joelaaronseely

You can have my cup of koolaid - I'm not thirsty.

I had kids.

Yeah...no. In the situation I was in, I tried this. Only to find out that my supervisor's manager was sleeping with her. Worse yet, he gave her the password to his e-mail and she was reviewing them when he was travelling - including the one where I asked to have a meeting when he got back (and the reasons why).

It got unpleasant for awhile, but I was fortunately able to move to another group and watch from afar as the sandcastle she and her paramour had created crumble around them. They were both asked to leave at the next round of layoffs.

Clearly you are not one with the body. You must be purged! :)

Yeah, he was like that in person as well. When I was an undergraduate, he would "teach" a seminar on Tuesday afternoons called "PhysX" where you could go and ask any question you wanted. He'd go up to the blackboard and extemporaneously write things down and explain things in such a way that thought you really understood. But when you got back to your room and tried to replicate the chain of reasoning, there were always pieces missing or leaps that you now couldn't make. (It felt like the Star Trek Episode, "Spock's Brain".)

But we all took that as an indication of our own lack of knowledge and intuition and would just try harder.

I fourth this comment. It's possible that everything will go swimmingly for them. But it's also possible they'll run into all kinds of problems, such as inexperienced programmers, poor communications, slower feature deliveries, difficulty with managing the team, etc.

There's a skill that good programmers have of understanding at a visceral level what the customer is asking for and delivering that and more. But a good programmer often does this "effortlessly" which leads a company to believe that all programmers are like this, so you should just find the cheapest one. They're not all the same and companies that have made this mistake quickly learn to cherish their good programmers (whether employees or contractors).

Tivo AOL

Try these: On the rise of Al Qaeda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares

Exploration of lives of John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, and Karl Marx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Money

Google! At the time I heard about this startup in the search space, I thought these people were idiots. Didn't they know that there was already Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, HotBot, Alta Vista, Etc. Another search engine is doomed to failure - especially if they don't even know enough to spell "googol" correctly.

There is another mechanism called "Single Event Upset" (SEU) or "Single Event Effects" (SEE) (basically synonymous). This is due to cosmic rays. On the surface of the earth, the effect is mostly abated by the atmosphere - except for neutrons. As you go higher in the atmosphere (say on a mountaintop, or an airplane, or go into space) it becomes worse because of other charged particles that are no longer attenuated by the atmosphere.

The typical issue at sea level is from neutrons hitting silicon atoms. If a neutron hits the neucleus in some area of the microprocessor circuitry, it suddenly recoils, basically causing an ionizing trail of several microns in length. Given transistors are now measured in 10s of nanometers, the ionizing path can cross many nodes in the circuit and create some sort of state change. Best case it happens in a single bit of a memory that has error correction and you never notice it. Worst case it causes latchup (power to ground short) in your processor and your CPU overheats and fries. Generally you would just notice it as a sudden error that causes the system to lock up, you'd reboot and it would come back up and be fine, leaving you with a vague thought of, "That was weird".

I started doing P90X about 3.5 years ago. It's been a lifestyle change where I've made a commitment that I will work out 5 days a week (rest on the weekends) and I don't let anything else get in the way of this. I'm flexible as to when this happens - but I WILL work out for 1 hour every day!

Also I started Testosterone Replacement Therapy. This has been amazing! Whereas I had no energy after work and no interest in sex, it changed within a week after my testosterone went from 311 ng/dl to 1100 ng/dl. (And my wife was thrilled!) Furthermore because of the workout routine, I have gained 10 pounds of muscle and lost 5 pounds of fat - and have the DEXA scans to prove it. (This is after the first 3 years of P90X and having lost 45 pounds, so these gains in muscle and loss of fat was a bit of a pleasant surprise.) My strength is greater than it was in highschool. My energy level is higher, but not at the highschool level - but close.

Let's go further. This country was founded on immigrants. This country is powerful because of the wonderful hard-working immigrants who have come to this country and seen opportunity and seized it with both hands and their teeth. It's not the lazy, entitled, molly-coddled, citizens who would rather watch endless episodes of real-world who made this country great (and yes, I, sadly, fall in that category). It is the people who came here with nothing and worked as hard as they could for themselves and their families who keep reinventing this country. We should welcome as many hard-working immigrants into this country as we can.

From an economic perspective it makes sense, too. My wife came with her family from Vietnam in 1991. They were given 1 year of public assitance of $1100 per month. There were 11 people living in a rented house that didn't speak a word of English. Since that time they have grown up, gone to college (and paid for it through working side-jobs), become nurses, optometrists, and doctors. The return the US is getting on their pitiful $13K investment 20 years ago is an annuity worth $Millions in taxes alone! Sign me up for that kind of investment!