"Capitalism 101 says that pricing acts as a regulator between supply and demand."

Your incorrect, price is where the supply curve intersects with the demand curve. It is the result, not the input. That is economics 101. Price is a regulator of nothing unless your a government that sets price controls (which always fail).

Capitalism 101 just says charge people what you can get away with and pay as little as possible. The difference is profit.

If you think the free market is suppose to give consumers everything at low cost you don't understand the concept. Free markets produce the most accurate real cost of a product, not the friendliest.

AT&T is not acting in a free market, it is regulated. The government controls who can compete with AT&T and this is why they act the way they do. This is the real racket you are referring to. If it were an open market anyone could put up a network to compete for your dollars. That's what the Rand fanbois would tell you.

However that argument is as ill conceived as your post. Barriers to entry and interfering transmissions between carriers destroys that notion. You could have light but intelligent regulation but that requires Congress to act like mature adults. Good luck with that.

Of course, the mainframe is a marginalized beast these days.

Hardly marginalized. It's doing what it has always done best, which is push lots of data around with raw processing power. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they aren't there humming away crunching data. If you use an ATM, charge something to a credit card, or receive your pay I guarantee you there is a mainframe at the end of that transaction.

The need for mainframe services never went away, the world just built a whole new computer segment separate from them for new things.

I have to disagree with you on XP. I think it was a much cleaner OS that the ones before it. It was the first to ditch the Windows 95/DOS code base and use the Windows NT kernel as a base. For most of the 90's I was a Linux or BSD user. Windows 95 and 98 were pains in the ass in terms of getting drivers to work or playing nice on the network. I tolerated Win 95 for my games but when game time was done it was back to Linux. XP, at least after the first service pack, seemed to just work. You could plug something in and it just worked. No screaming and cursing trying to make some driver function. I stopped using Linux with XP.

Windows 7 on the other hand is starting to get annoying and has me wondering about going back to Linux. There are too many locked down things in there attempt to be more like OS X. MS seems to be catering to regular consumers instead of power users. It's getting very annoying.

"If you use Windows for financial stuff you will get screwed eventually."

You are clearly not familiar with true computer security. I have used windows for more than a decade (one of many OS's I work with) and have done "financial stuff" on them. A Windows system can be just as hardened as any other. I do everything from person banking to stock trading. I have never had any problems because I have never had a virus or spyware running on any system I have ever used. I know how operating systems work and I make sure I know what every service, application, or driver is doing on my system. This is what being secure really is. Every OS is vulnerable including Linux and OS X, it's just that Windows gets more of the press and targeting by hackers. If you blindly trust the makers of your OS to provide security your going to get screwed.

The amount of gold that exists does change and fluctuate based on how much of it we pull out of the earth. This is the problem with gold or other commodity backed currencies and why it's lead to volatile inflation/deflation cycles. You are connecting the supply of money to the rate miners can dig the mineral out of the earth. Printing money under a proper monetary system can be controlled to keep inflation in check, so long as the central bank's mandate is to keep inflation in check. So pick your poison, a central banking system that requires oversight to avoid the temptation of inflating you way out of problems, or highly volatile inflation /deflation cycles based on the rate miners can dig stuff from the ground.

"Online learning is no substitute for a good teacher....Reading is boring. By using volume, inflection, humour, and gestures the teacher keeps the class lively and the students interested. One can only read for so long before the brain shut down and the learning stops."

This is bunk, and I think I know why you can't see the other side of things. You are one of those extrovert types, you always have to be talking to some one to get that in person experience. If you can't get the facial expressions and vocal tones to go with information you are digesting you just can't digest it, like making a person with gluten allergies try and eat a loaf of bread. Your mistake is you think other people function the same way, but they don't.

As an introvert I hate those intonations and inflections you drone on about. Just give me the book and in a week I will be an expert at the subject matter. You say reading is boring? Do you know how stupid that sounds? I have received greater wisdom from so many great writers who's bones are now dust, all from a printed page. I don't need your professor (who usually won't give me the time of day) to give the right volume and funny spin as you put it to get it through my head. This is why I flourish in on-line education and suck in a traditional setting. Give me the course materials and 6 months to prep and I can ace any exam on any subject.

I understand that your personality type needs things to be told to you by another human for you to properly digest. I read about this in books. But that is just an argument to have both systems available for different learning styles.

"Being able to talk to tutors/unit coordinators face to face helps (being able to send them email questions right on the spot without needing to wait until they can see them in the flesh next time also helps)"

It works for you, not for me. If we are just talking undergrad do you really think you can't lookup the information in a book or even Wikipedia? In an undergrad setting you are getting nothing by being there in person, zip, zero, nada. Unless your the one class suck up it's not going to happen. In this situation your text book and course materials, not to mention external sources, are going to be far more helpful. In a traditional setting your just a bum in a seat in a very large class room setting.

"And yes as others have said, being on campus gives you campus culture and stuff"

Campus culture is crap. This is the excuse of last resort in defending traditional university settings. It's really just a day care centre for not yet adults who get to drink alcohol and party. As each year goes by in the real world you will find your "experience" becomes more of a quaint memory that has nothing to do with real life.

I just spent 4 years getting a degree online (Athabasca) after working in the real world for 15 years and I far prefer it to the traditional experience. On-line or distance gives me the flexibility to keep my full time job (helps to pay for the courses) and manage course load. Employers don't give two craps what your university culture or alma mater is, just what you can do. If you can master course material with little assistance independently and on time you are highly sought after. A degree from the right on-line university (some are great, some not so much) can convey that.

I will admit to agreeing with a lot of your post, but that does not mean a Facebook account is evil and Facebook users deserve what ever evil befalls them. When I was in the army and taking Comm's training they told us to always assume the enemy is listening. I treat Facebook the same way regardless of privacy setting. I say nothing on Facebook or any other site that I could not handle being asked about in a job interview.

Unfortunately there are lots of people who have not made that connection. Their drunken escapades are displayed for all to gawk at. It is these people who do not deserve our pity. But don't tarnish all Facebook users for that idiocy of some.

You problem is bad management, not bad process.

The process is an enabler of bad management. The biggest assumption that all development life cycle methodology is that management is competent and wants the project to succeed. In the real world of cubicle politics this is nuts to assume. The "process" now becomes a weapon in an agenda war between managers and departments. Competent works and managers become targets and victims of the "process".

Have the bean counters gotten in the way? Yes, but remember they're the ones who have to show management that you're tracking on schedule and delivering something that will work; keeping you employed.

At what point does it become excessive tracking and managing by the bean counters? I've watched over 15 years a shift from wild west to overly bureaucratic. What if all those bean counters cause quality to go down, not up? Yes we need to avoid the wild west development style to avoid those problems but we seem to be solving that by going in the absolute opposite direction. I've seen bug fixes for simple things take years to work their way through the process. I have witnesses simple side projects with budgets of $50K turn into millions of dollars annually due to process overkill. There has to be an in between where we have some process over site but allow some flexibility for developers to do their jobs. At what point do those bean counter be the reason the company goes under and every one is no longer employed?

I've been programming since the 80's and getting paid to do it since the mid 90's. It was the mid to late 90's when I got introduced to life cycle methodologies and at first I applauded them. I was even selected for a committee to help firm up our "best practices". I thought I would improving things by stopping bad practices by bad programmers. After a while it turned into a nightmare as those bad programmers started using the "best practice" rules as cover for the crap they produced. "But it passed unit testing and UAT, it must be awesome". Our project budgets went up and implementation time increased while our customers were visibly pissed at the final product.

The problem with SDLC process management has been sufficiently skewered by Joel Spolsky in a blog post several years ago. By putting a bureaucratic process in place you replace rock stars with compliance monkeys. Actually delivering a solid product is far less important than meeting checkpoints. And when your a programmer who's dedicated to a polished final product it's like murdering your soul to watch mid level managers (who know nothing of development) work hard at micro-managing you to ensure those check points are met on time. The actual outcome is irrelevant, the surgery was a success even though the patient died.

I have worked in both environments, the loosy goosy no rules and the highly rigid SDLC bureaucratic world. I understand the need for review and verification and the problems of wild west development. But development process methodologies are dangerous enablers of bad middle managers and "consultants" that sell you management processes that don't really help any body.

Developers just implement the design

You sound either insane or too young to know what goes on in development. Development encompasses a lot of things and many projects don't even have a "designer" involved at all. Properly tackling how interfaces connect back to back end databases and other services takes smarts and passion. There is a whole host of things that go on behind that pretty screen that you "design". If you don't have smart people thinking creatively how to do that the project will be crushed by bugs and poor performance.

It's WPA2 of course, and I created a randomly generated 16 character password of upper and lower case letters, number, and special characters (! & etc).

Guests to my house that ask for access are mortified at entering the password on their smart phones.

"I don't know about you out there, but I'm a big fan of this whole "society" thing, and if random JoeBlow walks up to my house and asks for a drink of water"

And what happens when many neighbors keep coming up to your door for water? What if several pull up and ask you to fill up their barrel with water? What if the wants lots of your water to drown their wife for kids? Water their 40 acres of crops? Fill a swimming pool? What's your limit of giving?

It might be a tiny cost now, but with that big a drain on your water supply won't the water utility question this and charge you more? Metered water is a fact in most cities these days. Are you willing to pay way more for your benevolent community contribution? You are asking to be taken advantage of. It's the same thing with wi-fi signals, people will take advantage of you and then you will get your Internet usage bill. Once that occurs you will change your tune.