I am still wanting to see a viable long term storage solution for the waste, with at least one example of a spent rod finding a final and safe resting place. Otherwise the tail risk of nuclear power is just a myth.

Twice a week, ride the bike to work the other days.

I have opposite problem. I left me cell as an emergency contact on my out of office reply, and now boss man keeps using it instead of either me desk phone, email, or the lab phone. I previously strictly only answeered calls from my wife (who knows only to call me for very important issues during the day), and had previously not read text until the end of the day. I've missed enough impromptu meeting he called via text message that I had to take that off of silent, which is very annoying for all the other texts that come in during the day. Several gentle "cease and desist" conversations have not gotten through. I am tempted to send him a bill to see if that gets through.

Vector diplays on some old test equipment are fantastic, just like how pen plotter plots still have something special going for them.

A friend of mine got me a really nice copy of Bode's book, which I now treasure. A look into the minds of the pioneers of your field can be fascinating.

Game play still is more important than FPS, see: RAGE.

A good game with low FPS is tragic, but a lame game at even the highest FPS still just sucks.

Me: High school dropout with GED, BSEE, year of unfinished master's (couldn't stand the though to another year to jump through all the bogus thesis hoops). I work as a design engineer, and do pretty good at it.

Older Brother: Finished HS (was a good warning sign for me that it could destroy enthusiasm spending 4 years with burnouts), 6 years of loans to get a Journalism and Broadcasting degree that he never really wanted in the first place. Now he's a house husband...

Much younger half-Sister: Just finishing here AA, which was a struggle for her. Sadly she took after her mother and has to work very hard for everything she learns (life lessons included).

Perhaps it is a short sighted negotiating tactic to loot the place while asking the workers to "take one for the team". Destroying good will with the workers can have consequences, and it is rather simplistic to 100% blame the unions for drawing a line after seeing the boss class run up excesses in the middle of harsh and painful negotiations. Hopefully future negotiations will benefit from the fear that employees will not always do ANYTHING to keep their ever downward spiraling jobs.

A three year old isn't trying to make a living using this crap. I'm not THAT old (35) and I am still hating life pretty bad just getting my job done with Office and it's Ribbon interface crap after over a year of being moved to it. Sure a 3-year old could figure that out, but ask them to be efficient and do real work with a real deadline. Windows 8 strikes me as more vomitous spew from whatever bozo thought up the Ribbon crap. Oh well.

Or Clippy Mobile as a competitor for Siri.

Wish I had mod points.

Pay is only one piece of a large puzzle. My experience is as follows:

1) HR people can't pick out a good engineer's resume out of a stack to save their life. Worse, is they often can't even post the job in a good location. I was at a company that wanted to hire another copy of me (RF/Microwave Design Engineer, a somewhat rare critter) and I could not find the posting even after the hiring manager told me where to look. If HR is illiterate in your key growth areas you are SOL.

2) Pay is not in my top 3 concerns, and I understand that it is for many other folks. Getting jerked around because my pre-planned vacation (5 months warning) now conflicts with your MS Project fiction should not result in heated words with my manager. Employees need time off, and it should not be a major hassle to take it. If the project is so fragile that a one week absence is so detrimental, you have a staffing or vision problem, not a scheduling problem.

3) My weekends are not fair game except in rare crunches. Sorry, but no. Telling me "You wouldn't do well at a startup." won't get very far in winning me over, especially if you used "need more time with family" as the explanation as to why you left a startup to come work here (a non-startup, FYI).

4) Letting me have beer a day with lunch at my desk won't kill your bottom line, but would be worth 2% salary to me to have a more enjoyable time at work.

5) When I come in on my day off for 4 hours, don't bitch that I changed my timecard to reflect I worked that day. I'm salary, I worked. Telling me to put in 4 hours of PTO will not win you brownie points for the next time you foul up and need me to cancel a date with my wife.

Seriously? Solder GUN? Like telling a dentist to do a root canal with a machete...

Thanks! It is nice to read that I'm not the only nutjob running this thought experiment.

How do we know that all galaxies are made of matter, and that the universe isn't littered with some galaxies made out of antimatter? How would we be able to tell if a galaxy was made of anti-matter due to a different rounding error than occurred in our neck of the woods?

There was great buzz when it first went online, but they actively kept folks from signing up without an invite for a couple months. I tried to check it out, but was rejected, as were many folks I suspect. Google didn't want me, why go back?

Google has done this before too. I just lose interest if they come out with a half finished Beta service, which they have a track record of then not following through with. Apple has this side of things mostly down, zip your lips until you ship. With little Apple generates over-inflated expectations and mostly well executed non-Beta products at launch you have a lot less chance of "Meh" in the marketplace.