"I see here on your resume that you have SQL experience. Can you tell me about some of the SQL deployments and experience that you were doing in your last job? How did you integrate that into your business requirements?"

Its exactly THIS sort of question, which I'm getting a bit, which trips people up who self learn. I'm getting it with VMware... I had VMware experience building, maintaining, updating machines... but never anything server side, and never anything on the farm level of things like vMotion. After I was let go at end of contract after 5 years on build team/CMDB remediation team, all the interview screen questions tended to focus toward vmWare and Exchange. So, I went out, got myself a beefy machine, installed vSphere 5.1 on it, and have done quite a few things with it... but that experience means SQUAT when you're sitting in front of a board which includes interviewing manager, vmWare SME, and a couple other general members of the IT team who are trying to probe you for you BUSINESS level experience.

There's a heck of a lot difference between test lab, and business level, and interviewers can ferret that out REAL quick.

Now explain to me why all that work, which the typical user figures has been done by fairies or elves anyway, has any relevance to said user when he goes to get his battery changed? All he is going to care about is how much will it cost, how long will it take, and how much better will it be.

We truly stand on the shoulders of giants. Even a "simple" hammer or wheel isn't simple any more. There is serious research in both of those. And yet, I can still take a cash equivalent of one to three hours of my time and buy this device which literally has thousands of hours of research applied to it. It really is quite simple. Just like the tech switch between two different battery technologies.

So...what you're saying is, once a whole bunch of stuff has been done, and Tesla has approved a new type of battery, someone could take their Model S to the shop and simply have their battery tech switched, right? Sounds pretty simple from the consumer point of view - no more difficult than changing to winter tires.

Really, for the end consumer, this is no different than the switch from NiMH to Li-Ion in laptops. If you can't do it for your current one, you can certainly get it for your next one. If the chargers are made even half-decently, they can probably be upgraded, too. All those huge hurdles that are passed first are invisible to the end user.

Yes, and some people can't think of anything better to do on the weekend than destroying their livers and brains. Most of the people I've met find that game gets old by their mid-thirties, if not sooner. As for an increased sample size improving the odds of finding a suitable mate, I don't see how casual sex helps with finding someone who is emotionally compatible, and bagging women doesn't usually imply that you're trying to get to know them.

Physical attraction is a great tool from an evolutionary perspective, especially when you note what "physically attractive" means from era to era (generally, healthy and able to provide for oneself). It tends to improve the chances of your genes getting passed along, which is what evolution is all about. Long-term relationships aren't as important to the successful passing along of genes (I think about five years has been generally accepted as being enough up until the last few generations of humanity). That said, my main requirement for a long-term partner wasn't primarily the viability of her genes, although I find her attractive enough. I like to think that I can work past my instincts to a certain degree, although for all we know that's just a counter-culture instinct evolution has raised to keep mixing in interesting traits.

Marriage isn't about "bagging women" or getting into bed with them, so your whole point and attitude has no overall bearing on the conversation, except the part about potential age-equivalent mates being fewer. I won't even say more "crazies" because I've seen enough people with problems from a variety of age groups over the years. Moreover, marriages where one person just tells the other "what they want to hear" are probably going to be unsatisfying and unsuccessful. Do the world a favor and stick with your series of superficial, commitment-free relationships.

Ladies, not all men think like him. Some of us are willing to tell a woman what we're looking for once we've determined a relationship with her has a chance, as well as being open, honest, and (at least trying to be) considerate. I may not get as many dates as the parent poster, but sometimes quantity doesn't have a quality all its own (and it's still often enough that I remember how everything works).

So, what's the reason in your conspiracy-riddled world that we use rats and mice for so much of the basic research modern scientists do? It certainly can't be all the other commonalities between rats and voles, can it?

Monogamy is a cultural fact, going back thousands of years (same for polygamy). Finding an acceptable model is the first step in seeing if it also has a biological basis. And here's this handy little creature with the trait we want to study and a short lifespan. Even if they're wrong about the connection, this wouldn't be the first time scientists went down a dead end, to the profit of society.

Moreover, there are plenty of mammals that I find tasty and enjoyable. The sentience level is more of an issue to me (which others can argue about, too).

I'm not aware of any courses that teach most of those issues, and the ones that do (psychology and political science) aren't really found in a technical degree. As for the rest, any course would be at least halfway out of date before the syllabus was written up. Sounds like they're all better dealt with in real-world personal development, often called work experience.

Seriously, sounds like you're more appreciative of a trade school program, which certainly has it's strengths. In fact, some of them can be quite good, if that's what you're looking for.

I would like to believe you're trolling, but I suspect you aren't.

The idea behind abstraction is that it doesn't matter what you learned, it's how you learned to think about the problem. It's the difference between knowing how to use MS Word and knowing how to use a word processor, knowing how to use MS Excel and knowing how to use spreadsheets. The idea is to teach you how to solve problems, not how to solve problems in a certain field.

This can be done in a more 'practical' area, but the beauty of math is that your set of tools are limited, a successful result is limited or unique, and the process used to arrive at your result can be understood by anyone who actually grasps the math concepts. Once you can solve a problem with those restrictions, little things like user requirements and process flow become trivial.

I'm certainly biased - I love math. After all, it's the language that describes the universe.

This is one of my greatest grievances with MS Office. Not only do they fundamentally change the file format just about every version (even when there is no notable difference between version besides UI and two or three features used by a handful of people worldwide), they also seem to have a terrible track record of opening most old versions of their own documents! This never made sense to me, except possibly as a ploy to force user upgrades. It gave me a strong preference to abandon their Office software, especially since Open/Libre Office does a decent job on most MS Office documents anyway.

That said, if you have a heavily formatted MS Word doc, you're better off using the same version of MS Word to open it. I find this is typically an issue with internal office documents. If I get a heavily formatted Word doc from a client, I have to wonder why they want me to be able to change the text of something important that they sent me. PDFs are my preferred word processor format of choice for inter-company documents.

Wow, I read that, and the argument I came up with is that we shouldn't feed meat to herbivores. Cows aren't bad - cows eating cows are bad.

This, if any of you remember, is one of the key items of the Star Trek holodeck. The Technical manual showed users on an omnidirectional treadmill (probably using forcefields rather than an actual treadmill), which the holodeck routed to wherever there was space if there were more than one user and they were in different locations of the program.

And yet, the average for being killed by a terrorist in Massachusetts in the last year is about 1 per 100 days. Which is still far lower than traffic fatalities.

Not saying I disagree with the police actions, or the desire to stay home when a loose nut is about, but it's still not a major factor over any span of time.

Let's say you have a patent on a 10-speed bike (2 gears in front, 5 in back). When it's about to expire you file one for an 18-speed bike (3 gears in front, 6 in back). How innovative is this?

I'm not sure how close the changes to the drug are compared to the difference in my example, but the Indian court is leaning towards my example.