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Comment Re:Analogy to Civil Engineers (Score 1) 196

Yes, they should. I keep websites accessible for this for a living. It's not at all hard to make a website accessible. You actually have to go out of your way to make a website inaccessible. When you keep accessibility as you template things, all you have to do is know the rules (WCAG 2.0 AA are the de facto standards) so that you don't ADD things that make your site inaccessible.

I guarantee to you that blind people buy hunting and camping equipment. They live full, well-rounded lives. They probably won't buy a lantern, but they will want a sleeping bag. They own TVs. Because TV shows and movies have audio descriptions for the blind, they get to participate in all sorts of pop culture activities. They are parents with sighted children that they need to buy things for.

I'm sure that your job rarely has you deal with people. Your people skills are shining clear, here. I have a blind friend who would call you "sighty." Like "whitey." But she's beyond colorblind.

The law is that if you create a place of public accommodation, it has to be accessible to everyone. There are NOT exceptions made for engineers building places of public accommodation. Your thoughts on this matter are blatantly discriminatory and you would get sued into the ground and lose a lot of money if anyone ever sues you.

Comment Face time (Score 2) 587

Cog making is fine and good anywhere, but, honestly, many bosses want to be able to hold someone's feet to the fire. Someone in the room. Someone in the room with people in their room. If you have a product that requires specific communication and intense deadlines, being able to look someone in the eye is most of the justification for a premium. Managers don't get paid for results — they get paid for the appearance of results. They justify your expense to justify their own expense.

Comment Re:Yes. (Score 3, Insightful) 184

One has to assume a baseline of understanding with one's readers. Take it as a given that a journalist is a competent user of the English language*, and also take it as a given that basic research has pulled together information for a story*, but the jargon used by specialists is about 50/50 worth using or explaining. This guy is out of his gourd if he wants everyone everywhere to either understand industry-specific jargon or STFU. If a researcher can't explain his shit without jargon, then he probably doesn't have a good grasp of it himself. I mean, Einstein explained relativity with both raw math and simple analogies. If you've got something more complicated than relativity to explain and you can't do it without jargon, then fine. But if you're worried about having to use an extra eight words to explain your protein concoction, the, well, the STFU is on you.

*I realize that this is not always the case.

Comment Re:Easier headline... (Score 1) 550

No, it's on my resume. I even still use references from the company ... just not the big boss. I mean, the point was that I had co-workers and immediate supervisors who were good, honest, hardworking people that I very much did not want to screw by leaving too quickly, thus the long notice. But the upper management ... they were douche bags, and everybody who worked there knew it. I blew up that bridge, no doubt, but I wouldn't go back to work for those people under any circumstances. And I have never had any blowback from my exit. Partially because I left and started my own business. Frankly, that's a much worse thing to put on your resume. If you worked for yourself for five years, people assume that you won't be a team player or that you'll try to run the show. And durning that five years I was on my own, almost all the upper management (all the ones I had problems with) at the company I was at has gone somewhere else, so really there is no one out there to bad mouth me. It didn't cost me anything but was wonderfully cathartic.

Comment Re:Easier headline... (Score 1) 550

Well, honestly, yes. I spent a lot of my remaining time there bringing people up to speed on the ongoing and entrenched things I was doing. The funniest consequence of them deciding to bolt the doors on me was that even before my final conversation with HR my system user ID had been deleted. (I worked second shift and knew I'd been fired because I stopped getting emails from work at about 1 p.m., three hours before I was supposed to go in for work.) With my user ID deleted, several mission-critical scripts that I had written over the years simply stopped working, and so at 11 p.m. (an hour after all these automated things were supposed to run) they assumed that I had somehow managed to sabotage the system remotely. Had I been given another month there, I would have migrated all those scripts to a different user ID and it would have all been fine. Instead, they just shot themselves in a foot and accused me of pulling the trigger. That's what happens when you work for dickheads.

Comment Re:Easier headline... (Score 1) 550

No, they did not pay me for the time I would have worked. And, yes, this is an at-will state. They had to pay unemployment penalties. I definitely burnt bridges, and I certainly didn't change anything for anyone who was still there. The only thing that happened from my exit interview was that I really got to tell the boss to his face what I thought of him, which was glorious.

Comment Re:Easier headline... (Score 1) 550

Actually, for what it was worth, I had been worked so hard for so long that I had two months' vacation to take and had to use one month before I started losing vacation time. I took my month and then realized that I was really, really overworked and didn't need that job to be busy, successful and happy. We had a few projects at work that I wanted to complete, but didn't want to keep working there forever. So when I returned from my month off I notified my immediate superior that I'd decided to leave. He asked when that would be, I said, well, I suppose in three months when this project is done. He said OK and that was the end of it. Until they wanted an exit interview.

Comment Re:Easier headline... (Score 5, Interesting) 550

I once told my employer that I was leaving in three months. I honestly didn't know what I was doing when I left, but it had gotten so bad for me that I just had to leave. Telling them that I was going was a great weight off my chest. About a month before I was going to leave, they scheduled an exit interview for me. I told them what I thought about what was going on. I also packed what little personal items I had and took them home with me. When I showed up the next day, I had been bared from entering the building except to go directly to HR, where the president was waiting to talk to me to tell me why my resignation was being accepted early. I insisted that he was firing me, because for me nothing was different this day than the day before. If knowing how I felt makes that much difference to them, then they are firing me. So, as was eventually backed up by the state employment agency, they fired me (and still insisted that they were just taking my resignation early). Did I burn a bridge? Not one that I ever wanted to go back across unless they were willing to rebuild it from their end. It was the environment that they created that made me decide to leave, and as long as it was as petty and difficult as it was when I left, I don't care to return.

Comment Re:Global warming has been offset recently (Score 4, Informative) 1367

The Wall Street Journal has published one of the most offensive, untruthful, twisted reviews of what scientists think of climate change; the WSJ Lies about the facts and twists the story to accommodate the needs of head-in-the-sand industrialists and 1%ers; The most compelling part of their argument, according to them, is that the editorial has been signed by 16 scientists.

http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2012/01/two_incontrovertible_things_an.php

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