Hate to tell you this, but most of us in the top 5% started in the lower 50%. When you get out of college you take a shit job to get experience but little by little you climb up the ladder. But today there is such a sense of entitlement that everyone wants to be in the top 10% right out of undergrad. Guess what? it does not work that way. Want to make the top 10 or 5%? Sacrifice. Give up going out with your friends to work 18 hour days. Nobody gave me what I have, but I am glad that I have it and I say "screw you" to those who want to take it away from me (ie: Obama). I made the sacrifices. I could have made more money off the bat by not going to college, but I did not. I could have made more money quickly by not getting a second degree part time while I was working but I stuck it out. Now I have a nice house and a new car with a kid in college and another to follow soon. I also was smart and went to state schools so I did not have to max out my student loans. You made bad choices? Tough shit. The info was always out there but you chose to ignore it.

Nope. http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/administrative/breachnotificationrule/postedbreaches.html

BS - They have already gone after Blue Cross/Blue Shield and many large practices. There have been multi-million dollar settlements. This was a warning shot to smaller providers that they have to keep their patients' data safe too because many are too lazy to do so.

You should re-read the license. You absolutely may charge for GPL software. Free means the source code is readily available (free as in speech, not as in beer).

Then why did Danny Williams come to the US for his heart surgery?

If you live in the US, or your hosting is in the US, what you have done is technically cyber-crime. While I hate to say this, your best recourse is to move to another host and leave it all behind you. Should the hosting company start losing business because of you warning other users you could face all kinds of civil lawsuits and possibly even criminal penalties.

Go onto Cowboom or eBay and get a used Mac. Blizzard has great Mac clients and you will not have to worry about the viruses, etc. The upfront cost may be greater but the Total Cost of Ownership will be less. See if you can find a Mac Mini that meets the specs - any one made in 2009 or later will do as they have nvidia graphics.

I am just about as old as you and pretty much have followed the same track. I do still use Linux as my server OS - Scientific or Centos, but I use OSX 10.8 as my desktop. It look good, it does not essentially change with each annual release, the mainstream apps I need are available and I can still do PHP/Apache/MySQL development on it. I loved Linux from the late 80s until around the release of the first Hackintosh distros when I was able to convert my Dell Vostro which had Fedora over to MacOS. It was fairly stable but the stability problems took me no longer to fix than the configuration files on Linux that I always had to tweak. Now I run a MacBook Air, and everything works well, including the unix console that I spend half my day using.

Actually no, since you are the one accessing it against the company policy, YOU are circumventing your copy-protection scheme and you could technically go to jail for accessing your own data.

It is settled law that the company owns all data on its computers, email accounts etc, at least in the USA. If you are doing it at work, your employer has every right to be sniffing and logging that data, encrypted of otherwise since you are working for them and as a result you, for the time you are at work, are part of the company.

Depends on what you call "Elder". Those in their 60s and 70s yes. Those of us in our 40s and slighty older than us are even more screwed than you youngsters. We have paid in all our lives (25+ years) the same as those in their 70s and 80s who have gotten everything but when we get to retirement age in 15-20 years there will be nothing left for us and everything we paid in will have been sucked dry.

Here are a few online courses that might help

http://chemistry.about.com/od/onlinecourses/Online_Chemistry_Courses.htm

Agreed. You cannot be expected to shift gears and look at code for free. The client write the spec or at least the majority of it. It behooves them to test the code to make sure it meets the spec when they get it. Support costs, it is not a freebie.

I write into my contracts: 1/3 due up front (agreement of the spec). 1/3 due at delivery. 1/3 due at acceptance. Acceptance is either when they sign off, or one week after delivery of product or delivery of the fix of the last bug determined between delivery and acceptance. Anything after acceptance is billable. Any "bug" that does not match the initial spec is not a bug, but rather additional work to be billed. The original spec is initialed on all pages by them Any changes that they ask for and I agree to during the course of the product being developed are added to an amended spec, sometimes gratis, sometimes at an additional cost. It is a pain, but it is the only way that these things go smoothly.