I had a system where switching a SCSI card with a NIC from PCI1 to PCI2 (and vice versa of course), made Windows 2000 bluescreen. Just switching those two cards. Nothing else and the SCSI had only a scanner attached, no bootable devices.

So, yes, that is long ago, but Windows 2000 implies at least the year 2000.

Linux didn't complain at all.... Yes, I was running Linux back then in dual boot.

Who's this we? Are you some kind of dev-only shop, self-managed?

I would bet that in most instances, the "savings" from moving to cloud never becomes more budget for the IT department, especially if its money for salaries. If anything it just cuts your budget or feeds some bonus pool for executives.

You're willing to sit on the sidelines while ISIS engages in a campaign of genocide and ethnic/religious cleansing? ...... They're barbarians and they need to be terminated with extreme prejudice.

You're against ethnic/religious cleansing but want to "terminate with extreme prejudice" an entire very large group of people largely defined along ethnic and religious lines .........

words fail me

If the entire government became Libertarian today, it would take less than 10 years for corporations to take total control of governance and we'd have just as much (or probably more) squashing of individual liberties, but no longer any accountability to voters.

Isn't that a contradiction? I'd think a libertarian government would not want anyone, owners of large corporations included, to take over governance. That's kind of the definition of libertarianism, I thought.

Additionally, I'm having a hard time recalling the last occasion on which a company squashed my civil liberties. Actually I don't think it ever happened. Companies, even big ones, are typically very simple creatures compared to governments - they have simple needs and simple desires. Even companies that can't be easily reduced down to the profit motive (most obviously Google in this day and age) still have quite simple motivations, in their case "build sci fi stuff".

On the other hand, our awesome western governments routinely kill people for merely being in the wrong place at the wrong time or receiving a text message from the "wrong" person (see: signature driven drone strikes).

Whilst these governments aren't quite at the stage of drone striking people who are physically in western countries yet, they certainly are willing to do lots of other nasty things, as residents of gitmo will attest. So given a choice between a government that did very little and mostly let corporations get on with it, or the current state of affairs, it's pretty hard to choose the current state of affairs given the very very low likelyhood of companies deciding to nuke people out of existence of their own accord.

There are many powerful players in society and I'm not one of them. Does it make me a crony capitalist or a welfare queen when I decide I'd rather the power go to those I can vote out of office than those I can't?

No, it doesn't make you either of those things. It does mean you have a lot more faith in voting than other people do. This can be described as either very reasonable or perhaps naive, depending on where you live. E.g. in places like America or the UK voting is driven almost entirely by the economy and matters of foreign policy or the justice system have no impact on elections, politicians know that so they do more or less whatever they like. In places like Switzerland where there are referendums four times a year, preferring voting power to market power would make a lot more sense.

I'd swear someone in my family has a secret pot farm hidden in my 2,000 sq ft house someplace because every time I see electricity usage on Slashdot I wonder where the hell all my power goes.

My bill for October (no heat, no AC usage) was for 987 kWh. Most of my lighting is CFL or LED (all of the lights that get used a lot are), my fridge is less than 5 years old and we use natural gas for cooking and heating. I do have about 4 PCs but two are diskless and one is off more than it is on.

A roughly 40kWh used Tesla battery would get me through a day but probably be most useful for runtimes of an hour before starting an external generator.

When I posted my original comment I didn't think of this, but it's not hard to CAs to start claiming they provide a beneficial security service by validating certificate buyers, helping to keep bad guys from running encrypted web sites to sell drugs, defile white women and support terrorism.

Maybe they will agree to some kind of "national security compromise" that enables regulation of CAs and their continued monopoly status, of course in exchange for giving the NSA backdoor access.

There's a Seeker born every minute!

Sure, they do business selling code-signing certs, wildcard and SAN certs but I have to believe that a not insignificant part of their business is selling boring, single-name certs for web servers.

If you can suddenly get SSL certs for your web server for free and have them work like a paid certificate (wide-spread browser and device support) won't a lot of people do just this?

Or will it be some kind of "we need support" thing where people keep buying them because of corporate policy and the "only" users will be hobbyists and tinkerers who had previously used self-signed certs or none at all?

Everybody in Cleveland has one.

Even if they call them "advisors" or "lawyers" or "business managers" or something else?

I would mostly assume many uniquely successful people have somebody that advises or negotiates for them and may help steer business to them or filter out offers.

Even many high level corporate types will sometimes rely on somebody to help them negotiate a salary package even if the position is a "normal" full time job.

I don't think it makes you a "rock star" though.

I think this is kind of the point -- people don't WANT to be educated, they want what economists call the "signalling effect" of a college degree in some employment field.

And I think we're poorer for it as a culture -- no one recognizes the same political tricks and gimcrackery employed by the Roman elite getting recycled today, just as an example.

But then again, I have heard a counter-argument that classical education even in its heyday was also usurped by non-educational agendas, such as regional elites seeking to broaden their power base by exposing their children to elites from other regions, hoping to form social and economic alliances (or, why people STILL go to Harvard), or looking to find class-appropriate mates for their daughters.

Didn't people USED to go to college for the educational purpose of building a broad understanding of human knowledge -- history, literature, humanities, science, foreign languages, etc?

Most people now seem to go to college to obtain some kind of vocational certification and get a "career", usually in business, an engineering speciality or if they really apply themselves, in a medical field or law. General learning is a bunch of requirements students don't care about and the instructors mainly view them as an opportunity for ideological posturing.

The best I see these bootcamps is replacing some trade schools or community college technical programs. They might have value for people with an IT background but employed and looking for a new skill to market.

What surprises me is that he keeps coming back for more and Slashdots editors keep letting him.

I can't help but think he'd be an interesting guy to meet at least once. I'd rather talk to someone with ideas and opinions I don't like that someone without any of either.

If you like to use sample sizes that are too small, then I would like to interest you in another useful technique.

Correlation is causation.

For example:

The tides cause the moon. The correlation proves it.

Similarly, murder rates are higher in the summer, and ice cream sales are higher in summer months. Therefore ice cream causes murder.

I hope that was helpful.

Right, but you generally DO need a reason to deny them unemployment compensation -- they have to be fired for cause and the rules are quite strict.

I've fired somebody with what HR said were well-documented for-cause reasons just to have the person appeal and the state find in their favor and award unemployment. In my case they felt that the letters written and the HR policy weren't quite specific enough about not showing up for work and claiming "vacation" in an email at 9:30 AM.

Maybe some places don't care, but usually there's some kind of dollar cost to companies that do a lot of at-will terminations that result in unemployment compensation.