Oh no, not at all! The beauty of startups is having motivated, talented people willing to work long hours for peanuts!

Oh you mean the beauty of startups for the *employees*... :P

At a what? Are you at a 21-year-old company or are you at a startup?

Or are you at a 21-year-old company that pretends to be a startup when they say things like "hey guys we're a startup so can you work this weekend?"

This one time this guy died in a car crash and he was driving a Volvo.

Therefore motorbikes are safer than Volvos.

This sysadmin/scripter/system architect/DBA role exists in virtually every company that has a core business other than IT or software development. Even in a very large multinational, there's more utility in having one "Mr Wizard" in each business unit than there is in having a room full of software developers somewhere far away from the rest of the business.

It really is a support role and it's more an outgrowth of system administration than it is saddling your brightest software guy with managing the mail server. Of course, it's possible to get stuck in that role because there's nowhere to go from there, but it's a niche that suits some people. If it doesn't suit you, then move.

It's also a distinct role from the "do everything guy" at a startup, because at a startup everyone is multitasking and as the startup expands, new people are hired to take on some of these roles. DevOps is a role in itself.

Who are controlled in turn by an even more mysterious organisation: ROUS.

But I doubt they exist.

Sir! I think we've just identified the Babelfish Bandit!

Just physically unplug the hard drive before booting off a live CD? I have to admit, though, that my first reaction was also "Anonymously produced live CD promises to protect your secrets? Sounds legit."

And this is the issue with every single "flying car" prototype. The efficiency of a rotorcraft is determined by its disc loading. All of the VTOL "flying car" designs have a comparatively tiny disc area, and thus a ridiculous disc loading. With enough power you can make something like that, but in terms of engineering complexity, cost, and reliability it'll be far closer to a Harrier Jump Jet than it will to the Jetsons' car. That SkyTran thing seems pretty cool. Basically an autonomous pod transport system a la every sci-fi metropolis ever.

Some of them even go to 12.

A friend of mine recently re-joined Facebook after a year or two of not using it. He found that despite our best efforts, he was still enough out of the loop that he was missing a heap of social events.

tl;dr Not playing only works if your friends don't use Facebook as a primary communication medium.

Is this still as much the case given the trend towards increasingly parallel multi-core CPUs?

You have to take into account the potential of the new technology as well. Consider the transition from DC to AC power - initially there wasn't much in it, because voltages were low and transmission distances were short. It was only after the whole electricity industry scaled up that AC really showed its strengths... but the potential was there and so it was a worthwhile investment even early on.

I prefer to use power-of-two values for my length measurements, too. At 2 cm = 1 inch, I'm way more inches than you.

Yeah, our first x86 computer (in 1993) originally had a 40mb hard drive, and that was mid-range.

So don't you think that the telemetry shutting off BEFORE the plane dropped off radar is even MORE suspicious?

If they'd shut off at the same time, then kaboom. If they'd shut off after the plane dropped off radar, then maybe some electronics was battery backed or whatever and was still transmitting until it got waterlogged and sank. But shutting off 20 minutes before the plane dropped off radar would indicate deliberate sabotage.