Bravo, sir. Bravo.

He took our jerbs!

I used to work in Engineering -- this takes me back. Who owns those building now? Celestica? The new Cray spin-off?

Back when I was an intern with SGI, we took a day off* to visit the Chippewa Falls Museum**, which has a good-size collection of Control Data and Cray Supercomputer relics along with other items relevant to my interests***.

I got to poke around inside of an original Cray-1. To me, the most interesting thing about it was just how insanely packed the internal wiring was; I'd been expecting the intricate plumbing, but the sheer volume of wires running from Point A to Point B was really impressive. I mentioned this to the guy giving the tour, who turned out to be a retired manufacturing supervisor -- he told me that the hardest part of his job was finding women with both enough skill and small enough hands to handle the internal wiring jobs. The thing had been assembled *by hand*, every connection in this crazy bulk of wired clipped or soldered into place one after another.

Anyhow, after that I sat on the couch. It was not comfy.

* My boss was *pissed* about this -- she went around telling anyone that would listen that "interns are here to work, not go sightseeing". This marks the one and only time in my career that anyone in HR has ever done anything worthwhile, calling her up and telling her this was part of the program and she didn't get a vote.
** Seymour Cray moved to Chippewa Falls, his hometown, when he was still with Control Data because he felt most middle managers wouldn't want to drive that far just to bother him. Visionary man, that Seymour Cray.
*** Stuff from Leinenkugals.

At seven planets, I'm reasonably sure this qualifies as the *second* richest planetary system we're aware of.

"Should event occur in urban areas.... Jesus.... (haunted) That's.. classified."

Seriously, people are complete and total retards. And I mean that in the 3rd grade definition, not in any clinical sense. This should not be news to anyone, especially those of us who've been kicking around the internet for more than a couple of weeks.

Whereas some people see disturbing potential side effects of our best attempts to regulate brain chemistry, I see a business opportunity and a way to meet heavily-tattooed hot short girls.

I realize that this being Slashdot and this being a bully thread we're going to get a lot of "woe is me" replies, but on the flip side kids don't become bullies just because they wake up and decide it'd be a fun way to pass the time. Based on my childhood sample, they do it because:

(a) It's the conflict resolution method they learned at home, either from dad beating the hell out of mom or both parents laying into the kid, or
(b) They're screwed up emotionally, often from abuse, and as children don't have any idea how to deal with it.

One of the bullies who caused me (and a lot of other kids) a lot of grief in middle school turned out to have been molested by his uncle. Another lived in a trailer park and had no mom and a dad who was constantly falling down drunk and, I suspect, physically abusive to him. These are just the two I know for sure about, I'm betting that this isn't some wildly exotic circumstance.

In retrospect, I'm the one who got off easy. What those poor kids had to deal with was far, far worse than having their books slapped out of their hands or the occasional bumps and bruises.