ExpertsExchange has an extremely misleading UI, starting with a question, followed by graphics that imply it's hiding the answer and you must register to see it... but all the text google thinks is there, is really there... you just have to scroll down to the bottom of the page.

(You may know this and block them simply because they're being intentionally misleading... OTOH, you may not. I actively railed against them for years before noticing.)

Ah, another Knoxvillian...

After getting a small speeding ticket from Oak Ridge at one of these red light cameras I swore off going to Oak Ridge for any financial transaction. So far, I've counted about $3,500 worth of small contracts, Craigslist purchases and whatnot I've turned down or avoided simply because they were in Oak Ridge.

It's my small, passive-aggressive non-resident contribution to Oak Ridge.

RE: "Seriously.. despite all the controversy it has stirred up.. if you don't have anything to hide.. who cares"

That is, of course, the crux of the privacy argument and even exactly the sentiment Eric Schmidt was expressing: "Only bad people want privacy."

Even defending those that want privacy is hard to express. Why would you want privacy? What do you have to hide that you don't want known?

So here are a few off-the-cuff points for privacy:

* There's a quote out there (google it--lol) that goes along the lines of "You don't need privacy to protect you from the government you have today, you want privacy to protect you from the government it may become."

* People's ideas of what's acceptable to share are different depending on the times. Maybe a miniskirt is no big thing today. Maybe by the time she's running for senate miniskirt=whore. Maybe you comment on a friend's private facebook account. Maybe last week Facebook just made all that very, very public (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/12/13/2028219/Facebook-Founders-Pictures-Go-Public).

* On the last vein, Do you think if today were 1929 you'd hesitate to put that you were Jewish on your online profile?

* Even publicly making a stance on pro/anti online privacy costs you in some way. Certainly anyone pro-privacy had better have a squeaky clean past present and future. After all, anyone that uses scroogle.com and the like are exactly the wingnuts you'd want to track, right?

Nobody can see into the future far enough to know just what they'll regret, and just what it will cost them.

That made me think of an even better idea... astroturf yourself. "[Joe Skeleton] wins Nobel Peace Prize!" etc. Get enough out there--backdated even--and if anyone asks, just say you have some real prankster buddies.

Short of that though, your best bet really is to start putting your name out there for what you've done since. I've sort of had the opposite effect happen to me. For years just out of college I thought it was pretty rad to be findable online and worked to be every result on the first page (why... I don't know.) of Altavista (yeah, remember them?). Then after a while I changed my mind and started pulling things offline, which left only crap I couldn't erase myself. Now the first page results include only one item that's legitimately from me (not someone with my same name) and it's of me chewing out a guy on a mailing list. Thus my legacy is of being a douche to some random guy. =/

OP is ranting to a degree that he's misrepresenting his case.

First, all smartphones require this crappy extra $30/month fee. Blackberries, iphones... Droids. It sucks, but Droid isn't the bad guy here, it's every carrier.

Second, tethering isn't supported for most smartphone plans on the major networks. You want it on your iphone, too bad. The iphone itself supports it (as does Droid obviously) and AT&T doesn't. Well, apparently they will, but they will charge extra, just like Verizon. (http://mashable.com/2009/10/08/iphone-tethering/) Once again, don't blame Droid / verizon, blame every carrier.

So please don't blame the Droid or Verizon for this without including every other network and smartphone in the rant. =P

(Though calling 5gb "unlimited" is pretty skeezy.)

PS. Loving my droid, tethering or no. ;-)

FWIW, I've been using Ubuntu since 6.10 and Karmic Koala has been by far my easiest and most care-free install. Every six months since 6.10 I've installed the new Ubuntu and it generally takes me about a week to get my OS going to full speed. Sometimes the damn dual monitor thing doesn't want to work. Sometimes my network shares stop being accessible by name and have to be hit by IP... whatever, it's all piddly one-off stuff.

Karmic Koala installed everything perfectly this time. I didn't have to custom compile Pidgin to get Microsoft Communicator functional at work. The OTR plugin worked too without custom compiling, unlike previous times.

My setup for my laptop, for the first time ever, doesn't need switchconf to load one xorg.conf for stand-alone mode and another for dual monitor docked mode. Heck, I don't even have a xorg.conf! I deleted it alltogether and let the system figure it out!

Wireless worked, the network worked, the printers worked.

Everything has been smooth smooth smooth.

So, for me at least, Koala is my favorite release yet. Kudos to the Ubuntu team, keep going!

You're older than I am, but you're far too young to be pulling the "[that] fact shows at the very least your ignorance and, at worst, your ageism" bullshit.

Your argument assumes he was referring to mid-thirties as part of the "older generation[s that] didn't grow up with computers" and obviously if you were learning to program when you were eight, you're not in the same age bracket as the grandparent-post's target-generation.

But cheer up! This means you're only an old fart on the inside.

A friend of mine loves old harddrives. They have a lot of super heavyduty magnets in them. To my knowledge he just dismantles the drive and then sticks'm to his fridge but ... either way, ubermagnets are fun!

holy crap... they're really making pon farr?

Dragon*Con lampooned this a couple years ago in one of their fauxmercials at the con:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mboR7Y3pFUg

At my last company they allowed 9-nines or 4-tens. 9-nines is a great deal for the developer. Any actually important developer in a company ends up working 9 hours a day anyway, just due to interruptions, meetings, etc. so having every other friday off for doing what you'd be doing *anyway* is excellent, and if you have that mentality, then even if you *do* get called in for a crisis, well, then you don't get your "free day".

It's actually a much better deal for the developer than the manager / company. the 4-eights guys end up being the ones to stay late friday night to meet a deadline and the 9-nines and 4-tens guys get to wash their hands of it on Thursday (and only come in for a production issue/crisis).

Also, if you're the type of person with a lot of domain knowledge people probably drop by your desk a lot. Every Friday you're out someone drops by and goes "AH, dangit!" and wanders off to find someone else. Not a big deal, but it's there.

Point is, don't feel abused when you get pulled in or called, because the company's doing something very cool for you they don't have to.

Seriously... Slashdot never has made claims at being unbiased, and I have no excess fondness for MS products (I'm currently writing this from my ubuntu desktop) but still... Frontpaging needlessly harsh opinions best left to tongue-in-cheek office humor don't serve the slashdot community.

If I want vitriolic bias, I'll head to Fox News.