Perhaps if the baby boomers didn't rig the financial system in their favor, inflate housing prices, crash the dollar, grant themselves unfunded medicare and social security benefits for their vastly extended lifespan, increase college and healthcare costs 20-40%/yr, start two hugely expensive and mostly pointless wars, burn half the world's oil, scalp the science/tech sectors that their parents built for WWII and the space race, replacing them with finance/real estate ponzi schemes to extend an empty consumer lifestyle, and then outsource virtually everything except for senior executive and imigrant service jobs, their kids could start their own lives?

Just sayin.

Why are so many people in their 60's not retired?

Why are so many people in their 70's not dead?

I really could have gone the whole day without seeing a cartoon panda's anus.

Okay, I am now officially sick of this kind of story.

I'm 45, and if this trend of increasingly defining older and older people more and more infantile continues, I could end up a baby again before I retire.

Seriously though, I don't see the newness here. My father told me that his grandfather told him that you don't truly become and adult until around age 35 or so. That bit of family wisdom dates back to early the last century. A hundred years ago.

If we're into social commentary, I'd point out that as we become more and more pampered, we become more and more infantile. I expect to push the button on the iPhone and have the pizza show up 15 minutes later. I expect to be in contact with all of my friends instantly via text message. I expect to have college paid for and a warm house with the folks if things don't work out.

These are probably great things to expect, but when you're not making work-or-starve decisions every day, you can easily start expecting a helluva lot of stuff that just realistically isn't going to happen. We call people who have unrealistic views about their status in the world, an inability to make decisions, and the need to be taken care of, well, chidlike. I love optimism, but that's not what I see from this article. This is different than optimism. Optimism says we'll make the most of it and things will be fine. This is I-want-to-be-a-rock-star. I have everything else I want. I want this too. It's all luck, anyway. Show me the button I push for the limo.

Put another way, these super-cool new things need to be compared to something. If you compare them to nothing, you know what you have and what you don't have. If you have no frame of reference, it's all just "normal". That lack of context makes a difference in being able to do stuff.

I don't mean that as commentary on "those dang kids". I think every generation has an awesome potential, mainly because of all these cool new things. I see no reason why we need a new developmental stage. 20-somethings can fly nuclear bombers, I think they'll do alright with career choices. If we let them. Pointing out they are mentally impaired is no more useful than pointing out the average 85-year-old is mentally impaired. Yet many of them drive, work, and do just fine in the world.

What I think is missing at this age, frankly, is some sense of comparison. You need to know you are unique and special, just like everybody else. I think some form of mandatory national service could help.

Either that or I need to start looking for rattles that I find appealing.

This really isn't that big of a deal. If you look through some of the results, you see things like blank forms (where "Confidential" refers to the information filled in by the applicant), boilerplate, attachments as part of public filings (where the document may have been confidential but came out in a trial) etc.

In one case, the "this document is confidential" is a phrase taken from the sentence "nothing in this document is confidential." I'm working on a "confidential" document right now, but it's intended for litigation and will likely show up in a records search in a year or two.

There may be something juicy in here, but you're gonna have to go through a whole bunch of the mundane to find it.

This has been said before but it's worth repeating, Oracle is not an engineering company. They are giant sales organization with an engineering department tacked on.

They probably considered Sun's workforce before the acquisition as a liability instead of as an asset. The assets were in Sun's products, patents and customers. In that calculus, the people who quit willingly just represent severance checks Oracle doesn't have to write.