All you can really do is hope that sooner or later his boss puts two and two together. In fact, they may have done in order to bring you on board with the remit you say you have been given. In light of that I supposed you could go through a document each mistake that has caused a project to overrun and hope that he is the common thread that unites all the projects.

Alternatively you could try getting the department to run within it's budget and force the necessary cuts be made to staff provisioning. This will force the IT manager to actually go round firing people. Since this is a very tough part of the job to do he might balk at it or at the very least screw it up in a way he can't blame on anyone else.

To be honest though this doesn't sound like you are entirely being truthful. If you were really in the position you are in you probably would have been given the right to fire the IT manager and recruit a decent replacement as part of the deal. This gives you the option to force him to raise his game and also help in with any additional training he needs to become a better manager.

When it come to firing managers you generally just pay them off and then give them gardening leave for the duration of their contract along with a cast iron reference they can take to another employer. This gives them a reason to go quietly without you proving they were shit at all.

If you do not have that and are effectively working under him or alongside him then you are on road to nowhere and might as well just concentrate on helping the department underneath him run well as best you can. Even an incredibly shit IT manager can look amazing if the department all know there stuff and do what they need to.

If projects are all necessarily complex that is not just the fault of the IT manager, that is also the fault of the person or people delivering them. Try working on them directly to get them to deliver better work, one possible way to do this is to subtly make them realise who is for the chop if the costs don't come down. Obviously you have to be very careful how you do this, it might help to pick one person who is on side already but also has a good working relationship with his colleagues and then drop a few hints.

If you are doing all this already and the IT manager is blocking you then you might end up in a situation where all you can do is take your consultancy fee and make a few suggestions around the edges.

I guess you pay attention to the guideline about concentrating on modding up rather than down :)

He made a big thing about it was only copying data, I was trying to illustrate that sometimes just making a copy of something is not desired by the person who owns it. I should realise I am just wasting my breath though, slashdot is mostly full of students and young people who have not realised that people earning a living is far more important than being able to watch whatever you like the name of some data wants to be free crusade.

When you grow up you will realise that some form of copyright law needs to exist. You will only see this though when you have a work of your own that is worth other people wanting to copy it and have a need to buy a house and feed your children. This sort of work will only come about though if you invest thousands of (or maybe even a million) hours in its creation.

The capitalist world we live in at present is simply not ready to abandon copyright yet, there are many reasons why but if all you are crying out for is a way of justifying bit torrent use on some bullshit moral stretch of logic you will never see them.

As you get old you might realise that enjoying a movie you can't be arsed to pay for is just like stealing from the supermarket if you ever get the chance to get away with it. I know that that copying is not not depriving the copyright owner of a physical product, but it is depriving them of the revenue you SHOULD have paid them in order to watch the film. If the film was so shit it wasn't worth anything, then just don't watch it. You can sugar coat it any way you like saying you buy loads of movies and what ever, but for every film you watch illegally for free is depriving someone of the pittance you would have paid to join Netflix or buy it on DVD. if you watch it legally for free you are probably paying in some way you just can't see.

Final point, the lack of copyright law will render the GPL worthless and us evil capitalists (I am joking, see below) will be able to shit all over every bit of open source software by ignoring the GPL completely.

BTW, I am actually a socialist at heart I just think that while capitalism exists then copyright law also has to so artists can earn a living from producing content. Just performing live simply doesn't pay the bills enough as most of the revenue goes to the people who own the venue.

Some kind soul would download it then edit out the adverts and reupload it. Everyone would choose the ad free version and that would be the one with more seeders in no time.

Also, they would attract loads of high paying satellite and cable customers to bit torrent which currently they probably haven't heard of.

Then other companies would make nice, easy to use Tivo boxes that sourced from torrents instead of tv signals.

Instant bankruptcy and they are not quite that stupid.

In my experience (I am a lowly brit) a very small minority, especially at the moment as those on the left moan about the tories being in power and those on the right moan about the liberals being in coalition with them.

That doesn't mean everyone wants to repeal copyright law though, they just think the police should be out making sure no squaddies get attacked by Muslim nutters again.

Wow. You seem quite angry. Maybe you'll calm down a bit when grow up start getting laid.

Would you agree if I hacked your home PC and copied all the data I found on there?

Just because something can be copied without incurring a cost does not make it any less valuable.

Unfortunately the old generation are not dieing quick enough to make changing the law to cope with new technologies possible yet. They will most likely carry on voting for parties to get in and strengthen copyright law for many decades to come, however futile you may think it is.

These are not victimless crimes. The victims are just huge multinational conglomerates that you do not give a crap about (I am not sure I do either to be honest). In this case though the the victims have lots of money and are constantly whining to the police and politicians about the crimes perpetrated against them. The police need to be seen to be doing something.

Also, it is worth remembering that the UK record industry does have a lot of employees and is one of the few things we actually export nowadays so it is no surprise that politicians wish to protect it from any perceived harm.

Finally, you need to remember that the vast majority of the UK voting population do not necessarily give a crap about repealing copyright law or whatever. The care more about our economy. I actually think if we had a referendum tomorrow about copyright law it would come out as a majority in favour of strengthening it thanks to all the old people voting, even though you and all your friends would disagree.

Nope, far from it. But if it helps you carry on being arrogant you're free to believe it if you like.

I did have a longer post that this answering some of your other points but since you have just gone though all my posts replying to them all seperately I am convinced you are just a troll or something now.

Did you look at any?

Compare:

$('body').append('<div>A div with content</div>');

With:

var newDiv = document.createElement("div");
var newContent = document.createTextNode("A div with content");
newDiv.appendChild(newContent);
document.body.appendChild(newDiv);

Whatever else you may say you cannot possibly miss that jquery let you do the same thing but with far few characters being typed.

Granted Jquery does let you make a mess, but I gather from your sig that you are not a fan of OOP so you are pretty much guaranteed to hate it in that case. You can write beautiful simple jquery if you are careful, like in any language. Once you get used to Jquery you can often find that it is easier to read than the pure JS alternative (see my example above).

Most users know fuck all, and even if they do they don't pay the bills in web development, the client does.

I have never had any performance issues with the stuff I have been creating, if I did I would dive straight into pure JS to get it done as I have been doing this for a while so can do either. Maybe if you were having Jquery performance issues it was with very old versions or you were not writing decent code?

Jquery is just quicker to write so takes less dev time.

Also, out of your list of pure JS replacements about you missed document.createElement(). Once you start having to create elements of the dom tree on the fly JQuery comes into its own in terms of writing less code and hence developers producing quicker results.

Nobody cares about efficiency any more as cpu time is just so much cheaper than the man hours put in to creating code. Writing super efficient code is just not worth wasting time over when modern PC's are so powerful and underutilized. You can complain about this all you like but you are just pissing into the wind, it will never change now even phones have quad core cpus.

(BTW - I actually think everyone should learn to write more efficient code but am old enough to know that most people who pull the strings don't care.)

The problem is that people like yourself are a tiny minority. Most people go "wow, look at pretty swirl that follows my mouse pointer around, isn't it neat!" (this is a piss poor example)

Seriously though, most people love jquery as it means we don't have to do basic animations in flash any more and can do ajax type stuff. Without things like jquery you would be stuck with whole page refreshes just because you wanted to add a row to a form. I have done this sort of stuff in raw JS (I have been a web dev for almost 10 years) and it was just not worth the effort making it cross browser without doing whole page reloads that were slow for the average user. JQuery lets you do dynamic html pages far more easily and build user interfaces that more closely resemble stand alone applications.

Recently I had to create a page that lets users sort a list by clicking and up down arrow next to each item. When I did stuff like this before JQuery it was a PITA to get working and horrible to use, now it is much quicker and easier. For the same amount of time I put in previously I could have let them drag and drop stuff up and down now (I wanted to, but couldn't get it passed management).

This is just because many japanese people lack the gene to process alcohol efficiently so can't drink for shit.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2262318.stm

This makes excessive drinking more of a cultural taboo than it is in Europe and America where it was essential to drink in order to get the nutrition you needed to survive from seasonal crops that only came once a year in our climate. Japan and the far east had the ability to grow crops that could be harvested throughout the year unlike grain.

Whaling for food is illegal. But Japan has come up with some bullshit excuse that they need to conduct scientific research which is why they need to kill whales, then selling the meat as byproduct just makes good sense.

The problem with this is that there is simply no need to kill so many whales for research it's just that Japan's (ruling) older generation view eating whale as such an essential part of their culture they refuse to contemplate change on this front. You might be able to make an argument that what Japan does it legal, but it is still against the spirit of the treaty.

I also think that the individual ships flout the law because they know their is no appetite to prosecute them back home. I certainly think that the average Japanese whaling ship captain will happily follow his prey into Australian waters then lie about it later if they Australian Navy is not around to stop them.

Finally, later this year or early next year the final word on whether what Japan does is legal or not will come down from the ICJ. That will be final and binding (no appeals allowed) but until then no one really knows either way.