Google Glass users come down with mysterious ocular syndromes).

Man, you must have had some *horrible* educational experiences...

For me (and I assume many others) there is (at least) a 4. which could be more important than the other 3 combined: to allow you to explore new ideas, develop skills to write, analyze, criticize, debate, research, etc, to get a chance to study other fields from experts who you may never have the same level of access to again, and basically to broaden your perspective for *life* more than your *career*. Though I may not be explicitly using what I learned in my creative writing, psychology, archaeology, classical history, physics, organic chemistry, etc classes in my daily work, I found them fascinating and I'm sure subconsciously use what I learned in them all the time.

I know many colleges these days have thrown much of that experience out the window trying to "prepare" students for "their careers" after they graduate (which I suppose if part of your point!) and IMO that is a tragedy. It actually does go back to Bloomberg's original point, as well - colleges are becoming factories to give everyone the same basic "education" in topics students could have just learned on their own from a book, rather than actually teaching them what they traditionally did - how to think *creatively* - if you can't *add* to the body of human knowledge why bother spending 4+ years rehashing what everyone else already knows...

It's a job, if you were happy doing it they wouldn't pay you.

So, no one who is getting paid for their work can be happy doing it? Yeah, *brilliant* insight there...

I completely agree with your first sentence, and completely disagree with your second.

At most *decent* universities, CS degrees ARE supposed to be able to program. Are they experts in the field on graduation at age ~22? Rarely. But they have the tools they need to start their new career (whether it goes anywhere is a different story, of course). I took CS 20 years ago and spent 100's of hours writing software as a part of various projects and homework assignments, as did all of my peers. In fact, one of my required classes was designing, documenting, and implementing a fairly large software project in a team of 5 from scratch.

Of course, I learned a lot more in various jobs over the years, as well - but that's no different from most other careers, whether it's medicine (residency) or plumbing (apprenticeship). You learn the basic techniques in a classroom with some amount of practical exercises, and you become an expert in the field from doing it on the job.

Actually, in the Bay Area (where many of the "rich engineers" in the US live) it's more like $100-120 an hour. And people pay it. Why? Because they are mostly *software* engineers and are scared shitless (possibly literally) of doing it themselves. Sure, the plumbers are not making as much as a doctor but they are making a solid middle class income in a part of the country where that can be pretty damn difficult without a degree.

I'm not saying you don't have a point in there somewhere, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the number of high school grads considering med school vs. plumbing school is pretty near ZERO. Bloomberg specifically said he wasn't talking about the honors students who excelled in high school, he was talking about the poor students who were going to limp their way through community college with nothing much to show for it when they finished.

And plumbing is just an example - though a fairly good one - of a career with fairly good compensation and excellent job security. There are plenty of other similar skilled trade jobs. But the key word there is *skilled* - it's the GOOD tradespeople making the good money, and it takes a lot of hard work and common sense to be good at these things.

So, do they vaccinate the children with ground up copies of Windows DVDs, or are they in fact using the VAST MAJORITY of the money to buy, oh, I don't know... vaccines?

And actually - could you provide any reputable citation that a charity receiving funds from the Gates Foundation is prohibited from buying any non-Microsoft computer products? I have seen a few case of donating Microsoft software, but nothing requiring purchases. Honestly, though, in the end who gives a shit? If you give someone money to buy software or give them free software to help run their charity operations, either way it's still CHARITY.

Yes, you just described how insurance works. The idea isnt that "you get your money back" (it only works financially when people statistically do NOT get their money back, after all), its that youre reducing the risk of a gigantic lump sum cost that you cannot pay.

Yeah, you are not the first person to reply with that but I can say is, DUUUH... :) I know how insurance works. The point was with single-payer that sudden cutoff doesn't happen - it's still a shared risk model, but it's now shared over 100% of the population and shared over your entire life, regardless of your short term circumstances. Since it's so widely shared and non-profit, you will tend to get more efficiency (and before you go saying "government efficiency, hah!" - go look at the numbers first - the overhead costs of single payer countries are for the most part WAY lower than the overhead of US private healthcare insurance).

And to go one further, with single payer you don't have for-profit insurance companies dropping you on a technicality or raising your premium beyond a level you can afford once they do have to provide a large payout after your years of previous unused coverage.

You do have the potential for more bureaucracy, sure. But to be honest the last time I had to go to the emergency room it took over 6 months (and numerous threats made to me for collection, even though my liability was clearly stated up front as a $150 copay) before the various incompetent departments at the hospital were able to recover their fees from the incompetent private insurance company. The government does not have a monopoly on inefficiency and mismanagement.

Definitely sounds like your manager had inferiority (and other) issues to insult you for a typo - and your spell checker conclusion was too reasonable, I'd have just told him to piss off ;)

But I really wouldn't try to extend his defective personality to anyone who has ever managed personnel and/or built a successful business - many of them actually do care about their employees. I have come across the occasional bad manager in my career, but also a few who have been great mentors and friends. And I have several friends and former colleagues who work or have worked for Larry and Sergei (one of them now reports to him directly at Google X), and they generally sound like great bosses to work for.

Yes, actually. As PhD students they worked a TAs and research assistants for the cost of their tuition. Besides the fact that you don't get accepted as a CS PhD student at Stanford just because you "are privileged".

My girlfriend's dad was a JAG in the USAF (man, does he have some interesting stories... I think my favorite was defending a guy who decided he was going to get a dishonorable discharge by sitting on top of a Minuteman silo in Montana and lighting up a joint...), and then later became a public defender. His total compensation in the Air Force was higher than what he made as a public defender in a rural county.

Then again, being a rural area their 4 bedroom house cost about 1/10 of it would in somewhere like California, so they were still solidly in the middle class. I guess my point being, $99k (or even somewhere in that general ballpark) is actually way more than the national average (which is what, something like $49k for a family?) and in many parts of the country that does afford, like you said, a pretty comfortable lifestyle.

How is that relevant to quoting numbers from a web site (that at least provided a lot more insight into compensation levels than your useless snarky comment)?

I see some of your recent posts were about healthcare and electric cars. You obviously are not a doctor or work for Tesla, so if you think being an expert in the field is necessary to post on slashdot why did you even bother commenting on either of those topics?