...If it was "hackable". But it seems that hardware makers today want more than selling you their product. They want to make sure you don't use it unless it's in a way they approve of.

For now, I have alternatives (buy something else), but I am afraid my daughter will not have that option.

I use RAID1 on my desktop and all important files are also backed up on a linksys NAS (also with RAID1). Yet I am answering the last option because it is not a true backup. If a burglar comes into the house and takes my desktop and NAS, I am screwed.

I saw a couple of people here stating that they felt safe by using mirroring or timemachine, well, it's not enough.

Or make sure you hire professionals. A professional will take their severance pay (or whatever they are entitled by law) and move on.

Also, the way people are fired says a lot about a company. Generally, if people are treated the way you suggest, that company is not a good place to be.

I'll agree with your second point. Those fantasies are either an indication of immaturity or personality disorders.

Should I tell my mom that lives in a different continent that I don't want her talking to her granddaughter over skype once a week?

it's actually more, take the "at least once a week" category, living in their parent's basement does not mean they have to actually *talk* to them.

Would't it be great if there was a website where you could look at those numbers? Seriously though, you are right in limiting the cost of controlling the spending. Here's where Hans Rosling got it right, though: the world needs the raw data, the rest is all voluntary crowd sourcing. I think government transparency is a must if beating corruption is a priority. I'd say, find out how to run those cheaper, let the interested parties do the data crunching. Everything else is a step backwards.

TFA says he was an IT employee at British Airways. He was a dumb terrorist but also, a lousy IT professional, thinking that his substitution cypher was better than AES.

As they say: even worse than an idiot, is an idiot with initiative.

"There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere." Isaac Asimov

Yes, i played lots of civ4... why do you ask?

Something needs to be done to "balance out" things now that Oracle and IBM are in bed together.

http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/cpp.htm

This one still makes me laugh

Human behaviour is fuzzy, that is, there's a "good enough" approach to say... walking. As long as I am on my feet and "kinda" moving towards my destination, it is good enough. On the other hand, software tends to be very precise. I know of no customer of mine that would accept a program as good enough if it hit the database with the correct information 90% of the time.

What is very important though, as you already said, is the ability to recover from some error. This is no trivial task and requires lots of experience and attention to detail, especially as the components of the software grow in number and complexity. A good design is essential, and lots of attention to detail is needed. The problem is that customers are not willing to pay for that unless they belong to a small set of industries such as airspace or nuclear.

lobotomies, apparently...

I'll contradict you, even if that is impolite... :) On the BSc level, the course curriculum in the "average" university is very similar to the ones taught in "average" universities in the US or Europe. That is, you are taught the same theory by teachers that may or may not have a clue about it, or about teaching. As in every place, It is the student that makes the difference in those cases. I have worked with great people that went to "very expensive internationally recognized universities" as well as the state funded ones. And I've met not-so-good engineers graduating from both also.

Make sure you are not comparing apples to oranges, the "Ingeniería en Computación" program by the state university where I live is very similar to the Computer Science program of the University of Toronto for example.

Maybe you haven't looked hard enough or in the correct places, eh?

Seriously though, one of the things that I've learned in Mexico is that people consider "impolite" to contradict you. When you think "wow, I can't believe they didn't know that", they are most likely thinking "gringo estupido, I can't believe he thinks we didn't know that". Anyway, there's tons of talent in Mexico, but you need to understand the culture or you'll end up feeling very frustrated.

I can't talk about the specific model you mention, but the zebras I worked with were far from a "generic" printer. In the sense that you either used their windows label printing software (labelview) or, if your requirements are not met, you write specific code for them even in windows. Admittedly this was 10 years ago, maybe labelview has improved or there may be other options out there.

Anyway, in 2001 I had to write code to print (a very specific type of) labels at an adjustable rate for a production line. Plus we needed to update a database associating each label with the specific article, so labelview was not enough. It ended up running on linux, but it could run on either unix or windows. I still have the ZPL manual sitting on a bookshelf at my house.