What an awful waste of both Scotch and Parma Ham. The high alcohol content of the Scotch mixes with the high salt content of the ham and utterly kills your palate. You'll taste neither with any acuity. With the Parma Ham, you're much better off with a semi-dry Prosecco. With the Scotch, don't eat anything if it's good Scotch. If it's bad Scotch, don't drink it, it's not worth the liver damage.

It might be scary, but the graphics resolution is really really good. As is the surround sound!

How can we have an intelligent discussion about the Cost-Effectiveness of older programmers vs. younger programmers without a method to measure programmer productivity? The only thing measurable is the "Cost." The "Effectiveness" part is left out completely. When you come up with a generally accepted method for measuring programmer Effectiveness, please let us know. Until then, I predict, anti-old-programmer bias in hiring and layoffs will continue in most organizations.

How does an individual programmer deal with this bias in her own career plan?

Option 1: Burrow deep into a niche technology upon which one or more corporations depend for tens of millions (or more) dollars in profit. Ideally this niche technology will be as attractive to current CSci students as learning COBOL is today. Show up for work everyday. You'll have employment opportunities well into your 70's.

Option 2: Start a small business. Software businesses have notoriously low start-up capital costs. If you can identify an unmet or under-served software need of a number of small or mid-sized businesses and work with potential customers to come up good solution, you can create a business that will feed you and your family until you no longer want to work.

Option 3: Bag groceries, deliver pizzas, work seasonally at the post office or in retail or try real estate or insurance sales or used car sales when you're 55 trying to survive to 65 and Social Security/Medicare.

I've seen a large number of techies (not just programmers, but Engineers as well) choosing Option 3 by default because they didn't want to stare the grim reality in the face.

>> If women want equal rights, then there should be no feminists.
First, women have equal rights. Second, feminists are people who hold the radical notion that women are people too.

Australia lags the rest of the developed world by about 25 years in relations between the sexes. China? Maybe more like 50.

>> Even though we have freedom of speech, we run the risk of losing our livelihoods if we say something that might offend someone somewhere.

Freedom of speech, as enshrined in the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution protects us from our government. It does not protect us from our fellow citizens or employers. If you say something nasty to me about my wife, whether it is true or not, the 1st Amendment does not protect you when I punch you in the nose. Laws against assault may apply, but they are not based on the 1st Amendment.

>> If someone can come up with a disparaging name to call a female that is not sexist, please suggest one,

Since you asked: Jerk or asshole both fit the bill.

This is the best advice. Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you and you may be rewarded in the end. When the manager for this company realizes you've done diligent work up to the last second of your contract and that manager moves on to another company after the newbie fails to live up to expectations, he may call you and offer you more work at an even better rate. If you hold out on the replacement and don't give him full training (that you are indeed being paid to do), then you ruin your reputation with the newbie (who knows where he'll end up?) and the manager(s).

If you don't like games that require internet connections without needing internet connections, don't buy them. That's really simple. If you don't like EA's other business practices, boycott EA by all means. Plenty of MMORPGs like WoW, EQ2, Rift, SWTOR and EVE require internet connections, but of course they actually derive benefit from the connections and their servers usually work.

And they're doing it all with components built by Lucas!

What does Google's 1 gbps service in KC cost? $70 / month? I'd pay that $70 and throw all cable executives' and their offspring to the wolves in about ... well, there I did it while you were reading.

I've never been a MS-hater. I even owned a significant number of shares of MSFT from 1995 to about 2005. I've was moderately happy with MS Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint...even Access sometimes) from about 1995 to about 2008. That's more than a dozen years. The apps did more than I wanted. Far more. The three problems with MS Office: Too many features. Too much UI change. Managing document files is boring. Too many features makes it hard to find the features I want. Have you ever even heard of "The Spike" much less used it? Changing the UI to make it pretty or modern every 5 years just makes me have to re-learn something that was working fine. Losing documents and spreadsheets to inevitable hard disk crashes, then having to find them in backups, just plain sucks. Google Apps solved all this for me and when MSDN subscriptions including Office licenses went up in price last year, I just stopped bothering with Office. Google Apps has enough features to be useful. I've given up on Access and do all my database stuff with SQL Server or similar databases. I don't miss office. Microsoft needs to reinvent itself. It is the next AOL. Existing only for people too lazy to bother with a better alternative in most of the product categories.

Software that did not function as intended? Such an amazing surprise!

What the duck?!?!?

Just brine the poultry in a solution of 1/2 c kosher salt, 1/4 c sugar and 1 quart (liter) of water for 1-3 hours prior to cooking and you should be able to avoid that onerous basting.

http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/news/20090323/7-rules-for-eating

Segway seemed like a great idea....but it just lowered the physical activity level of people who stopped walking. Thus making them fatter. What a cunning plan to sell stomach evacuators.

This was written by someone who knew Mr. Swartz. http://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html