Partially correct, but IMO, not the whole picture.....

A job really is only created when an employer decides to offer it.

Even if someone has more people wanting to use his/her service than he can handle, he has other options besides creating a new job to hire extra help. I see this every day.... Many people decide that thanks to all the government "red tape", it's not desirable to grow the business larger than the sole proprietorship level it's at. (As soon as you hire that first employee, you're mired in a mess of payroll taxes, questions about health insurance and benefits, worker's comp, etc. etc. You're practically committing to hiring at least TWO people, right off the bat, because you need an accountant to make sure all of that is done properly!)

You also see this all the time in the restaurant industry. Someone will be perfectly happy running a restaurant that gets so crowded, people have to wait 60 minutes or more just to get seated, and people who didn't call ahead with reservations are turned away. Whenever you witness that, you see potential additional jobs right there not being realized. This place is losing business right before your eyes, yet they're not trying to change it by hiring more waitstaff, leasing a larger place, hiring extra chefs, etc.

You're correct that nobody creates a new job out of purely altruistic motivations. But neither are they ever "forced" to do it, just because their business is a success. If you're earning enough money so you're content, and business is steady enough so you're not overly worried about income randomly dropping off -- you don't really have a reason to hire more people at all. You *might* do it, if greed is a motivator for you and you're always looking for ways to make MORE money. But then we bad-mouth and crucify those types when they go after that motivation and build a huge corporation, hiring MANY people, and finally get themselves those huge salaries.

I think you're absolutely right about the trend in news shifting towards immediacy vs. verification of content. Maybe professional journalism has a marketing problem, in that regard? I think the general public, especially in the "Internet age" where everything seems to be available at the click of a mouse, might need reminders of the value of fact-checked, accurate news reporting?

Really, there's no true need to be first, if doing so means only having part of the story, or an inaccurate one. The *perceived* need to do so only comes from the content consuming public who is trained to make the assumption that whatever news they get is already properly verified as accurate. There's a perception out there that, "If it comes from a name-brand news source, it's good content. So whichever of those professional source gives it to me first, consistently, must be the best at doing it."

I don't think most of us are anxious to see another negative ad campaign attacking the competition for doing things wrong .... but emphasis on a news team going the extra mile every time to ensure you get complete and verified news reporting, "even if it takes us a little longer" might help change peoples' priorities?

Exactly! Everything Symantec puts its name on turns to garbage.... Company could rename itself "Reverse Midas Corp."

"Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis said she'd rather see companies pay more in taxes and fund schools that way, rather than relying on their charity or free software."

Well, Karen Lewis .... I'd rather see companies concentrate on what they do best, and then share some of that for free with schools when they see fit to do so!

The typical union mentality of "Pay more taxes! Give us more money!" doesn't necessarily solve a thing, except insuring raises for overpaid school administrators.

Maybe so, but I think the argument made in the original article is still valid. If you're going to copyright your color scheme, you better list a *specific* color shade. Simply declaring "yellow" or any other primary color to be "your copyrighted color" is far too broad a statement.

People who pay a premium price for a Fluke meter are usually well aware of what they're paying for. Just because a Chinese knock-off comes out with similar colors doesn't mean people would be fooled into thinking it was equivalent to a Fluke.

I find it interesting so many people took a negative view of Bitcoin, even before all of the bad press of late.

Of course, if you made up your mind from the start that a decentralized, universal, digital currency was a bad idea -- I guess anything negative that's said about it after that would just bolster your original opinion.

As some of you have pointed out, it's really only a few years old. It's going to take much longer to refine it into something more workable for the typical user. I could easily see it morphing into a whole new type of e-currency at some point, with a mandatory "drop dead" date where your Bitcoin has to be converted to its replacement or else you forfeit it.

Personally though, I think all of the "fans" out there typing to hype it up are simply doing the marketing that's necessary to grow a new idea like this. I don't find them any more "insufferable" that corporations running commercials on TV or taking out ads in the magazines I read. If you're not interested in what they're trying to sell, just ignore it.

I know with OneNote 2013 for Windows, it stores the "master" copy of your data wherever you configure it to go. It could be on a local drive, a network share, or the cloud (if you default it to SkyDrive or DropBox or Google Drive or whatever).

Then, it always keeps a cached copy on your C: drive in a big cache file for improved performance. (For Windows users, it's found under C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneNote\15.0)

AppData is a hidden directory, BTW.

It seems to me that almost all of this concern over running short of water centers around having enough available clean drinking water; a very different issue than actually not having water at all.

California is a *coastal* state, up against an ocean full of water, yet they're seriously entertaining such elaborate ideas as pumping water from an aquifer far below the desert, to areas around L.A. (Never mind the strong possibility that once they drain it, it won't refill for quite a long time again.)

People keep discussing desalination as too costly and inefficient a process... as something that's "not Green enough". IMO, that's ridiculous. The clear answer is to do more R&D to make that process more feasible! When you're short on drinkable water but you sit up against an ocean full of it, and removing the salt is the only real obstacle? Figure out a good way to remove the salt!

I agree with your observations, but not with you conclusions.

It's true that, especially for touch-screen capable devices, Windows 8 satisfies the casual user and less computer-savvy. The only reason these people find it usable is the ease of which one can launch a basic selection of apps from the Metro UI. It's like having a big program launcher / menu system bolted onto the front of everything.

The millennials are pretty fixated on "cloud based services and apps" right now. You could give them a modern day dumb terminal with good web surfing capabilities and all of the popular sites made into icons and they'd be happy. (Well, you might have to make it run MS Word and Excel too, since they typically learned those programs in school and don't like the web-based alternatives so much.)

Your suggestion of using Windows 7 instead and the response that it's "for old people" sounds like the dismissive behavior I'd get from our pre-teen kids... but doesn't mean the entire face of computing has changed.

People who actually want to do real work with a computer aren't exactly praising the Windows 8 UI as the future. Microsoft is trying really hard to sell it that way, but it's struggling. The whole Nokia merger and the in-fighting surrounding it indicates MS is a company desperate to find other revenue streams. Basically, it doesn't really believe in Windows 8 itself -- so it wants to bolster it by retaining some leverage in the mobile phone space.

I may be one of those geeks who "used to laugh at those who refused to adapt to change", but back then, the changes were truly innovative leaps forward. When you tried to get people using MS-DOS to move to a GUI environment that supported multi-tasking, automatic support for all of the RAM in the machine, cross-application support for printers and audio devices and SO much more, it was a leap worth taking. When I compare Windows 8 to Apple's approach with OS X for desktops and iOS for smaller devices, the Apple method makes a lot more sense to me. Win 8 isn't really giving me back anything that makes it worth re-learning where they hid all of the settings and options.

If a law is made this quickly, it could ALSO mean it just seems like such a common sense thing to the people involved, there's really nothing to argue about.

Personally, I think I'd rather have legislation made this way (flawed though it may be) than people passing multiple hundred page long bills that NOBODY could read through and fully understand before they're voted on.

Simple, quickly passed legislation can also be easily understood by juries and amended, as needed. The massive stuff with hundreds of hidden side-effects just catches people by surprise, time and time again, for decades to come.

How would this even be an issue? When you shoot video, do you irresponsibly just upload it to the Internet for public viewing, immediately, without so much as previewing what you filmed first?

I've always assumed that 80% of the work of recording video is the editing you do AFTER you're captured the initial footage!

IMO, at 30, you're right in the "zone" as far as the age group companies like to hire for computer support or network/server administration.

(Honestly, I think there's greater interest in hiring younger for software development, due to the mentality that you can hire talent cheap if you catch them shortly after they're out of school. Plus, they haven't been in the field long enough to be "old dogs that know a bunch of tricks you have to get them to un-learn" for your particular environment.)

It sounds like part of your question relates to which technologies you should focus on learning? One trend I have noticed is that mail servers are becoming more and more centralized. Most growing companies want to eliminate the in-house mail server(s) and sub-contract that out. With the growth of mobile devices that get attached to corporate email, it's nice to offload that bandwidth usage to a 3rd. party, among other things. This has the side-effect of making knowledge of setup/configuration/maintenance of mail servers (like Exchange) a skill-set that gives you a full-time job working only with email. If you really like email and mail servers, great. Go this route and get hired on at one of the cloud-based email services out there! Otherwise, I'd only worry about knowing it from the client side.

Every company I've ever worked at could stand to have more I.T. people on staff with good training skills and an interest in doing it. The "gotcha" there is that usually? It boils down to a situation where you won't really get to do as much of that as you and your co-workers would like because management has other ideas about what's the most valuable use of your time and company resources. (Remember, if you decide to schedule a "training session" for a big group in one of the conference rooms? Now the productivity of ALL of those people attending just dropped to 0 during the time you've got them as a captive audience in there. You're also occupying the room, which may also pose at least some level of inconvenience -- especially if employees regularly book the room to pitch a service or product your company makes to its clients. You'll probably also find that without providing some food and drink, it's tough to get people to show up for such things... so again, another expense for the company.)

I've always found that good communication skills and ability to teach the software is a really valuable skill, but you'll primarily wind up using it randomly, when assisting people by phone or "one on one" at their desks with issues. If you're lucky, a hiring manager will give you more consideration than "the next applicant" because of a background teaching technology. But it will become "just another thing you do that's kind of taken for granted" once you're hired.

Especially if you're getting hired via a recruiting firm, they're overly fixated on industry "buzzwords". Certain items are considered "hot" at any given time. For the last couple years or so, "virtualization" was a big one. If you could say you had experience using VMWare ESXi or any of the other products allowing virtual servers, it was a big plus. "Cloud" knowledge is another one. IMO, this is really a bunch of nonsense, because almost ALL the cloud-based services have easy to use web based control panels. Anyone with good general I.T. skills and knowledge can master any of them in short order. Mastering virtual server products is a little more difficult and useful as a real skill .... but again, many places just treated it like it was a big deal, only because of a one-off desire to reduce the number of servers in a server room. Once somebody moved all 7 or 8 of those outdated physical servers onto one virtual server and got them running well? There wasn't a whole lot more to do or know to maintain that.... so other I.T. skills become more important again.

The Radio Shack I knew and loved, growing up, was one of the early computer stores, among other things. The TRS-80 line of 8-bit computers, despite being much maligned by proponents of competing brands ("Trash 80" as they liked to call them), were solid, reliable and capable computers in their day. I *still* know several people who have their old TRS-80 Model 3 or 4 computers in good, working condition to this day. (If you purchased that optional dust cover Radio Shack used to sell for them, and used it religiously, the machine might even LOOK almost like new!)

The parent poster is also correct that Radio Shack home stereo equipment was pretty good stuff, all in all. Like every brand, they sold a few "duds" too, but products like the old Minimus 7 die-cast metal bookshelf speakers were even critically acclaimed in magazines like Stereo Review. (They eventually got renamed Optimus 7, with the 77 being a larger wattage version with about an inch larger woofer.) I believe some of their component stereo receivers were made for them by Pioneer, but designed custom for Radio Shack so not just identical to Pioneer models for sale elsewhere.

Radio Shack used to also be one of only a few really good "go to" places for things like police scanners, weather radios or shortwave radios. Sure, other brands were arguably "better" but were typically only available by mail order or at specialty shops. At least with Radio Shack, you could recommend a particular one and know anyone could run down the street and grab it at their nearest store. The availability of some of these also meant readily available hardware modifications. (I remember downloading instructions on how to cut one capacitor off of a board in one of my Radio Shack scanners to unlock the ability to scan a whole portion of the frequency spectrum that was otherwise locked out. Pretty cool enhancement for nothing but the cost of my time to open it up and cut one thing.)

When they tried to change into a mini Best Buy type of store, they really went downhill fast, IMO. I guess that was an attempt to appeal to the masses, who were less interested in electronics projects and hacking, and more interested in buying off the shelf accessories and gadgets. But too many retailers already did that better than Radio Shack ever could with their smaller stores.

At this point, I agree that R/S may need to cut back and close quite a few stores -- but it could do well to focus the remaining ones on electronics for true hobbyists and electricians, IMO. Drop the prices so they're really competitive, especially on items like ethernet cabling and jacks. Carry a full line of quality tools like phone linemen's handsets, punch-down tools and "fox and hound" toners/probes, but sell them below the high prices of places like Greybar! IMO, there's no room to make any money selling computers anymore. R/S just needs to step out of that area -- other than maybe stocking a few common items like USB memory sticks or SD cards. But definitely go back to carrying a full line of soldering irons, solder remover tools, maybe an R/S branded oscilloscope ....
 

I'm more than happy to defend the concept behind crypto-currency ... unregulated by governments and all!

What I find a bit humorous are all the people who were so greedy and eager to make a quick buck on bitcoin that they immediately exchanged considerable amounts of traditional, govt. backed funds for it, only to park the bitcoin in one of these public exchanges. Then they're all happy and excited, until the site gets hacked and their bitcoin disappears (or an unscrupulous operator take the money himself, pretending it was a hack involved, and shutters the site). All of a sudden, "the sky is falling" because nobody is there to come to their rescue, to get back the lost crypto.

ALL of this was perfectly well known as risks of using a decentralized currency from day 1! By keeping the bulk of your crypto in a personal encrypted wallet and making sure you have backups in safe places (on a USB stick kept in a safe deposit box, perhaps?), you would never encounter any of these issues.

IMO, the only "right" way to trade on these exchanges is to push funds in only when you're ready to trade them. Do your trade, and extract your resulting funds again, ASAP. Sure, you *might* lose that money if something goes bad in the middle of your transaction -- but that's, IMO, a much more acceptable risk.

Start treating bitcoin more like cash, people! Would you just hand, $10,000 or $20,000 in cash to some stranger, because he promises you he'll enable you to buy something else with it of greater value, if you just leave it with him for a while until the right moment comes along?

The 3 auto makers offering it first are all high-end luxury brands. That means the "early adopters" are the same people who have plenty of disposable income to have already purchased superior options.

(Personally, if I had they money to be driving around a Ferrari, I would already have a really nice custom stereo system in it, which would surely have a dedicated GPS system in it. Why get stuck in a situation where you can't find some place you need to get to, just because you accidentally left your phone at home or at work?)

This integration makes a lot of sense, but I think the people who will get the most out of it are the masses driving inexpensive economy cars, minivans, pickups, and mid priced sedans or sporty cars. (Again, the wealthy have the means to pay for "concierge" services by phone where they can make requests of a live operator who answers. Why settle for an automated system like Siri?)