Here are six amendments (not in any form of airtight legalese) that would be useful:

1: Campaign donations are forbidden. Each candidate for an elected office will get an equivalent place to state their platform. Advertising anything election related on a commercial (paid) basis will be a crime.

2: Similar to Article 9 of the Mexican Constitution: Only US citizens can influence the politics of the nation.

3: A "no confidence" vote can be done on Congress, forcing a complete re-election with no incumbents allowed in for the next term (but can run after that.)

4: Same as Article 23 of the Mexican Constitution. No double jeopardy, and after three trials, the defendant is now absolved of charges.

5: Same as Article 10 of the German Constitution, guaranteeing privacy.

6: The right to a firearm is guaranteed. However, part of school education is firearms training, from elementary school to high school. The purpose of this is to "un-Hollywoodize" firearms, and make them perceived as a tool (similar to a chainsaw or weed whacker), and no more. If packing becomes pedestrian or gauche, the gun control problem will go away by itself.

These are not perfect, but they will go a ways to address critical issues.

If the microwave was repairable/servicable with magnetron parts available for example, there wouldn't be anything wrong with an $800 unit. In fact, going back to appliances that are designed to be repaired rather than replaced is probably one of the best ideas that can happen in the market.

One example of this are portable generators. I can buy a no-name Chinese model inverter on the cheap. However, if I need to find a carb, jets, brushes, or other parts, I -might- be able to adapt something, or I might just be SOL and have to buy a new one. Or, I can pay the price premium for a Honda, Yamaha, or Champion make, and be able to find parts almost anywhere.

If LED light bulbs mature enough so they have a long MTBF, then three for $25 is a good deal. That isn't a bad thing either.

Similar with a phone. If it were made somewhat modular where RAM, flash storage, and other parts were upgradable, with the antenna being easily swapped out, then paying twice as much for the device wouldn't be a bad thing.

It would be nice to see something other than the absolute race to the bottom when it comes to materials, fit/finish, customer support, and overall quality.

Even the meth-heads have stopped stealing car stereos. That is how stagnant the industry has gotten.

I have seen some companies have their developers given autonomy, with their own DevOps, mainly because it allows for what is needed to get granted. New subnet for lab testing? It is a lot easier to get a DevOp guy to configure the VLAN for it than to submit a ticket to a different organization that isn't connected at all, nor knows what needs done.

Of all the organizations in a company, dev needs the loosest reins (while still keeping separation so that the loosened policies don't allow for a security breach to compromise other departments.) The other department that needs autonomy is QA, because $DEITY knows what needs to be tested against.

So, having an autonomous DevOps means that the dedicated programmers have people that know what they want/need, and have the ability to get that.

In my experience, this does seem to work and work well in SMBs that are not just hiring H-1Bs or offshoring their entire dev department in toto. Larger companies, depending on corporate culture, not so much. Dev and QA should be autonomous. They have to be because that is where things get invented and bugs get squashed.

I wonder what ever happened to the concept of the data diode. That way, stuff can be monitored... but it would take someone physically there for action [1]. I've done this on a low bandwidth basis by using two machines on physically separate networks, a serial cable that has one line cut (so it could only send signal one direction), syslog on one side, and a redirect from the serial port to a file on the other side.

[1]: Of course, this isn't 100%, someone can pretend to be a manager or upper muckety muck, but it is a step up from a remote attacker just typing in blkdiscard /dev/sda on an embedded machine that got exploited.

I wonder how Ada 2012 would do in this test, although I don't know of any websites that use this language for a backend.

Similar dilemma. A regular bicycle is unfeasible due to distance. Hopping a bus with a bike is iffish, since there are only two bike spaces in the rack per bus that shows up every hour... and assuming a slot got made free, it would be a battle of speed with others. Which leaves folding bikes and having to lug a Brompton into and out of a building.

Even if you find a space, the parking meters are kiosks on every block, and you -will- get a ticket between the time you walk to the kiosk, get the ticket printed out, and come back to the vehicle to put it on.

So, the easiest thing to do is hail a taxi and go from there.

The ironic thing, most of the places were private companies without a government contract. They wanted the security clearance because someone else did the vetting for them.

It isn't how I like to be, but just what narrow piece I saw after graduating college. Without the alphabet soup, you never had a chance of passing the first rounds.

In my experience, you won't get an HR person's attention unless you have the alphabet soup after your name. A bachelor's gets the resume out of the round file. A MCSE/CCIE/RHCE gets it scheduled. A CISSP or TS-SCI clearance gets it to the tech guys to be interviewed. In fact, when I got out of college, most interviews went like this:

Interviewer: "Do you have a CISSP or TS-SCI? No? Next in line, please."

It really didn't matter about experience... one could be clueless in IT but have a MCSE, and be further along than someone who had many years in the field, but didn't have the cert.

I'm wondering if they got results without a choke, or at full choke. This might be statistically significant.

You can count me in that category. I signed up way back in 2008 because after getting out of college, prospective employers would demand if I had a FB/MySpace/Twitter account, and if not, the interview was up, as the HR rep felt that it was mandatory for anyone in IT to have social networking accounts to be considered up to date in skills.

So, I created a Twitter account, followed EMC and a few other names, and called it done... it did make the bean counters happy because they thought I was "with it".

+1.

We have 50-60 years of technology advancements. Look how cars have advanced. Had there not been such a strong oil/coal lobby, there would be advancements that would be impossible in today's political climate:

1: Thermal depolymerization -- turn waste products back into crude ready for use again.

2: Droughts would be mitigated as issue with desalination plants combined with the infrastructure to pump it inland.

3: More technologies would be possible to reclaim used components. Waste can be recycled cleanly.

4: More expensive (expensive as in energy) chemical processes can be used to reclaim toxic sites.

I think future generations will think we are dolts as not to have moved to nuclear sooner, because more energy available per person can mean a lot more advances and a better quality of life.

Here is the ironic thing: Both the hippies and the Tea Party people I know are all over solar, wind, and other alternative energy.

I just wonder when the tipping point happens where people and businesses stop wanting to be beholden to Middle Eastern oil and dirty coal, and move onto nuclear [1]. With more energy than what we have now, we can easily use thermal depolymerization to toss waste plastic and usable crude oil.

[1]: Thorium reactors show great promise.

Depends. A website's SSL key may be slurped up. However, a root CA key should be either kept on an offline machine or kept in a hardware security module where the key won't be divulged, ever... the module will sign a key, and that's it.

I'm sure some places will have their root CA on an externally connected machine, then try to place blame, likely saying how insecure UNIX is (when it isn't any particular flavor of UNIX that is at fault.)

Don't forget Splunk, so the servers that you are managing have a place to dump logs, and where you can do syslog searches from one place. Splunk isn't a magic bullet, but it does a lot of useful functions and can scale up, and it is a very useful troubleshooting tool.