That's how you know you're getting old. Stand aside, grandpa, we have a future to build!

But why is the Kerbal Space Program theme playing in their mission control?

You're friends with some dude and some dude. Some dude's pretty cool, but some dude keeps posting goats.cx pictures on your news page. You keep trying to unfriend him, but you keep accidentally unfriending some dude instead. Some dude offered to sell you weed but when you tried to take him up on it and asked him where to send your money, he accused you of being a cop and unfriended you. You put up with it because it's still less annoying than Facebook.

Or us, for determining if we're at-risk for dying with any money left in our bank accounts or any wine left in our wine cellars.

Because that's going to work. Perhaps they should ban all foreign currencies while they're at it.

I wanted to do something like that on network-attached postscript printers a few years back, but didn't have an easy way to open a network socket in PostScript. My virus would have moved from printer to printer and done nothing else except replace every instance of the word "Strategic" with the word "Satanic" on printed documents.

Since I kicked the WoW habit. Fortunately the other MMOs I tried didn't have that refined-crack quality WoW does. While I still do occasionally kill some time with an offline game, I'm coding for fun a lot more, and skydiving or flying in a vertical wind tunnel when weather, budget and time allow. At the end of the day, what I have to show for it is a lot more rewarding than anything I ever got out of WoW.

If you're a bad programmer, your code with an IDE will be bad. If you're a good programmer, it won't. Stop blaming the tools.

I use EMACS for all my development. The young'uns at the office are completely lost without a GUI environment and an IDE. Most of 'em probably don't even know what the link phase is. I fix shared library issues for them from time to time. I can use an IDE if I want to, but like to have more control over my build process. You really have to understand, say, maven, to hand-author a maven build file. If I don't understand my tools, how can I resolve problems when they don't work as expected?

Perhaps knowing when and how to use a hammer and nails would make you a better craftsman than completely dismissing the tools in your toolchest. At the end of the day, that's no better than only having a hammer and thinking every problem looks like a nail.

Would you need contextual information about the API calls if the API were consistently designed? I remember thinking something should work in a certain way in Java, trying it and having it work that way, back when I was learning the language. Most languages, you learn a few idioms and are basically set. If your in-house software goes off into the weeds, that's really the fault of your developers and not the language.

Easy way around this would be to form an IT workers' union and have the union hold H1B visas. Of course, if there was a union, you probably wouldn't need to worry about H1B workers being paid a fraction of what citizens make in the first place.

I've had several Indian contractors in my little work area lately who seem to constantly be on the phone about problems with their paychecks or tax forms. One guy didn't get paid for several weeks because "the guy who signs the checks is out of the country on business." A couple other ones had their first few paychecks held (Which seems to be a common practice but illegal at least under this state's law.) I suggested they bring their complaints up with the state labor board, but they don't appear to be willing to do that.

They had to kill the rock to confirm its age.

Are likely to kill you too, unless you kill them first.

/me swings into Microsoft's HQ on a rope and finds himself face to face with Steve Ballmer

Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my operating system. Prepare to die!

Hopefully it'll screw up our pine beetles out west, too.