I recently went to a doctor with a sinus infection. She told me it was most likely viral so there was no point in prescribing antibiotics, and the best thing I could do would be to use a nasal rinse, available for about $13 at the drug store (and which I already owned).

Maybe the problem isn't the doctors, but the heavy advertising by the drug companies which encourages people to demand prescriptions regardless of their costs or actual benefits.

Yes, exactly. I really see that at REI, on of my favorite stores. You want the latest 2010 backpacking tent that weighs 1/4 ounce less than last year's? You'll pay the full $500 price. You're just a casual camper and are happy with one that would have been state-of-the-art two years ago? That one's $99. It would make sense if REI would identify the different buying habits, so they can offer sales to the hard-core enthusiast (say, $50 off that $500 tent) that would be a waste of time for a 'value customer' (ie, cheapskate) like me.

I think that back in the day, the old people just had different things to complain about. When I was at UCLA 1975-79 as a grad. student, tuition was cheap (~$800/year), and a lot of the undergrads were there to party and delay going to work. The older generation, including we grad. students who were TA's, complained about how the undergrads didn't have the basic writing and math skills that previous generations did when they entered college, and how they didn't value their education because it was almost free.

I do this too, because Flash on my netbook is really slow and doesn't have the nice kbd controls like mplayer. And you don't even have to wait until it's all buffered, as long as the download speed is greater than the speed of watching it.

Plus, if I want to keep it, I just drag-and-drop it into a different directory and rename it. I wonder if Windows users can do something similar, as I've been asked a couple of times.

Well... should it be illegal to sell a penny for $100? How about a 10-cent stamp for several thousand? Should there be a law banning the selling of these for more than 150% of face value?
I'm more upset at the ridiculous fees that Ticketmaster charges, but I guess that's also a case of 'what the market will bear'.

Okay, so it's a solved problem. Now all we have to do is find a source of dilithium and we're good to go!:-)

Most 'old' programmers were programming in C++, which has been in common use for 20 years. Going from that to Java is not that big a stretch. Around 1997, I got hired at a startup to write a parser in Java (...yes sounds strange), and had little trouble picking it up from scratch. A few years later, I couldn't get an interview with any companies looking for Java developers because I only had the one year of experience.

56 here! Still doing development in C for the EDA industry. Fortunately, I'm at a company that values experience, and I've been getting consistently high reviews.

But the last time I looked for a job, 7 years ago, I spent 5 months searching, and the only interview I got was with my current employer. Sure, there are people in their 50's who are old farts. But there are also 30-somethings who haven't done anything new in 10 years. I've been trying to stay youthful, taking up snowboarding at 50, salsa at 53. But that doesn't do much good on a resume (unless one lies about the years).

You're kidding, right? In the 19th century, US presidential candidates won election by emphasizing their 'simple' roots, giving themselves folksy nicknames like 'Old Kinderwood', where the term 'OK' is reputed to come from. Think of how many Americans thought that slavery, which had been absent from Europe for over a millenium, was justified. 100 years ago, my grandfather lived a peasant's life in a Russian village out of 'Fiddler on the Roof', but without the nice songs.:-)

Today I earn a living sitting in a warm office typing at a computer. I go out dancing 5 nights a week where I mingle with women in all sorts of professions that would have been considered impossible 100 years ago (like a parole officer, medical research, dentistry). I fly all over the country just for fun, and spend the tiniest fraction of my salary on food. Both my daughters are in college, and I don't have to worry about finding them husbands; because they'll be able to support themselves.

Literature is practically free: I recently bought a used hardbound classic for $7, my earnings from less than 10 minutes of work. And there's an unlimited amount that really is free from Project Guttenberg.

I grew up in 1950's American suburbia. What I recall is that the women, all housewives, were pretty bored with their lack of careers and spent a lot of time hanging out with each other while we kids roamed the streets on our own and walked ourselves to and from school.

How about cybermen, then? Better start hoarding gold.

That's true if you work for a 'cost center', and that has been about half my experience. That's why it's better to work for a profit center; ie, work on software that the company is selling as part of its main business. You get treated much better in those positions.

You could be missing out on some very talented emacs users! And just VHDL? Not Verilog?

My theory is that these companies are run by people who aren't smart enough to teach themselves anything new, and they assume everyone else is the same.
I actually had a job for a year writing in Java, and I still couldn't get another one in that language because there's always some new library or subsystem that they expect you to have experience with.

The funny thing is that I'm now a C-programmer again, earning a nice salary while writing in a language I learned in the 80's and then abandoned for a decade. Life is strange.

They also don't take into account that the older person, at some point, will no longer be supporting or raising kids. He/she is also likely to be divorced, providing even more time to work for the company.:-) Meanwhile, those youngsters are up late drinking, trying to hook up at clubs, getting treated for STD's, or taking time off for 'back-to-school' days.