What? There's a lack of trust in the US government?!! Just because the IRS can apparently be a very willing tool in attacking citizens, now we are going to distrust the FBI? As the movie line goes, "heaven forfend!"

What are we worrying about? Benghazi? Wiretapping of Emails? Oh my, how suspicious we've become about our public servants who tirelessly work on our behalf. Some times they have to explain why they are shielding and coddling us, but really–it's all for our benefit; for the greater good.

Silly conspiracy theorists! Relax, the government will take care of us!!!

Out of curiosity, what editor is that? Does it use Emacs/shell key bindings? Take my fingers off the home row to hit a key and you've lost the argument.

I just spent 3 days at a HP-sponsored event. Can you say Windows? I happened to mention I use Emacs as my editor. Everything was fine up until then, using Linux is "geeky/cool," but for a couple of listeners, using Emacs equated with being ancient. Bizarre. I don't GAF (think about that) what people use to create files. The created file and what it does in the grand scheme of things has always seemed to me to be the more important aspect of it all, and if you like vi, yay for you. I've used Emacs since before many IT people today were born.

People are mostly awed when they enter my office, get behind the "wall o-monitors" and see just how many xterm windows I'm running. More disturbing for them, since several are running tails, they move. My visitors are intimidated, though that is never my intent. I imagine them thinking, "How does he manage so much information at one time!!!"

When command line is history, I hope to be history

I can see it now, a star chamber filled with emotionless shadowy figures. You are summoned and tested by arbitrary standards. You try to object; you are summarily hustled out and told you'll be informed in three days.

The predictable outcome: You're too old. It doesn't matter what your skill set is; we judge simply on age.

What could go wrong? Sounds like a perfect socialist societal model to me.

We have to do something. Get people all worked up so they're not thinking clearly, then ram another law in their faces.

Welcome to politics!

I recently had a spot of basal cell carcinoma removed from my nose, which involved a skin transplant from - of all places - my ear. Then I received an unexpected (and certainly unwanted) appointment voice confirmation call from my dermatologist. At least it wasn't a robocall; I block those. On my next visit I lambasted the receptionist, telling her to send Email. She said quietly "The computer I'm working on is running Windows 98, and our server runs DOS." Oh, crap.

Pretty hard to give her a rough time after that. She told me that the doctor had written his own billing software and was in the process of trying to port it over to Windows 7. Sheesh. I appreciate that volume reduces cost, as has often been mentioned. I don't live in Podunk (and if you do, my apologies), and my doctor either can't afford commercial billing software or perhaps is too cheap to buy it.

Naturally, there is no Internet connection from these ancient computers. Isolating something that works but is not supported makes a small degree of sense, but to be running Win98 in 2013? Something's badly broken, maybe the killer FOSS medical billing software is the answer, but I have no ability to write it.

Rant mode: Why then, when I have "full" coverage, do I have to pay $1800 on the bill when my "insurance company" pays less than $400? End rant.

If your business has a steel roof, that's what's doing the jamming. I have no problem if there's a legitimate reason to SCREEN cell phone emissions. You do that by lining your walls with some kind of "chicken wire" appropriate for the frequency the offenders are trying to transmit on.

Funny how this transfers the cost of cell phone use denial to the business that wishes to deny it, and how appropriate. The idea of employing jammers, simply ridiculous. I hear it as the cheapest way to deal with a perceived problem. If you can't motivate your employees, that's not MY problem (should I unwittingly venture onto your property.) Seems to me that denial of 911 access alone would put any of these guardians of all freedom into a painful legal situation.

A-holes on cell phones are the same a-holes that have plagued society since time immemorial. Trying to counter a perceived RF threat with more RF is a strategy destined to failure.

My approach is to play music softly in the background. At work we have private offices, as opposed to being a cube farm, and what it takes for me is to have the music just loud enough to keep something else from looping constantly, and it's not loud enough to bother my coworkers. The experience is that the annoying tune[s] have no way to start playing, so they don't loop.

For me, a song playing in my head is very distracting, to the point I can't get other work done. Seems like every time I get in the shower some song will start playing and it takes until I'm out and the hair dryer is going that it disappears. Wait, this means I have a disability, woo hoo!!! If it isn't tinitis, it's music in my head. Where's that number for the disability office?

Beats me how you can justify a teacher forcing a child to switch hands. When my mother was a child (yes, in a one-room schoolhouse), she was forced to switch and become right handed. I asked her why she didn't simply switch back, and she said she'd been writing so long with her right hand that she really couldn't. She always struggled to write neatly.

When I entered first grade Mom told me that if the teacher tried to make me use my right hand, to tell the teacher she'd be having a conversation with my mother. That's exactly what happened, I think the teacher was taken aback that a small child would stand up to a directive like that. Mom and the teacher spoke (I was not privy to the conversation) and I was never asked to write right handed again.

I also learned to shoot right handed, and was disturbed by an earlier poster who apparently thinks shooting a gun is wrong for some reason. My parents gave me the best gun safety education a child could possibly ask for, and safety has always been #1 for me when around firearms. Anyway, the rifles we had were bolt action and of course were made for right-handed shooters. I really had no choice but to learn to shoot right handed, and I do so now. I'm strongly left eye dominant, being naturally about 20/40 in the left eye and 20/200 in the right eye. Didn't have glasses as a kid (that's another story), but had to learn to shoot using my weak eye.

Interesting about writing, I saw a few left handed kids that wrote with their hand all scrunched up, and it made no sense to me. It was like they were trying to be right handed with their left hand. Being fairly inventive, I adopted a natural position of the hand and taught myself. My teachers were no help, and they probably secretly wanted to force me to "write properly" with my right hand. Learning to take my own path and not blindly follow instructions was a great lesson in life.

Ever notice how pretty much all paper forms are totally right handed? When I'm handed a clipboard with forms to fill out, I unclip the paper and turn the clipboard 90 degrees so that my left hand has support while filling in blanks that are at the left margin of the page. Funny how there are few if any blanks to fill in at the right margin. I laugh every time there are and some "rightie" complains they're hard to fill in. Welcome to my world, dude!

Yup, lies are often transparent. Prevarication, outright B.S. - both can deceive if delivered in a convincing way. "What do you mean, I didn't answer your question?" A "B.S.-o'meter" would make car salespeople fear me and most politicians run in terror.

I'm not worried about losing friends with my new super power. I spent way too long weeding them out from the crowd to have any further worries about whether they have my back (or a knife poised just above it.)

No, not quite. That's not what "hang up" means.

When I was a boy, you young whippersnapper, we had a candlestick phone (look it up: http://www.collectorsweekly.com/telephones/candlestick). When the phone rang our distinctive ring pattern, you picked up the candlestick with your right hand, then picked the receiver up with your left and held it to your ear. When the call was complete, you hung the receiver on its hook. Not placed, hung. That, sonny boy, is where the term "hang up" comes from.

Since the telephone operator in town listened in to every call, she knew who was visiting who, so if I'd lift the receiver hook carefully to see if someone was on the party line, then hang up and give the magneto crank one long turn to call the operator, I'd ask in my little boy voice to talk to my aunt Della. The operator knew she was visiting Luella and put the call through. Our phone consisted of the candlestick, plus an oak box on the wall with brass bells and the ringer on the top, a crank on the right side for the magneto, and two dry cells with Fahnestock clips wired in series for power. The phone guy came out and replaced them twice a year. It wasn't even a "central battery" system in those days.

The really scary part is, it's true. We had a candlestick phone until I was about 12 years old in '62 or '63 when we got our first party line dial phone. How freakin' old am I?

OK, there's some justification for this. Some.

Older versions of the OS do not support, and are not expected to support new hardware. If I was making an OS (let us be thankful I am not), I'd do the same thing.

That being said, it's often frustrating to buy new machines that won't support an older OS version. As the network admin for a small college (happily) infested with Macs, we often deal with major software (Avid, Pro Tools, etc.) that is very version-specific. Trying to find the latest version we can run on a lab's computers that will work with every 3rd party software application that the situation demands is like walking a tightrope. Run too new an OS version and you'll break something, guaranteed.

All of this kvetching aside, I'd 100X rather manage Macs than Windows. As to Linux, and we have a number of Linux servers on campus, I sit in my office with the 27" iMac my boss so generously purchased for me, and most of what's on the two screens it's running are xterms. Yet in a moment I can switch to Photoshop CS6 to do some tweaks on an image that is soon to become part of an informational how-to poster that students and faculty alike will completely ignore. Life is fun.

A souvenir bat. It's not that complicated!!!

(For any who are wondering, this is about spelling.)

Finally it makes sense, the plane (which is often in the clouds) generates data (which is stored in the cloud.)