You mean you were the tech guy, and he threatened to take out a contract on your life because you couldn't make his pager work when it was turned off? Was this said in jest?

Regardless, this and lots of other comments on /. make me think it would be good to have a category for tech/programmer/related workers' labor issues, quality of life, that sort of thing.

OP is (currently) modded as a troll. Anyone who's lived or been there and isn't a fanboy knows that the OP is /not/ a troll.

Yes this. I already see flaming in these comments, which is unfortunate. Although there are undoubtedly instances of gender discrimination, I don't think IT people are each other's enemies--management and their view of IT as a liability rather than a resource (quoting some other /.er) are our enemies. A misunderstanding or dismissal of what we do and the attitude towards IT which that engenders, that's what ruins what should be a line of work about as good as any other, maybe even better.

So, subtopic: what kinds of other jobs can IT skills/background be marshaled into?

Have they tried splicing together KDE and Gnome, by chance?

When did they have a significant outage? I opened my account in 2004.

Opera has, as far as I know, a fairly good reputation. I hope this works out well.

How absurd to claim that as a "most basic of rights". You are certainly free to spend your money to create your own power sources. Don't have enough money to build your own power plants? Then you simply cannot *afford* unlimited access to power.

Power is a limited resource. It needs to be generated, and distributed among communities. The reality is that sometimes your unnecessarily cool AC will cause grids to lose power to more basic and necessary appliances, like lights and fridges.

And please. Many Amish barns might have electricity, but they *do not* have A/C.

you really are a sucker.

My analogy is EXACTLY what Goldman and other investment banks did.

When i saw it, really tought that was a metajoke Me too. It seemed too absurd to be anything but intentional.

I don't understand why Republicans stand up for him at all. He was no Republican - he was the son of one and wanted to be King but thought it was all about parties and holidays.
He saw it as a prize and not a job, and that he could hand out smaller prizes to personal friends. His terms were all about appearance and little about reality - idiocy like pulling out the military so that the CIA could get the credit for catching Bin Laden really sum up the situation. Simply because he couldn't tell his friend in charge of the CIA to pull his finger out and do their job of coordinating intelligence we got the vast barely competent organisation of Homeland Security to do it instead.
The arrival on the carrier in a clown suit designed to take the best of a dozen uniforms really sums up his time of trying to run the USA like Enron - all flash and no substance.
Don't forget that when the country needed him he simply ran away. Not even a secret broadcast from a hidden location, not even a statement or email - just running away and not doing his job. There has never been another US President that would have done that.

Yes, you can override in Ontario if needed. And you get better rates on off peak hours, instead of a higher flat rate.

It really is a good idea.

Four fully enclosed offices with doors which open to a central conference area (just a 3x8 table and half a dozen chairs), which in turn opens onto the corridor accessing the rest of the office. Bonus points if you can parley a space for a sink, a mini-fridge, and a coffee machine on a small kitchenette at one end of the common area.

You should always be close, but there are times when you need to collaborate and times when you need to close the door and concentrate on what you're doing without distraction (coding, of course).

I have actually worked in an environment like this and it is pretty darned productive. We had 6 offices that opened onto a common area. No coffee mess, but life isn't perfect. I think we were much more in sync as a team than the folks who were lined up in offices along a corridor, and much less distracted than being in a cube farm (I've been in both of those environments, too).