How does he compare to, say, the execrable The Shadow of the Wind, or other novels that shoot for the standards of literary fiction but all too often miss?

But mainly, because I like it in this garrett: where the computer is exactly the way I like it, and I get to say which toys I want

I don't blame you: my "day job" is working with my family's business, which does grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies, and we get (and recommend) lots of cool toys too. The linked post is among the most popular on our blog. That being said, we're really closer to consultants, and it sounds like that's where you are too; when Philip Greenspun says "writer," I think he uses in the popular colloquial usage that means "I write books and for magazines and such."

Nonetheless, I'm glad it's working for you!

Good call. Your comment is essentially a shorter version of what I posted independently here.

... or lack thereof, one might say.

The best thing we could do if we don't want IBM and other companies going abroad is what John Doerr and Thomas Friedman have suggested:

We should be taking advantage. Now is when we should be stapling a green card to the diploma of any foreign student who earns an advanced degree at any U.S. university, and we should be ending all H-1B visa restrictions on knowledge workers who want to come here.

Because it's often difficult or impossible to import international engineers and scientists with valuable or unusual skills to the United States, the logical alternative is to go to where they are. Want this kind of behavior on the part of IBM and others to, if not stop altogether, then at least to slow? Implement Friedman's suggestion. Otherwise, don't implicitly (or, in the case of many commenters on this thread, explicitly) complain when companies react to the conditions that politicians, and by extension voters, have placed on them.

and the Sheriff's Office has been a joke for almost all of them.

He would be more of a joke if it weren't for his habit of abusing his powers, as this New Yorker article indicates. It's behind a pay-wall at the moment, but the upshot is that, at least in the greater Phoenix area, there is liberty and justice for the wealthy, and Sheriff Joe for everyone else.

... there were still enough applications to slow government servers to a crawl, resulting in a deadline extension.

This is normal behavior for Grants.gov and may or may not be related to BIP and BTOP, the two major broadband programs; for earlier examples of Grants.gov problems, see this post and its references to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on Grants.gov problems, as well as "From the Department of "No Kidding:" Grants.gov Warns of Outages at High Service Period."

Sometimes Grants.gov problems result in an extension, and sometimes they don't, as detailed further at the links.

Seriously. And for those who lack PS/2 connectors or want new boards, the Unicomp Customizer is the way to go: it's made on the same equipment as the Model M was, except that it's presently available.

Microsoft's split keyboard looks weird and takes some getting used to, but I like it much better than a normal one now.

Try a Kinesis Advantage Ergonomic Keyboard, and notice in particular some of the research citations in that post: you'll probably like the Advantage even better than the Microsoft board, except for the price.

I'm surprised there aren't more votes for keyboards: maybe those devices are just underappreciated. Those who are interested in something a bit unusual in that department might like the Kinesis Advantage, which is discussed in more detail at the link.

Good call; yesterday I submitted that very story, which seems broader and better researched than this one. Now that the Illinois story got posted, I suppose /. has exceeded its moral panic issue for the day, but it's nonetheless intriguing that the backlash stories are now cropping up.

Funny you should mention that--yesterday I submitted a story about sex offender laws that links to this Economist piece that calls such laws unjust and ineffective. Now that the Illinois story got posted, I suppose /. has exceeded its moral panic issue for the day, but it's nonetheless intriguing that the backlash stories are now cropping up.

With all due respect, the recent New Yorker article "Suffering Souls" differs, and that periodical is well-known for having more fastidious fact checkers than Slashdot:

Finally, the emphasis in the word "psychopath" on an internal sickness was at odds with liberal mid-century social thought, which tended to look for external causes of social deviancy; "sociopath," coined in 1930 by the psychologist G. E. Partridge, became the preferred term. In 1958, the American Psychiatric Association used the term "sociopathic personality" to describe the disorder in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In the 1968 edition, the condition was renamed "general antisocial personality disorder."

The whole article is worth reading if you want to understand this research in particular and the subject in general.

See my comment here.