I've also seen terrible build quality in laptops. My brand new system that I got from work about 5 years ago started overheating and shutting down when sitting flat on a table. If you elevated the back it was fine. I opened it up, blew out the ducting with some air, didn't really see anything useful happen, put it back together, and never had another issue. Undoubtedly there was some flotsam in there that the factory hadn't gotten cleaned out. I suppose it could have been a fan not running, but a utility I installed I had claimed that all the fans were running.

Well, I can't say for sure because I am actually from Oklahoma and my company has not been trying to hire anyone other than me yet. However, my estimation is that there are a small number of both IT professionals and IT jobs and that any disruption to the static state of either probably takes a long time to fill the void.

I'm an Arkansas programmer. I don't actually live there, but I work for a company in Arkansas. They had to outsource to Oklahoma to get me.

That is not surprising. Back then, probably almost every high school offered a programming course. However, since then they have removed the programming course in favor of the more generic "computers" course, which teaches nothing but web surfing and how to burn illegal copies of games and music.

Any high school class is not intended to establish a career. It is intended to begin you down a track of learning which will be rounded out in college and polished to a fine hone during your first job.

In the USA, programming was also taught in schools 30 years ago. Now, however, they teach "Computers" instead of programming. As far as I can tell, "Computers" means how to surf the internet and burn illegal copies of games and music. After having gotten an "A" in computers, my stepson had to ask me what a good program would be to use if he wanted to write an essay.

There are about 164,000 911 calls nationwide in a 6 hour period on average. For 7 states, that averages out to about 23,000. So what happened that there were 500 times as many 911 calls in that area as the average dictates? Or by affected, do they mean, could have been affected, if they were one of the 0.006% of the people that may have needed to call 911 at that time?
Additionally, it is difficult to know what affected means when many areas already have hold times for 911.

EA screwed up Simcity when it decided to turn it into the Facebook of city builders. Nobody wants to play a single person strategy game online with all their friends. Nobody wants to have to buy content to fix issues with the game.Nobody wants city sizes smaller than the previous version.
I eventually bought it when they released the offline mode, but I still found it kind of disappointing.

Well, hopefully that would cut down on the monthly "Which keyboard should I get?" article.

That is pretty said if they have developed an in-car device that is less useful than a phone. Why don't they just buy cars with GPS? Just about every car has it at least as an option these days. You get a much larger screen, no worrying about batteries dying, usually a much less dangerous UI than a phone or other separate GPS, and some models even have limited inertial navigation for when you go into tunnels or are traveling in mountainous areas.

So you have arbitrarily decided your definition of a portable device is what fits into your definition of the size of a pocket. This tablet is less than 25% larger than your arbitrarily decided maximum pocket size. While we are at it, your arbitrarily decided maximum pocket size is rather huge. I am guessing you have decided on a particular manufacture that only has up to 8 inch tablets and are trying to justify it.

Exactly. If anything, they invented the smartphone. But nobody knew about it until Apple made the iphone and decided that they had invented the smartphone.

Fire the school administrators anyway. People complain about the teacher's union, but teacher's salaries have barely kept up with inflation. The administration budget, meanwhile, has gone up by thousands or tens of thousands of percent all across the country. Why were we able to get by in the 70s and 80s with effectively a couple of secretaries and a principal, but now we need an entire separate building to house hundreds of administrators? Why is the student to administrator ratio less than the student to teacher ratio? It is needless red tape and needless expense that drives up property taxes and sales taxes and reduces the amount of money going toward education. Fire all of them and education will be improved.
In my school district, in the 1970s, the band program received $15,000 a year, which helped to repair, replace and purchase instruments, music, and equipment. It is now $1,500 in actual dollars or $243 in inflation adjusted dollars. Meanwhile the administrative staff in my school district has gone from a size of perhaps 20 in the 1970s to several hundred now. The number of students in the district has remained approximately the same. The number of teachers has gone down so we can afford to pay all the administrators. Other services have disappeared as well. Bus service is only available if you live more than 1.5 miles from the school. School lunches have been cut back such that about once a week my kids come home and tell me that the cafeteria ran out of the meal and gave them a cold sandwich, yet charged full price.
What administrative costs have done to our schools is a nationwide epidemic and needs to be reversed and quickly. The entire department lives only continue its own existence at the expense of our children's education.

Well eventually, as more and more blue collar jobs are replaced with entry level service jobs, nobody will be able to afford the goods and services produced, so the need for OTR trucking will go away, and the companies that make the products will go away, so the need for IT people like us will go away. Everybody wins!

It's still not a threat to pilots. People doing that kind of work can't do it with a Private Pilot's license. it requires a Commercial Pilot's license. Anyone else also putting metal in the air for the same task in the same airspace also requires a Commercial Pilot's license. So no Pilot's jobs are at risk.