Wow... That strikes me as a great math problem! It requires the student to recognize the fact that the customer has accidentally overpaid with an unnecessary $5 bill on their $8 tab. So naturally, the right answer consists of handing them back their $5, then making the correct change of $2 from a $10.

Imagine that! And here I had thought this new "common core" would leave our snowflakes even less prepared for the exciting world of retail sales and customer service than before... But, I clearly stand corrected!

Oh then you want Basic income and universal healthcare.

Nice strawman-by-sarcasm, because actually, I do (though that has little to do with what I described).

Believe it or not, someone can legitimately consider unions as nothing but an obsolete style of extortion racket, without disagreeing with the idea that our society needs to evolve beyond the fallacy of "making a living". We've automated ourselves out of needing much unskilled labor in the modern workforce, yet somehow in the process our culture remained stuck in the mindset of a post-WWII work ethic. We automate to give ourselves more free time, not to put half of us on welfare while the other half pay for it.

Two things.

First, don't make the mistake of pushing off discussion of salary to the end of the process - Check the price range they want to pay right up front, before you even waste your time with an in-person interview. It doesn't matter if the job listing describes a senior software architect with a combination of skills that would easily take 20 years to master - If they want to pay intern's wages, they don't want you.

Second, you got old. It happens. We can, however, take a tip from our better halves (presuming you as male) to partially remediate that on a temporary basis. Dye your hair, dress considerably little less formally than you learned to do decades ago (if you can't stand the idea of going to an interview without a suit, at least go for a colored, relaxed-fit sport coat rather than the good old standby of black or charcoal), and you might even consider letting the missus help you with just a hint of makeup (don't worry, it won't stick out unless done horribly - Many younger guys have actually started wearing makeup regularly).

Once your coworkers see you in action, your skills matter more than your age. But that requires getting in the door first.

Workers needs rights and at least try the union way before we all end of on the welfare

Interesting perspective you have there, since unions basically turn entire industries into "welfare" for those who have no place working in them, at the expense of those who do. Unions had relevance half a century ago when the workforce consisted of 90% unskilled labor, and you could pull a lever over and over just as well as I could; that model fails miserably when dealing with skilled labor, and particularly in IT where we see literally multiple orders of magnitude differences in performance between the superstars and the barely-employable.

So no, thankyouverymuch, I would much rather get promoted on my own merits, rather than get dragged down to the mean so some waste of flesh can make the same as me (or worse, more solely because he has "seniority"). Fuck that! I bring an "A" game to the table, and get paid accordingly. Can't hack it? Don't play.

Now, as far as TFA goes - These people don't need a union, they need a clue. When you agree to work yourself to death for nothing-and-a-promise, you'd better make damned sure that you can live on nothing.

That said, nothing wrong with taking the occasional chance, after making sure you've met your basic needs. If you want to donate your spare evening and weekend time (after working a paying 9-to-5), in exchange for a startup-equity-lottery-ticket, hey, more power to ya. Just don't expect a sympathetic ear when empty promises won't pay for beer, much less your own private Caribbean island.

Yeah it may have some connections to the story of Noah, but then '300' had some connections to the actual story of the Battle of Thermopylae.. I don't think either should be taken too particularly seriously as exemplary of the source material.

And moving Romeo+Juliet to modern Verona Beach has little in common with Shakespeare's classic - Except everything.

Funny thing about great stories - The specifics of the setting usually don't matter. Space operas tend to work just as well underwater. War movies play out the same whether battling Japs or Bugs. Tragic love stories can take place equally well in Verona in 1595, Babylon c. 2000BCE, or Omega Saggita on stardate 42402.

Now, I don't know if I'd really call the Biblical myth of Noah a "great story", but the underlying plot generalizes well - A rare good man in a world of scoundrels and harlots receives some sort of prophesy that will save him from an impending disaster. This doesn't even need to have a religious angle to it, you could set it as a virtuous scientist discovering a planet-smashing comet headed for Earth, but his corrupt employer/government tries to suppress the information as bad for business.

Link 1: Wow, look how much uses Docker!
Link 2: Okay, docker works as some sort of VMy thing, oh and hype hype hype in case you missed link #1.

I rarely complain about FPs, even blatant Slashvertisements... But seriously? Yay, something wildly successful (that I've never heard of) has lasted a year. Woo-hoo! Pass me a beer.

If foreign workers can do the work better, cheaper, etc then we should be flooding the market with H1-B's. It's the free market principle at work - trying to artificially inflate the value of tech jobs by limiting competition is a fool's errand that will ultimately not work. We live and work in a global economy now, and trying to fight it goes against all the free market principles that this country was founded on and made us great a hundred years ago.

If foreign workers can do the job better and cheaper, and we actually do live and work in a global economy...

Why does 95+% of the world's high-quality commercial software come out of the US?

I don't know how to build a mud hut. I grew up in a place that not only didn't require that of me, but actively discouraged it ("What the HELL did you do to the lawn this time???"). I do, however, know computers like my life depended on it, because realistically, I do make my living knowing them. I grew up in an era when the PC counted as a cool new thing, and transitioned into a workforce that considered my background extremely valuable.

If you want a programmer - You want me, at any price. If you want a mud hut, you'd do well to pass me over. The same applies in reverse.

Secondly, just because YOU don't feel harassed and uncomfortable in a gaming environment doesn't give you the right to decide what should make other people feel that way.

Except yeah, it kinda does. Because I will pay for games like Duke Nukem, DoA, or Bayonetta - And thus, the publishers will make more like them.

You, for your part, can choose not to pay for them, and instead buy pablum like Candy Crush, Bejeweled, or Angry Birds.

See how the free market works? I buy the games I like, and don't get offended; you buy the games you like, and don't get offended. And most importantly, our two tastes need have nothing in common for us both to remain perfectly happy playing.

So right back atcha, Ms. Gore - Just because YOU feel harassed and uncomfortable in a gaming environment doesn't give you the right to decide that other people can't play and enjoy that same game.

Another aspect of the problem - Corporate policy in most large companies is to treat all of your IT programmers as identical widgets. This policy stems from HR, Finance, and IT efforts to 'normalize' positions so they can be circumscribed enough to allow 'efficient' allocation of resources, or more damaging, the allocation of resources that can be outsourced wholesale. Ultimately it all comes down to cost reduction. Poor results of IT, coupled with IT being strictly a cost center - leads to this outcome (the cost vs. value proposition as seen through the eyes of the heads of the business).

This of course, drags down everyone with it causing many good people to leave or get caught in the outsourcing net. If they are lucky - they do manage to move up into management (architects etc) - and hopefully they can influence the designs - but again - what is left behind is tragically impossible of effiently implementing even the best designs - so the problem feeds itself as your best get pulled away from programming.

Indications are CTOs are starting to see how this is not working...here's hoping they can get the HR and Finance people to turn this around, but I doubt it. .

Too bad you posted anonymously. I would have modded you up. This is absolutely the truth.

My recommendation for anyone: if you love the carreer you want to get into - then do it. However, if you only see a bunch of dollar signs - then it is better off for you and the rest of us in STEM if you would put your energy into something else.

We are plaugued with a glut of people who cause more inefficiency than the 'solutions' they create... causing me, and others who know what they are doing to spend extra cycles fixing their broken systems. The problem is most of the time, they don't even know why their choices are a bad thing, or worse - if they do, they don't care allowing expediency to take precedence over quality.

On a positive note: this will keep me employed well beyond my retirement as a contractor fixing other people's code.

Truecrypt is going over two years without an update.

Truecrypt doesn't try to serve every unrelated encryption need you might ever possibly have. It does securely encrypted disk-like things on a variety of underlying mediums, and nothing else. And in that regard, it hasn't needed an update in two years - I don't mean to sound like a zealot here, but honestly, Truecrypt comes just about as close to "perfect" software as I've ever seen.

And in that regard, Symantec (and Microsoft, and Gnome, and Apple, and Mozilla, and plenty of others as well) could take a lesson: Don't fuck with a good thing. Bugfixes? Great. Want to add optional features that don't break core functionality and see if your users like the? Great. But when you have an XP, just keep selling and supporting the damned thing, don't intentionally kill it off because of some delusion about merging phones and the desktop.

Um actually I believe you mean the treasury calls this "A new series". You know, like that line of purple spooge they put across some of the new bills.

Ah, good point, that does make a better example than mine. :)

Are you fucking kidding me? Bug fixes for a currency?

Why? The Federal reserve calls these "Quantitative Easing". We've had three major patches in as many years, along with quite a few minor updates to those outside the normal update release cycle.

Bottom line: drugs like this have no place in or penal system, regardless of the ethical ramifications of using them on prisoners.

Our current penal system has no place in our penal system.

What we have now amounts to a mockery of justice-as-rehabilitation, where we give otherwise-good people multi-year "we need to do something" sentences for obvious accidents (involuntary manslaughter, for example, or virtually all victimless "crimes"). They then come out as actual hardened criminals, far more likely to go on to commit real crimes (one well-studied population, nonviolent drug offenders, come out four times more likely to go on to commit a violent crime than the general population).

That said, I have to admit that this woman strikes me as likely a dangerous psychopath herself. Sentencing someone to a thousand years of boredom? "A lot of people seem to get out of that punishment by dying"??? Holy shit, woman, what kind of sick fuck would come up with something like that??? And I say that as someone who supports the death penalty, and personally would rather we use straightforward and effective punishments like caning over merely wasting a decade of someone's life on the taxpayer dime.

But hey, at least you would effectively reduce the cost of prison, since virtually everyone would resort to suicide after their first few "sessions".

"15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance"

Geico Gekko

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