That's too hard to manage and standardize. Creative and brilliant doesn't document anything. Creative and brilliant doesn't feel like going to the meetings. Creative and brilliant doesn't like customer contact. Creative and brilliant is hygiene challenged. Creative and brilliant is unpredictable. Creative and brilliant is impossible to replicate.

What I want is serviceable, durable, repeatable. I want literate, articulate. I want documentation. I want punctuality. I want deadlines. I want the 95% of that work which is not creative and brilliant.

We all wear smocks. What color is yours?

Chris Hitchens asserts a priori there is no diety there is no reason to think of one there is no argument that flows from even discussing it. Period. Therefore anyone who does is engaged in a meaningless and dangerous waste of time. All the letters here which try to put nuance on that are missing the point. Chris Hitchens position is no different from one of any of the Stalinist states of the past and present who simply wave off religion as anathema. Period. Full stop. By decree. It's about conciliation or a 'meeting of the minds'. It is about the statue of the Great Leader in the town square that every year the whole village lays flowers on for the the Great Leader's Birthday. The party has spoken.

Picture Dr. Dawkins if he was an alcoholic mid level regional Soviet bureaucrat.

Changed their hoops team from the Redmen to the Red Storm. Which sounds like an energy drink. Well you can't fault the freewheeling Vicentians from wanting to make nice. Of course this is the school that one year awarded "Hispanic Student of the Year" to a blond haired blue eyed non Spanish speaking student with an Irish name.

The DNC will be rooting for that perfect lesbian minority handicapped antiwar harridan nutjob and indulging in suicidal politics vis a vis the mainstream until they drive off a significant enough number of voters thereby turning the whole process into a nailbiter. Trust me, there will be people screaming for Al Gore to join the race in the last week before the election, just to make sure each and every monkey wrench has been thrown into the gears. Hell let's run a third party again and really fuck things up. Remember, election fraud only works

At gunpoint like in Africa.

Or where the results are so close as to be indistinguishable.

We leave. The VN declare victory. Cambodia collapses. Well we know how that ended. VN invades Cambodia in 1979, kicks out those butchers. Then there were a few border wars with China. Yeah other than that it was smooth sailing after we left. Oh and yeah those several hundred thousand boat people who fled VN after 1975. Well never mind it's all good.

People who insist in living in the Bronze Age need to stay there and we here who are enamored of exotic foreign cultures with funny headgear and historical violence need to join them. Eventually we will tolerate ourselves to death.

See, even though I have horns I'm not a monster. Look it's real real simple. Talk to a young person. Few if any express any interest in voting, are apathetic and don't see themselves as having a stake in the process.

I'm sorry but it's not. Most, virtually all IT work is simply working the same nuts and bolts over and over and over. There just isn't that much of a need to invent a shiny new widget. And the times that you do, you wind up with an expensive one off. Brilliant doesn't give me a repeatable process. It gives me a kludge I have to hand off to someone else to turn it into that. I need to avoid that mess at all costs. Why? Because I don't want to worry about the one guy who wrote his own Java engine to support his 80,000 lines of undocumented code.

Good question. I think there was some scholarship money wrapped up in it. Private colleges that are connected to the dioces I think do this a lot.

As long as Congress is basically useless. Oh they talk a good game, I guess. We'll have hearings and all sorts to twaddle and it'll be great. But as long as they basically do nothing and send bill after bill up there that gets vetoed then why would any executive worry about it if he felt strongly enough about getting his own way. This is not an endorsement either way. Simply put you have a President who's unfettered and then you complain that he's not paying attention to your public opinion surveys? Hello, time to stop huffing paint, kids.

We live in pretty fragile electronically based economy. Remove the electronics and you set everything back a hundred years. All of our wealth is locked up in digital account. Blow up the data centers and all the money goes away. And the phones and the air traffic control system, and so on and so on. But that's all really besides the point. It's a plot device. It's what happens when you isolate a bunch of people and make them scared.