I am a developer, and higher pay is important to me. That's why I'll never be a part of a union. You see, while labor agreements through collective bargaining put a floor on pay, they also put a ceiling on it as well. For instance, I want to be the only one negotiating my salary with my employer. I'd never want my boss to be able to say, "well, you're an indispensable part of this team and we'd like to pay you more as an incentive to stay, but I'm afraid the union contract doesn't allow that."

Unions are a gigantic double-edged sword. For every gain you get, you lose something of equal or greater value. All told, I'd rather just avoid all the extra complications.

If some of my co-workers don't have the balls negotiate better pay or switch jobs, that's entirely not my problem. If I get laid off, that's too bad but I know of three other companies who will hire me tomorrow. If I ever have to join a union just to get a job in I.T., I swear I'll sell everything I own, move out into the country, and switch my career to motorcycle repair. And no, I'm not kidding.

Not sure why anybody thought this was news, I remember reading about it in my Pschology 101 textbook. Nearly any mammal (not just humans) deprived of external stimulus when young will end up with a less developed brain than their otherwise normal peers.

This doesn't apply only to babies and toddlers either. There was a study awhile back trying to figure out why certain groups of inner-city teens don't learn in school. As in, they were taught the same material, given the same homework, spent the same amount of time in class. The study controlled for things like truants and habitual trouble-makers. It turned out that all of them were dealing with at least major parental crisis. For example, their parents were severe alcoholics, beat them, sexually abused them, or died recently. When stuff like that happens, the kids' brains switched into survival mode and were then completely incapable of the kind of in-depth learning that normal kids enjoy. Remove the crisis, and the kid can learn at a normal capacity again. (Depending on the extent/length of the trauma.)

If you disagree, tell me one country which would do a better job. And then tell me how much influence they'd have over the ITU.

The nice thing about the design of the Internet and its protocols, is that no one controls the whole thing(1). Any given entity only has the ability to control their own access to it. This is something that the Internet has flourished because of, not in spite of. If you don't like the Internet as it currently stands, you always have the option to build your own and/or build a firewall to manage access between your subnet and the rest of the Internet at large. As much as we loathe China for blocking off large parts of the Internet from their citizens, they're at least doing it right. They're not standing up on stage and demanding that the whole world's Internet change for their sole benefit. They just built a firewall.

1. I understand, however, that this doesn't apply to certain Internet technologies such as DNS and SSL certificate chains of trust. These are broken by design and will never be fixed until they are fully decentralized.

The trouble with Python 3 is that nobody took responsibility for converting the third-party libraries. Many major libraries became abandonware in that transition.

This is totally non-sensical. Those libraries would have become abandonware without the transition, as their authors had ceased to maintain them at any rate. It's good that others have written replacements. That's how the open source world functions.

While I like some of the changes in python3, breaking compatibility with python2 was a huge fail. [...] Python 2.7.3 is the new IE6.

How very hipster of you.

But, you're simply wrong. If you had bothered to do even the slightest bit of reading, you'd know full well that the Python creators never intended for Python 3 to replace 2 overnight. The break in compatibility was done deliberately, and with a great deal of thought. There are a number of things fundamentally wrong with Python 2 that can't be fixed without breaking backward compatibility. I, for one, am grateful for Guido and crew for doing so as it will mean a much cleaner and more sensible language.

Python 3 readily available in any OS that matters and can be installed right next to Python 2. Your favorite library isn't supported in Python 3? If it's proprietary, bug the vendor. If it's open source, patches are welcome!

We are in a transition period. The only ones that are bothered by all of this are those who want the entire software and language development world to fit into their neat and tidy little idea of how everything should work. If it really bugs you that much, switch to Perl.

Some people don't have a choice, they need the work.

In general, I have a problem with this statement. While I agree with the base assertion that many people can't afford to be terribly picky about their employment options, it is almost universally applied from the point of view, "the poor are completely helpless and it is therefore the government's responsibility to regulate (or give money to) corporations for the purpose of providing comfortable jobs for them."

Give. Me. A. Break. Good jobs are earned, not given. If you are not happy with your current job, stick with it for as long as you can, but work behind the scenes to find a better one. Don't whinge on about how the government, or anyone else, needs to make your job more comfortable for you.

Before anyone gets the wrong impression (and to get back on topic), I do applaud the state of California for making it illegal for companies to ask for your Facebook password. It is a ludicrously small step toward acknowledging individual privacy rights, but a step nonetheless. (The cynic in me is positive that it was already illegal, just under some slightly more complex language in the legal code.)

Finally, there is an easy option that nobody has mentioned yet: lie. Lie your sweet little head off, there's nothing illegal or wrong with legitimately protecting your privacy. Tell them you don't have a facebook account, tell them they found someone else's profile, tell them you lost your password and haven't used it in ages. If there's enough information on the public version of your page for them to dispute any of it, then you left your private life wide open to the world and you can truthfully tell them that they don't need a password to get any of it anyway.

If you ever wanted a punch a Slashdot editor in the face, here's your chance!

I pointed out all the IPv4 address exhaustion issues, but was basically told to mind my own business. "No customer demand for this feature."

Despite being in the business, your forgot one important thing: B2B hardware and software vendors almost universally design products only according to what their customers are actually asking for. It's not quite like the consumer sector where a company designs something new and tries to convince the masses that they need it via marketing. The enterprise is different. If the customer wants a faster horse, you damn well better offer a faster horse or they're going to buy your competitor's solution instead. You may be able to see a future need for a feature (like IPv6). Management sees it as unjustified engineering costs.

Of course, the cynic in me also wonders how many vendors are putting off explicit IPv6 support in their products in order to manufacture a crisis when IPv4 addresses run out, a la Y2K bug. "Oh noes, we need IPv6 in all our stuff, won't you help us out? Here's gobs of money for consulting and durable goods, just make our shit work again!"

Finally, even though IPv6 is starting to take off in the consumer and hosting space, most large internal networks are going to be mainly IPv4 for a good long time yet. We're talking decades, here. Large production business networks are loathe to change and they simply do not upgrade critical systems just because it makes sense to do so. That Sun box you helped engineer, it's going to be in the trash heap long before IPv6 is widespread in the enterprise.

If some company I never heard of asked me to book 5+ hours for an interview, I'd tell them no thanks as well, unless I was absolutely desperate. I have better things to do with my time.

Your time must be extremely valuable, then. Because for the right job, I would interview for as just about a long as they liked. Here's a little story...

For most of my life I had jobs that were either low stress with low pay or high stress with decent pay. I was chasing the dollars so eventually I wound up as a Unix Admin at a financial services company. From Hell. Everything about working there was backwards and the management were sadists. Take Office Space and replace the managers with drill sergeants and you're about halfway there.

Luckily, about two years ago a friend suggested that I interview at the company he worked for. It was one of the famous day-long interviews. I saw the manager of the position for maybe 30 minutes that day. The rest of the time I talked with something like eight different people (all employees, no managers), answered questions, read some code, and talked about my hobbies. I was offered the job and man, I cannot be happier. The culture is great. The pay is more than I thought I'd ever make. Free food and bev, management style is almost completely hands-off, and they care neither when I get there in the morning nor what I wear as long as I am productive and do the things that I'm responsible for. The company is full of great people who need no discipline to do good work, and I think I know why...

Most companies use an interview is make sure that the candidate has the required skills for the position. This is good and all, but what about a company that wants to maintain a certain culture? The day-long interview gives the company a chance to see whether the candidate is a good fit for the company all-around. The company I work for specifically selects for employees that work hard on their own, get along well with fellow geeks, are proud of their past accomplishments, have a bit of hacker spirit, and really know their stuff. You can't get all that in a two-hour sit-down meeting.

HTTPS would represent a significant hit on the servers CPU load if they're not using cryptographically capable hardware

I thought that myth has been pretty well debunked for quite some time now.

As far as I know, Sprint is the only carrier that does this. If every carrier was forced to allow this type of competition, I'm sure it would become the majority.

The other carriers do this, Sprint is just the one with the most MNVOs. Not sure about Verizon, but at least AT&T and T-Mobile also carry MNVOs with unlimited plans (text, talk, and data) for $40-$45. Straight Talk even lets you buy a SIM card for any T-Mobile or AT&T phone for $45/month unlimited everything. (But their customer service is reportedly the worst in the world.)

The reason that these aren't the majority is because the big four excel at marketing. They try to position themselves as the "premium" mobile providers with fancy phones and big expensive plans, and spin the MVNOs (and some of their own plans) as "budget" services for low-income consumers. If Apple products, cable TV, and SUVs have taught us anything, it's to never underestimate the profit potential of status symbols. To a majority of the populace, a cell phone is much more a status symbol than a necessity.

I did the research about a month ago. Since I don't use the carrier's services all that much (I don't make many phone calls, I use Google Voice for text messages, and turn off 3G data most of the time), I decided to go with Ting, the MVNO in TFA. I had to pay an outrageous amount for the phone (their low-end Android phones were too crappy to consider and there were no mid-level Android phones), but on the bright side, I'm looking at paying between $11 and $15 per month if I keep my usage low enough.

Since it is rare for a single process to require more than 4GB of its own address space, there is not much reason to migrate from i386 to amd64 on Linux

But then, if your hardware supports it, there's not a good reason not to, either. Unless you're one of the rare few that happen to need a particular version of Flash or Java, there's no advantage (and a slight performance penalty) to sticking with a 32-bit Linux distribution.

Also, it may be rare now to have a process that takes up more than 4GB of address space, but you'll be surprised how quickly that will cease to be true. The instance of Firefox that I'm using to write this is taking up 308MB of memory and that's only with a few tabs open. I imagine heavy users bump up against 1GB routinely.

I can't find the source at the moment, but there was a discussion on LKML where a few of the kernel developers were threatening to write a patch which refused to let a PAE kernel boot on AMD64 hardware.

Hence the rapid shift from 32bit to 64bit in Windows, but the much more leisurely migration on Linux and BSD.

I think you have those quite reversed...

When the first AMD64 processors were released, Linux was the only mainstream OS that could take full advantage of the hardware on day one because AMD actively worked with the open source community to get support for their chips in software like the kernel and gcc before launch. In truth, it wasn't that hard because Linux already had mature 64-bit support on other platforms (sparc, mips64) for years.

And for years, Linux was still the only mainstream OS that had good 64-bit support. The only thing holding users back were a couple of proprietary desktop applications that are now finally becoming fully obsolete. System administrators have been able to run full 64-bit Linux on their servers for what, 8 years or so.

But on Windows, everyone had to wait for software and hardware vendors to get their crap together in order to run anything decent. And I know a number of businesses who cannot and will not swtich over to 64-bit Windows any time soon due to legacy hardware and/or software requirements.

This is one argument I really don't get, and yet the FOSS library maintainers seem to be adamant that they must be able to break their ABIs whenever they want.

Yes, FOSS library maintainers want to be able to break their ABIs. They do it often. And that's fine. Why? Because we have this thing called versioning. You can write your application against libfoo.so.2, and the author of libfoo can rewrite the thing from ground-up and call it libfoo.so.3. And guess what? Your application works just fine because libfoo.so.2 didn't disappear from the face of the earth. You just install libfoo.so.2 and libfoo.so.3 side-by-side and everybody's happy. This is a primary strength of open source, not a weakness.

Most idiots just parrot the 'security through obscurity' thinking it's some compelling argument when it's really not. If the basis of your security is entirely reliant on the obscurity of your algorithms, etc. being private then it is bad. But using some level of secrecy as a first line of defense can be quite useful in preventing attacks.

My favorite analogy so far is: good security is layered like an onion. So, changing your SSH port to something other than 22 is not going to fool an attacker who is pretty sure that you probably have an SSH daemon running on your machine. But doing so lowers your attack surface significantly against random skript kiddies and less skilled crackers. Every layer you add reduces the attack surface that much more, until the only way someone is going to break into your system is if they happen to know exactly how it's set up and happen to have a couple of 0-day vulnerabilities at their disposal.

If you downplay all of the easy things which offer trivial security on their own but when put together, add significant security, all you're left with is a single barrier between root and the attackers. What are the chances that the barrier is perfectly bug-free and impenetrable? Even OpenBSD has shipped with security issues in the default install and that's probably the most hardened-out-of-the-box OS there is.

I tried Groove IP, and it looks like most of the time, all you have to do is install the app and sign in.

However, when testing it out with another phone, I found that the delay in the audio was too high to carry on a normal conversaion. On the order of 1 - 1.5 seconds. I couldn't find any settings in Groove IP that would lower it. Doesn't seem to be a problem with Google Voice because I carried out the same test on my computer (over the same wifi) and the latency was well within tolerable.

I might use Groove IP in a pinch, but not for normal chatting.