Why was this modded troll. It's 100% true, and anybody who thinks it isn't either doesn't live here in Canada, or really has no clue.

That letter includes the work address and phone number of the CEO of Rightscrap. Good times are ahead, I'm thinking.

Thanks for this! Yeah, I've got the backup side of things fully covered (and virus checkers, firewall, etc.), but I had never heard of CryptoPrevent before. I'll check it (and MalwareBytes) out

Ok, so I've done all this stuff. I unfortunately have to use Windows for a lot of things (eg. work), but I have full sets of redundant backups, and always at least one giant backup drive offsite. But there are always going to be gaps in the schedule where I'll potentially lose a couple days. With the pain of full system restores, and losing some continuity, however small, it would be far better to protect against this kind of thing. I'm pretty safe about blocking ads, turning off scripting, not clicking on evil things, but I'm wondering if there's more I can do? What about something like Sandboxie, or doing my web surfing from a VM? Anybody have any advice on best practices?

Even better, the linked article actually states "by all indications the economy’s doing pretty well". I didn't read past that.

"and by at least some indications the economy's doing pretty well"

Which indications are those? Forgive me, but I don't watch CNBC.

Ok, maybe I'm mis-remembering, and the client didn't tap into my video card back then, since now that you mention it, I didn't check out CGminer until about a year later. But looking at my wallet, I can see that it was July 2010, and I got my blocks on July 13th and 15th. Either way, the point is that I was lucky enough to check this thing out when it first started, and for once, simply being a curious geek paid off.

Doesn't matter to me what you think really, but I just wanted to mention that all I did was notice an article here on slashdot about bitcoin when it was first launching, said to myself "huh, this looks like an interesting concept", grabbed the client, mined a couple blocks of 50 coins in a matter of days with a mediocre video card, then turned it off and forgot about it. When the price skyrocketted, I knew it wasn't sustainable, and this neat little experiment had gone too far, so I sold most of them at that point, on an exchange. What part of that was me being a scammer?

I know, right? I got a pretty good crash course in Spanish after moving to Mexico for a year in 2000, to a city where almost no-one spoke English. So now I'm fairly fluent in English, French and Spanish. Since leaving Quebec almost 30 years ago, I only speak French with anyone once every few years as a bit of a novelty. Spanish? Absolutely never in the main cities in Canada. I work in IT, and I've only ever met one guy who spoke Spanish. The order is, and has been English, Chinese, Russian, and German, with Hindi floating around on either side of Russian, and Japanese down near the bottom (but still way above Spanish) more or less exactly as you stated, in every corporate environment I've working in for the last 20 years. That includes the teams several other countries. Conclusion: The secondary languages I've learned have absolutely no use in any business I've conducted throughout my entire career in IT.

You mean like this? http://hexus.net/tech/news/dis... I don't care what anyone else says about what's "right", because people are idiots. I'm buying one of these.

Alternate Reality Games. Love 'em. Hard to classify though, since the best ones have a heavy 'real world' puzzle solving component, and aren't necessarily confined to an online experience. That part alone would make me consider them video games, but some of the late night phone calls I've gotten, and weird places I've gone to, definitely elevates this type of game into a class by itself.

Wait...you're asking for a boycott on Samsung, but not Apple? ...and you think that Apple hasn't tried (and succeeded) in lawsuits defending their frivolous patents by outspending their competition on fancy lawyers? While I agree that Samsung has pulled a lot of crap that is boycott-worthy, the way you've stated the case is, to put it nicely, disingenuous.

Well, there are reasons beyond that to be fair. Thinking of the reasons why some of my previous jobs were in large corporations:

- More likely to get training when you're starting out and wet behind the ears, be surrounded by people with more experience you can learn from, and not have to be the guy with all the answers when you're so junior.
- A certain level of job stability and good benefits when you have bills to pay, and people you're supporting.
- Something recognizable to other employers for your future job hunting.

Having said all that, you're right about one thing. If you stay in IT long enough, and you're good at what you do, there does come a point where, if you've worked for large companies for a while, you realize how crap it is, and that you deserve better and can get it in a smaller shop, or startup.

[citation needed] Specifically I'm saying, citation of someone with no domain experience in a type of business starting one, and becoming wildly successful that wasn't due to either luck or downright unethical practices. One example please...just one. Thanks.

My favorite one was the space/sci-fi one. My memory is fuzzy, but there was a page where something really cool happens, but it was an unreachable, unlinked page that you couldn't normally get to. I found it because I had a practice of putting a little pencil mark on the corner of every page I read, so I could see which pages I hadn't read, and try to figure out how to get to them.