I agree with you that VBA is significantly more valuable to the average office drone. However, I'm not sure most of the things VBA is intended for will be big draws to getting kids to learn programming. When I was in high school it was VB6. Me and the other hand full of kids that knew how to program raced through the year's assignments and then wrote a video game. I guess I could implement a video game in Excel, but... it seems unnecessarily cheesy.

I run a Plex server and connect to it remotely via my phone. My phone can definitely play 1080p video, but my cell connection generally isn't going to stream fast enough. Having plex transcode on the fly means that the video is playable vs not.

I agree with you that Orthodox Christianity is a religion of hate.

I support open source for purely political reasons. I stopped using IE for mostly political reasons. I don't use FF anyways but I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that people might not use FF for political reasons.

If you're not distributing copyrighted material I fail to see how this could be a problem in practice. You'd have to create a public link to your copyrighted file and that link would have to somehow wind up in the hands of the MPAA or other representative of copyright holders.

They should use Windows 8 RT tablets. No one bothered to figure out how to hack both of the users of that platform.

Is it safe to assume that even nuclear weapons will emit a considerable amount of anti-neutrinos? Because that'd be.. Oh wait, there's a knock at the door.

How do you shop for new clients? How do you find businesses and get on their list of "approved vendors?"

My cell phone probably has the processing power to churn out diagnoses faster and equally as accurate as your average general practitioner. It could probably do most of the lab tests too. There's already devices to do blood sugar tests and tracking on your smartphone. It won't be long (decade or two) before they can do all sorts of blood and urine tests as well as check my heart rate and other vitals. My cell phone will be less forgetful and have more up to date information than the average physician. What my cell phone will lack is bedside manner. As a fairly non-emotional person I'm looking forward to my ability to have my cell phone provide me with scripts for 99% of the the things that go wrong with people.

No, but you can arrest bankers at HSBC for assisting in money laundering for drug cartels... oh wait.

Actually, sneaking a refill at 7-11 is definitely robbing. It's just robbing on a scale so small that no one would ever bother you for it. It's kind of like in banking software, when we calculate interest. You see there's all these fractions of cents...

Depends on the level of clearance. I've known plenty of defense contractors with various levels of clearance and I've never heard of any of them taking a polygraph.

And it's a little gray as to whether or not the NSA can sell it's data about you to the Canadian intelligence services and/or purchase data about Americans from foreign services. When I say it's a little gray, what I mean is that they do it and it appears to be technically legal.

I think this argument always boils down to nationalism. Do you support the idea of restrictions on business practices that are intended to promote your own country's citizens over that of another's? It's certainly fair and reasonable to do so, but I think a lot of people think the best person for the job should get the job no matter where they come from. And "best" of course is defined by the business owners and lower pay is obviously a factor. I think there's some merit to both schools of thought. In IT I think people like to compare current salaries to the dot com bubble which is silly. That's like comparing current realtor pay to the haydays of the housing bubble. It's very difficult to make a reasonable objective argument on what IT salaries *should* be right now.

It's also important to consider how IT work has changed over the decades. It's certainly true that a lot of the types of work we do has been commoditized so that a less skilled worker can complete tasks that were impossible 15 years ago. How should that impact wages?

TBH I think our country is facing very complex geopolitical issues that will result in us slowly becoming something other than the only world superpower, which is something we've enjoyed for generations. Competition is coming and it's silly to assume that US employees/workers are the "best." We just had a head start in relatively recent history due to the nature of the world economies after WW2. Americans are going to have to become accustomed to a lower relative standard of living because we've had it so amazingly good forever and there's a natural force pulling us back to normal.

Surveillance shouldn't bother you if you're not hiding anything. And since nothing can be hidden from Google, nothing is bothering you.